Tuesday, August 24, 2010

CMS Luminostiy Online


So for all of you who are from outside of particle physics a little explanation is in order.

When we want to know how much data we are recording in our particle physics experiments we often talk about this in terms of "Luminosity" which has strange units of inverse area and time.
Without giving too much of an explanation this is basically a measure of how many collisions we are having and how much data we are recording.

The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment currently operating at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN has posted their Luminosity plots online here:

http://cms-service-lumi.web.cern.ch/cms-service-lumi/overview.php

So you can actually see as the improvements in the accelerator and the operation of the detector improve the recorded luminosity and delivered luminosity (recorded being what the detector captures and delivered being what the accelerator pumps through the experiment) increase at nearly a exponential rate!

Not to brag too much but the same plots of the Tevatron at Fermilab can be found here:

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/now/tevlum.html

All I'm saying is our inital Luminosity at the start of a store (when the particles start colliding) is pretty impressive when compared to all the data the LHC has taken so far...but they will catch up!

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Here Comes the Sun

This is a great documentary outlining the reality of where technology and industry really are in reference to making solar power a real thing in the near future.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/here-comes-the-sun/

I've often found myself driving and biking around Chicago wondering why these buildings aren't installing solar panels on their roofs in order to cut down their own energy bills.

Even more, since the way I've had it explained to me, the energy produced by the panels acts like water in a pipe....when they aren't consuming this energy it will flow onto the grid making the cost of everyones energy go down.

This documentary shows me that my thoughts aren't too far off and the day of the sun will be here soon (I hope)

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

2010 Hadron Collider Physics Summer School (Live and Streaming)

The fifth annual CERN / Fermilab Hadron Physics summer school is currently going on right now at Fermilab in the Wilson Hall High Rise.

This annual summer school is a great opportunity for young physicists to listen to lectures about the field of high energy physics both experimental and theory. Furthermore, these  lectures are designed to give someone with limited experimental knowledge some real understanding of how these accelerators, detectors, and analysis computing take place in the real world of particle physics

This summer series is going on August 17th - August 20th and is available streaming online:
http://www-visualmedia.fnal.gov/live/2010HCPSS_Live.htm

As well as the slides from the various speakers are publicly available here:
http://indico.fnal.gov/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=3532

So even if you aren't able to be at Fermilab for these lectures you can still enjoy them. Much thanks to the Fermilab visual media services!

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Important Results coming from the Tevatron

I think this article from Femilab Press room is one of the most important results to recently come out of the CDF/DZero experiments at the Tevatron.

With the recent combination of results and update in new high data set experiments the Tevatron has extended the exclusion of the possible mass range to the Standard Model Higgs Boson to an even larger range than before. If you take this result and couple it with other measurements this make an excellent case for one of three scenarios as I understand it (Warning: I am not working directly on a Higgs search at CDF so this is just to the best of my understanding as a rising physicists)
1) The Higgs boson is a low mass boson (between 120 - 160 GeV) and and thus has a very difficult signal to see (and will be a nightmare to detect at the Large Hadron Collider because of the increase in background production at the higher energy) and will require more data to see at the Tevatron in addition to more sophisticated analysis techniques.
2) The Higgs boson is a non-Standard Model scenario and thus has some weird decay/signal mechanism that either is overlooked or hasn't been produced yet....(I don't know what this could be but a SUSY like Higgs doublet would be one such weird scenario)
3) We've got this all wrong and we need to go back to the drawing board when it comes to our understanding of nature...(not all that likely, but I think the most interesting of the possibilities)
Stay tuned as the results update

Muddy Buddy 2010 Results!

We finished Muddy Buddy 2010 in 1 hour flat!
 Heather and I managed to finish the Muddy Buddy race in the Co-ed flight in almost 1 hour exactly! We managed to run into a few people we know from our local gym who also happened to be in our same division so we got to hang out and compete with them. 
The first place in our division was around 45 minuets and there we ~ 140 some teams we were going against, and with a time of 1:00:14 we were around #54'ish overall.
I was really happy with this result and Heather and I had a blast. The biking was WAY tougher than I ever expected and if it wasn't for the bike loaned to us by Silviu there is no way we could have ever finished it. 

Some of my memories from the race include the first obstacle, which was an 8 foot climbing wall (which was easy for us climbers) but had a cargo net on the other side. Instead of trying to turn around and gently climb down I just launched myself landed with a foot through the net, took a 360 degree tumble and made it to my feet. I was greeted by an organizer saying "That is one way to get down..."

Then started the really hard biking section with lots of mud and uphill portions. Unfortunately, a girl in front of me gave up on the biking uphill at the wrong time and jumped off her bike right in front of me. I greeted her with a handle bar in the rib (and I felt awful about it). Luckily she was fine and I started running with my bike until I could get traction. 
Finally, on the last portion of the bike I did there were some crazy steep downhill portions and I witnessed a girl grip down too hard with her front brake and eat it right over her handlebars. Luckily she popped back up and said she was fine! I ran into her at the last obstacle (a giant inflatable slide) and she was trucking along and psyched about her fall.
This race was just TOO FUN and the organizers have the format down cold! Heather and I got super muddy, raced really hard, and enjoyed sunshine and food after the race on this beautiful farm.

Now that this race is all over we are gearing up for Urban Assault in September and re-focusing on work/family/and Lollapalloza which is this weekend!