Author: Stephen Sekula

Steve Sekula is an Assistant Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at Southern Methodist University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004, and currently spends most of his time either conducting research into the Higgs boson on the ATLAS Experiment or teaching. Oh, and he blogs. We all have flaws.
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Day One: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

We met for breakfast at Izzy’s Brooklyn Bagels at 10am, and fueled up for our first day here in the Bay  Area. After a short walk back to the hotel, we piled in the giant van we’ve rented for this trip and, in the cold drizzling rain, took a short driving tour of Stanford University before heading to SLAC. We arrived at SLAC just in time to grab a bunch of tables in the cafeteria and hold them until some friends and colleagues arrived to eat lunch with us. Post-docs from SLAC and the University of Maryland, as well as our Stanford grad student tour guide, Nicole, mixed it up with the students and answered their questions about physics, experiments, and life in science. Just behind us, at one of the tables, sat one of SLAC’s own three Nobel Prize winners, eating lunch with his own friends and colleagues.

Our tour began at 1pm with a short overview of the laboratory. Nicole delivered this  presentation from the SLAC Director’s  conference room. We then piled into the van again and headed into the accelerator area. Our tour started at the Klystron Gallery, one-quarter of the way along the two-mile linear accelerator that is the heart of SLAC science. The buzzing microwave generators, the klystrons, were busy feeding energy into the accelerator (25 feet below us) for use in the Linac Coherent Light Source. We stood in the gallery hallway, stared off into infinity (OK, well, to the vanishing point of the human eye), and then piled back in the van.

(for more photos, visit http://snappy.cooleysekula.net/thumbnails.php?album=10)

We saw the Main Control Center, the heart of accelerator operations at SLAC, and then took a short walk down a dark, cramped tunnel to the Research Yard. It was here that, in the 1960s and 1970s, the experiments were done that demonstrated that protons have substructure. This substructure came to be interpreted using the “quark hypothesis,” long unfavored as an explanation of proton and hadron structure until mountains of evidence appeared in support of it. We paused on the steel walkway, two stories above the ground, and looked out over the yard at the massive concrete end stations A and B, as well as the new extension of the linear accelerator that serves the light-source community at the laboratory.

We next stopped at the Stanford Large Detector (SLD), which ceased operations in the late 1990s around the time BaBar was completed and began operations. Donning hardhats, we were shown parts of the detector before descending into the detector pit for a quick photograph. We wrapped up the tour in the BaBar detector hall, where the experiment stood largely disassembled; only 2/3 of the barrel and back endcap remain, and the tracking system has been gutted from the detector. It’s the first time I’ve watched an experiment important in my own career be taken apart and shipped away. It was a deeply meaningful, and slightly painful, moment. I was happy, however, to pose in front of BaBar with my two undergraduate researchers, Landon and Matthew, who have done their projects on data from the BaBar Experiment.

We wrapped the day with coffee and rest in the Kavli Astroparticle Institute, before heading off for a nice casual dinner at In & Out Burger, a staple of California fast food. It was a nice counterpoint to the spicy and exotic Thai food we feasted on last night.

Tomorrow, we head to the top of Mount Hamilton to see the Lick Observatory. Among its many studies, it was the site of the first U.S. test of General Relativity, and should afford spectacular views of the entire Bay Area.

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Go West, Young Physicist

Today, I am driving to the airport for the kickoff of this year’s SMU Society of Physics Students trip to a major ecientific facility. We are headed (more) west, to the Silicon Valley and Bay Area of California. Specifcally, thanks to generous support from Larry Lightner and from deposits from each student, we are going to see the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Lick Observatory, Google, The Exploratorium (one of this nations’s FINEST science education landmarks), and other beacons of science and technology.

I’ll post entries and photos as the trip continues, and links to content produced by the eight undergraduates going on the trip.

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Living like physicists

I got the last slides for our two presentations just before midnight last night. Like every other thing that ever happens in physics, even with the best strategy and planning the writing of our talks came down to the last minute. After doing some last editing and tweaking on the material, I headed to sleep. 7:30am came too fast. Three cups of coffee and a light hotel breakfast later, I felt awake enough to suggest that we check out of the hotel and head in for the last day of the BaBar Jamboree.

Instead of attending the morning session, we found an empty room (coincidentally, the same room where an hour later we would give our presentations). Landon and I practiced our talk, which we decided to give as a team. I presented the introduction to our topic, motivating our dark matter search, and Landon focused on his role in finalizing the selection of signal candidates and the rejection of background. Matthew did some last data analysis while we were practicing and produced his penultimate set of slides. We put them up on the projector to check the images; his project has focused on using nuclear and atomic scattering to make beautiful images of the BaBar detector (in the process, checking our understanding of the material distribution in the detector). After some last-minute tweaking of the colors and contrast ratios in the images, we put the final versions of our talks in the meeting organizer and caught the last presentation of the first morning session.

In our parallel session, we were the second and fourth talks. Landon and I spoke first, presenting our topic and getting some good questions and useful feedback (especially suggestions on a publication strategy) from the audience of about 12 people (including the Spokesperson and both Physics Analysis Coordinators). I think generally the sentiment from the collaboration leadership was: “Great! When can we expect the paper(s)?” Matthew’s talk garnered a lot of excited conversation about material modeling and explanations of some reconstruction features. Some people had earlier said that they were coming to the session just for his talk, since they love to see details about material interactions in the detector. In fact, during a technical snafu near the beginning of Matthew’s talk, one person from a different session popped his head in the door and asked, “Oh, have you started your talk yet? Just started? Great! I’ll be right back!” before ducking back into the hallway to grab his suitcase and backpack. A chuckle arose from the room as it was implied that if we could just sustain the technical snafu a moment longer, he’d appreciate the delay.

Comments I received after the presentations were all positive, and a few attendees at the workshop expressed directly to Matthew and Landon their praise for the quality of their work and presentations. At least one person seemed surprised that one of the students was only in his first year of college, and during the closing summary talk on new physics searches the speaker referred to “Steve and his army of students.”

Today, we all lived like physicists. We did things down to the wire, we suffered our technical snafus, we got and answered questions, we heard lots of feedback and enthusiasm, and ultimately nobody made the distinction that these were undergraduates – today, these young researchers were physicists. Of all the things a faculty member could be proud of, that’s a pretty good place to be.