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 […]
Physics
257 posts
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 […]
The EPP2010 is released at 11:30 today. Here are my notes and thoughts. “EPP2010 Homepage”:http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bpa/EPP2010.html *11:30* Prompt beginning. Appearing: Harold Shapiro (chair), Sally Dawson (vice-chair), John Bagger, Takaaki Kajita. *11:31*: Opening remarks by Shapiro. This report lays otu the future of U.S. particle physics. The committee is 1/3 particle physicists, […]
One of the necessary conditions for the universe to have achieved a state in which it is completely dominated by matter is that it had to pass through a period of non-equilibirum. A moment of rapid expansion, or *inflation*, near the beginning of time would have been just such a […]
Today is an exciting day: the WMAP collaboration (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) has “released its three year data and data analysis”:http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/map/current/map_bibliography.cfm. I’ve just started looking through their results, but there is no doubt the precision cosmology they were able to do three years ago is even more exciting now! Recall […]