This week begins the 34th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP). The conference is being held in Philadelphia. While this presents much less of an interesting travel story [1], this conference may prove to be quite interesting. The LHC has not yet started operations, so this will be the […]
Physics
260 posts
The press release about the ηb discovery went out earlier this week, accompanied in SLAC Today with a very nice photo of the primary physics researchers working on the search. Looking back to the “winter of insanity” that started in December, I find it incredible that in such a short […]
This has been an exciting week. My own work may be soon coming to fruition, and I’m starting to the “pre-unblinding jitters”. I even took a walk from my office to the BaBar detector today, even in the oppressive heat, to relax. But what are “pre-unblnding jitters”? This is a […]
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 […]
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