Category: Travelogue: BaBar Physics Jamboree 2010

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.

The second day of the BaBar Physics Jamboree has come to an end, beginning with heaping plates of physics and ending with heaping plates of delicious food in our host’s beautiful home. A lot of topics got covered in parallel sessions today. We heard about more efforts in the search for evidence of a low-mass Higgs boson, efforts to study time-reversal symmetry (well, to be fair, this was ON the schedule but that session didn’t actually happen due to a time-related mishap), and efforts to understand strange patterns of decays of B mesons to two particles by looking for those same two particles being produced directly from electron-positron collisions. By the time we finished the latter topic, I needed a walk. My students and I set out to check out the Univ. of Cincinnati campus, with its many hills and vast expanses of tasteful modern architecture.

I think my favorite sight on the campus has been the “stairs to nowhere,” or as I am starting to think about it, my living example of the title of the blog. Walking this mysterious stairwell (see the photo below) has become the living embodiment  of “going up alleys to see if they are blind.” Start out on the wrong staircase, and you’ll end up at a dead-end rail that requires you to jog to the left to get back on the path.

The day ended, as I said, with a big reception at the home of one of the workshop organizers. We were treated to plates of food and more plates of dessert, cheese and chips and crackers. There were a number of other new students at the dinner, as well as my own peers and colleagues. Jodi and I used to joke that at collaboration meeting social events, a “kids table” and an “adults table” would naturally form. Back then, we were at the “kids table.” Tonight, I realized that though the adults in physics don’t actually act “grown up,” we were talking about funding as much as we were half-joking about splitting off big collaborations and forming our own experiments.That’s “adult table” stuff, no matter how goofy we were actually acting.

In 1998, I took my first plane trip. My advisor, a graduate student, and I left Yale and drove to Bradley Airport in Hartford. I was an undergraduate, entering senior year, and I got to go to Fermilab for a CDF collaboration meeting. I remember very little from the meetings themselves, but that trip left a huge impression on me. I was already excited about physics, but this was my first introduction to the wider collider physics community. The meetings themselves are all a blur to me now. I remember sitting in the main auditorium in Wilson Hall, listening to people give plenary presentations. I remember milling about in the lobby of the auditorium, sipping coffee and eating snacks. I remember my advisor introducing me to people. I remember him suggesting that the graduate student and I park at O’Hare and take the train into Chicago; I remember seeing the Sears tower and the lake front. I remember a blistering hot day walking around the touristy parts of downtown.

I remember getting off the plane, and my advisor turning to the two of us and saying, with a grin, “OK, now we say our mantra: ‘Yet again, we have cheated death.'” I remember walking around Fermilab, seeing a building with a roof made from halves of huge storage drum barrels, seeing power lines on vast towers stretching off into the distance, and seeing a spectrum of orange-to-blue painted tanks lining the accelerator road. I remember over-air-conditioned trailers and people stuffed shoulder-to-shoulder, buzzing over the preparations for Run II.

These were formative experiences for me as a physicist, to see the living collaboration and the world they inhabited. Coming to Cincinnati for this BaBar Physics Jamboree, and having my own undergraduate researchers with me, has brought me back to that first trip. My first trip on a plane. My first physics meeting. My first time at a national laboratory.

This first day was a day of travel and meetings. We arrived on time to the airport outside of Cincinnati, from crummy weather in Dallas to crummier weather in Ohio. But it was cooler (although grayer and rainier), and the drive to the University of Cincinnati was pleasant. The campus seems even more marvelous than the last time I was here, back in 2008. I’ve been introducing my students to friends and colleagues, and the first few sessions today were all plenary presentations of “hot item” analyses. An overwhelming alphabet soup of jargon and acronyms, Landon and Matthew asked lots of questions (Matthew even asked a question of one of the speakers) and though overwhelmed seemed to weather the experience well.

Dinner was a small affair at a nearby Indian restaurant, joined by a few of my friends from the collaboration. We discussed many things [1], and everyone seemed to have a pretty good time over samosas and curry, tea and nan.

Tomorrow, we have to finish our talks (for Sunday) and there are a lot of parallel sessions throughout the day. It will be dense and busy.

[1] http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23bpj