I’m scheduled to give the “wine and cheese” seminar at “Fermilab”:http://www.fnal.gov on August 25, so part of my vacation has to be spent writing slides for the talk. I’m planning to give the audience a promenade through recent results using searches for leptonic decays of heavy mesons. BaBar is what […]
Physics
260 posts
The plenary sessions at ICHEP were what I was most looking forward to, but they didn’t really deliver. I expected to catch some results that I missed during the parallels in the summary talks, but there wasn’t too much “hot stuff” that I hadn’t already seen. What was very clear […]
Time for another installment of my ICHEP Journal. I kept notes on all the parallel sessions I attended. I tried to mix it up: astrophysics, heavy quark physics, spectroscopy and new states, computing. I tried to avoid topics that are typical to BaBar, things I ought to know, unless there […]
I arrived in Moscow yesterday with a bunch of other BaBarians on a Delta flight out of JFK airport. We were tired, starting to feel jet-lagged, and eager to get to our hotel. To make a long story short (I’ll post more details from my ICHEP journal later), the taxi […]
The “International Linear Collider”:http://www.linearcollider.org is the priority machine for the high-energy physics community after the Large Hadron Collider begins operations in just over a year. This week, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver hosts a huge ILC workshop, a forum for discussing technical, research, and educational issues surrounding the […]
The 2006 International Conference on High-Energy Physics is a little over one week away. This coming week is the full flood of practice talks, the final days of preparation for the conference. Analyses are coming out of review, talks are being written and practiced, and everybody is stretched by the […]
The BES collaboration has “recently reported results in a search for invislbe decays of the eta meson”:http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0607006. This is interesting, because I have long been interested in similar decay searches at BaBar. It’s nice to see the experimental community beginning to build a fervor for searching for these rare, but […]
Summertime is the worst time of the year for physics. I’ve said this many times before, but no season is busier. I suppose it’s timed to coincide with professorial “free time”, when classes end and researchers can get back to their life of labs and meetings. For a post-doc or […]
The “HEP rumor mill”:http://www.freewebs.com/heprumor/ is just creepy. I feel naughty just looking at it. It’s a site maintained by… well, somebody, I don’t know who… that lists who’s hot and who’s not. OK, I’ll back off from that one. It lists who’s (allegedly) interviewing for what jobs in the high-energy […]
For the past five months, my professional life has been a roller-coaster ride. My research is now a constant source of stress, as deadlines rapidly approach and MANY questions need to be answered. Adding to this is a broader concern about the future of my own field in this country. […]
(Credit CERN) To see the magnets of the Large Hadron Collider installed in the CERN LHC tunnel is quite a sight. These magnets, along with the towering components of the ATLAS and CMS particle detectors, represent the very near future of my field. Each of these is a component in […]
Today, the National Academies concluded their decadal study of particle physics – EPP2010 – with the release of the multidisciplinary committee’s report. The EPP2010 report is several things. It is a strong cautionary bullhorn to the United States, telling us that ceding leadership in fundamental particle physics will pose more […]