I’m pleased to announce that BaBar has submitted for publication its first paper detailing results from the dataset we secured on the Y(3S) resonance. It’s a doozy – nothing like finding the ground state of bottomonium 31 years after the discovery of the bottom quark! I’ve written up a short […]
Physics
257 posts
Recently, SLAC cleaned out its library and moved to new digs in a nearby building. I walked past the old space today while working with some colleagues in the same building. At first, I turned past the old library space and headed for the exit. The emptiness of the space […]
This was a pretty exciting week. It peaked on Wednesday when the GLAST satellite, a space-based gamma ray observatory, was launched into orbit. I was sitting the in weekly BaBar physics meeting, and unable to go watch the launch with my GLAST colleagues in the main auditorium I pulled up […]
Sorry I got so tardy last week about posting. Elba was a bit all-consuming, and I don’t just mean in the mountains of food that Italy seemed fit to provide. We started each day at 8:30, with sessions ranging on topics from the rarest of CP violations in B decay […]
Two plane trips, two trains, one bus, one boat, one cab, and 30 hour without sleep, and it was all worth it. I’m currently on the island of Elba, off the west coast of Italy. The BaBar collaboration is meeting here, perhaps for the last time in this locale, to […]
We landed in Portland not that long ago. I’m sitting in a cafe by the main security entrance to the terminals. I haven’t been anywhere near Portland since 2000, when Jodi and I packed my car and headed west from Wisconsin to California. It was almost the same time of […]
Having just returned last night from Wisconsin, I find myself today in the San Jose airport waiting for my flight to the Tri-cities airport in Washington State. I had enough time to placate the cats, clean up the apartment a little (it was in excellent shape, actually, thanks to Roomba […]
In my read through the KIMS literature, I realized that while it does indeed use a crystal detector (as DAMA, except CsI instead of NaI), thye do not look for an annual modulation. Instead, they look for recoils of the nuclei against the WIMP, and so their result is in […]
Jodi sent me this interesting tidbit today: Dark Matter announcement sinks like a stone Yikes. I wonder if anyone is going to discuss the KIMS result in contrast to DAMA and DAMA/LIBRA? Follow-up: a response from the scientist quoted in the above article is here: About the DAMA-LIBRA result
As rumor had foretold, the DAMA/LIBRA collaboration released the results of their search for signal modulation in the annual cycle of the earth going around the sun. Both the old DAMA, and the new DAMA/LIBRA datasets are separately convincing that they are observing an annual modulation. Taken together, the datasets […]
As I mentioned earlier today, the rumor is that in the next day the LIBRA experiment will release its first follow-on results to the DAMA experiment. Why is this such news? Let’s review. In 2000, the DAMA experiment published an observation of an annual modulation signal which they interpreted as […]
I stood in the back row of the textbook floor in the Yale Co-op. My summer job as a janitor had given me about $2000 to spend for the two semesters, including book expenses. I had all my class books, but that didn’t matter. The dark beauty standing in front […]