Physics I'm Following

So I realized that before I get on with the business of pouring my heart out about the life I have been living I should also periodically update about the physics I find interesting and is going on now!

As a particle physicists (at least one in training) I find the questions about what the universe is made of and how it behaves to be some of the most compelling questions to be asked. Unfortunately these questions are also some of the most difficult to answer.  They often involve teasing out difficult details and very precise measurements from a variable sea of uninteresting and mis-measured parameters.

On place this is going on is the Belle Collaboration at the KEK Electron/Positron Collider in Tsukuba, Japan. Here they want to examine one of the strangest aspects of physics known as CP Violation (explained elsewhere for brevity). They do this by looking at a weird object known as B-mesons and trying to figure out if things look the way they expect according to our current understanding of the world.

The good news is that they are good at what they do, although not so good at making it easy to get this information in English.

What they have most recently found is that by looking at the angular distribution of the B-mesons they are producing they have found hints of new physics that we can't account for using our present theories.

Now as the results are discussed on Interactions.org in more clarity and detail than I'd expect a random viewer of my blog to want to read here I'll just say that these results are intriguing to me because they are experimental observation of what we already think we know...that is, that we don't know everything about the particle world

More exactly, it is that there is more to the theory and the reality of the early universe, the fundamental nature of matter, and what happens when you bang together really energetic particles than we ever get quite right the first go around.

This result and it's understanding might be a good place for up and comers to launch of of to get a real flavor for how weird and hard the physics I want to do really is.

My Life Told By Rock Climbing Shoes (Part I)

I thought it might be interesting to tell a little bit of my story of a journey through graduate school as seen through a tool that has been with me for a good portion of it. Namely my rock climbing shoes. There have been more shoes in my life than women (and thank god for that) throughout grad school, but each series tells a story about where I've been and the people that made the travels with me.

So my first pair of shoes I bought right after learning to climb was a neat pair of velcro Evolv's. They were way too nice of a shoe for me to be my first but they were recommended to me by the girl I was seeing at the time when we made our first trip ever to REI (a outdoor store which I am now a member of). The funny thing was that since my foot work was garbage as a new climbing and I was climbing 4 - 5 times a day in a gym I blew a hole right through the toe of the shoes in 3 months. Now that was WAY to quick to go through a pair of climbing shoes and the retail clerks at REI were sympathetic to my plight. So without too much hassle they replaced the shoes with a better beginner pair of Mad Rocks.

These shoes were big and clunky with no sharp toe and basically wore like a tight pair of firm gym shoes...perfect for a beginner climber like myself. They wore on with me beating them up in the gym for some time (maybe 6 months) and got me to realize that I needed to learn about foot work well before I worried about shoes.
This lesson might be a parallel to the lessons I was learning in life at the time...but I'll have to figure that out more later.

Finally came my brown La Sportiva's that I bought again from REI. These shoes were great and I took them on three of my first outdoor climbing expeditions around the Austin, TX region. They wore great, lasted a long time, I could wear them all day without too much discomfort, and performed wonderful on limestone and granite. I would recommend these shoes to first time climbers searching for a good shoe to take outdoors.

This basically takes me up through the first year of climbing I did while in graduate school. It was a fun year and took me on a wild trip around Austin area gaining experience with some sport climbing and getting introduced to the people at my college that did serious climbing both indoors and out. I had no idea that this sport was going to grab me the way it did and I certainly couldn't see where I was headed next.

From the Neighborhood to the Lab

I hope in the upcoming posts to catalog what my life has been like during the transition from the life in the neighborhood to the life at Fermilab. More than anything I don't want to say that one was better than the other...they are both great times in my life and I think in seeing how these two communities work and influence the world around them I have a blueprint for building a better life.

So in the neighborhood there were twenty or so central people who lived and gave to one another. A perfect example of this was an art show that was put on primarily by three girls (Mary Ellen, Carie, and Claire) but became the pet project of everyone in the Neighborhood. This show was called "Barefoot Art Guild" and was held about once every two months. What was truly amazing about this show is that what started as a small gathering of friends to share the art they created quickly grew to a show that spanned a city block, had live musicians come in from many different cities, would last 8 hours, and never charged a dime (except for food...which was still primarily given away)

In this example of my community I found the meaning of selfless enjoyment. Putting together, organizing, and breaking down these art shows took many hours and often a lot of resources. But the neighborhood always banded together, giving time, money and equipment to make sure that a good time could be had by complete strangers. All this was done without expectation and with very little drama. It was at one of the last Barefoot Art Guilds that it struck me why the Neighborhood functioned so well. Simply put, we were all interested in having a good time, and what was the unsaid truth is that we had a better time together than apart. So, by giving of what little we had to a common cause that would gather friends we could have a better time.

Seems simple enough. Give to your friends for the sake of fun. Don't be selfish with your resources and try to benefit those around you. The concept of the Neighborhood was all these things...but it was also more than that. It was a desire to be larger then our parts. We were becoming a force in College Station because there were many of us all contributing, watching out for one another and working for a greater good. Barefoot Art was just one of the many facets that the Neighborhood gave and in the future I will write more as to exactly what it was and maybe produce a timeline.

But more to the point I realized how this idea has leaked into my professional life here at Fermilab, and it is a good thing. I work with an amazing adviser (Prof. Dave Toback) and two other graduate students (Eunsin Lee and Adam Aurisano) on Supersymmetry searches at CDF. We do our work for the most part without a post-doc, and without our adviser being on site. Moreover, we all have wives or girlfriends, and Eunsin and Dave have kids. We have outside interests and responsibilities, however we are leading the way in photon searches and I see our institution as a leader on CDF.

 How is this possible? Simply, we give to one another, we support each others research, we give to each others lives. I wouldn't say that we are necessarily best of friends, but most of us in the Neighborhood weren't that way either. Instead we see that we are better when we give to each other and build something bigger than the individual. We support each other without ego or selfishness, and very little drama.

This idea, how did the Neighborhood change my life and how do I apply this to the world I am stepping into. Be it in particle physics, rock climbing, social life, moving...or whatever is part of the subject of this blog. The connection between Fermilab and the Neighborhood I hope can be teased out even further in future posts.
 

Life at the lab

So it has been just over a year since I made my journey from the little corner of Texas where the Neighborhood was founded and made my way to Fermilab to finish up my PhD.

I've loved my life and time up here so far and hope that I can share some of the unique experiences I am having right now living at the world's highest energy particle accelerator

I realize, of course, that the Tevatron won't be the world's best for that much longer. With the looming turn-on of the LHC at CERN coming ever closer I am witness to a unique time to be at this lab.

Funny enough when I originally moved up here it was to work on the LHC experiment through a collaboration known as CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), however with the delay it didn't make any sense to wait around for data while our group had a strong presence on a working experiment right here at Fermilab!

So I made the transition and started working on the BEST EXPERIMENT EVER (I'm paid to say that...but seriously I do love this experiment) So ever since December'ish 2008 I've been working on the Collider Detector @ Fermilab or lovingly called CDF.

This has really been a great transition and I am working on exciting searches on a well run machine with tons of experts and scientists who know how to squeeze every bit of information out of the detector we have.

Since joining I have many great stories and physics things to share and will slowly give all these up during this blog. Most recently I've been on what is known as "Ace Shifts" where you learn how to manage and control the detector for data acquisition quality. In short, I'm the pilot of this amazing experiment. Now it goes without saying that I'm only a link in the chain of many people and many years of work...so I don't want to paint myself as THE expert...just becoming AN expert.

Interestingly, I've gotten to be the Ace during a time where I was able to go down and stand in front of and climb around on this 3 ton 3 story monster of a machine and it was amazing! But that story is probably for another time