Six years of my life in 34 pages

We finally finally finally submitted the paper that describes my thesis research to a journal, so it is now publicly available:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0906.2983v1

(and totally incomprehensible to non-particle physicists — sorry!).  Notice that on this paper, the writing of which involved a lot of blood sweat and tears on my part, I am not the first author but the 71st!  That’s how it goes in particle physics, or at least with the CLEO collaboration.  The CLEO detector actually started taking data the month before I was born  — so this paper is the result of six years of work by me (in collaboration with another graduate student and our advisors) and decades of work by the hundreds of people who have been a part of the CLEO collaboration.

I was very lucky to get to work on this particular study — it’s one of the most important results that the collaboration has produced in the last several years.  The primary purpose was to test a technique called lattice QCD, which is a way of calculating effects of the extremely tricky strong force.  The theorists who use this technique basically assume that the infinite universe is a finite grid of points.  The punchline of our results is summarized in the figure at the top of page 16.  The blue and red points are the experimental data points I spent 6 years producing and the colored band is the Lattice QCD prediction — and they actually agree pretty well!

Another exiting aspect of this submission is that it is the 500th paper submitted by the CLEO collaboration!   That’s more than any other particle physics collaboration has ever produced.  Not bad for an experiment that was operated (at least by particle physics standards) on a shoe-string budget.

 

Nip/Tuck

Lucy (the fluffy one) is in surgery right now!  It’s nothing serious — she has a condition that causes her skin to irritate her eye and create a lot of discharge.  The surgery will tighten the skin, making her more comfortable and less likely to lose her sight later in life.  So it’s a good thing.  But it’s so sad to think of her being under the knife!   The procedure is apparently very similar to a human face lift.  She’s such a drama queen!

This is only the second time that Lucy has been to our new vet.  She went a few weeks ago to get shots, and the vaccination form she came home with described her color as “Butterscotch.”  For some reason, this seems like a much more awesome color than the “buff” that most vets describe her as.  Hopefully his surgical skills are as awesome as his cat-color naming skills!

 

CIPANP 2009

This week I have been in the Mithical Land of Sandy Eggo for the “Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics”.   Here are some highlights in handy bulleted form.  Apologies for the digressions into physics-ese!

• My favorite quote of the conference so far: “Somebody’s wrong, and statistics doesn’t handle wrong very well.”  I am definitely using that in the future.
• The central theme of the conference seems to be “we have no signal, but are really hopeful we’ll have one soon.”
• I finally got to publicly present the results of my thesis research!
• Some theorists talked through the whole damn thing (my presentation, that is).
• The public lectures were possibly the most interesting and informative of the whole conference, which either says something bad about me or the talks aimed at physicists.  Maybe both.
• Fermi (a space-based gamma ray telescope) have turned their data into some very cool movies.
• The hot word in the CKM/Heavy Flavor talks was “tension”.  You don’t say disagreement or agreement anymore — you say tension.  As in “there is a 1 sigma tension between theory and experiment”.  Which actually means that theory and experiment agree very well!
• One theorist began his plenary talk by stating that he would explain the origin of all mass in the universe.  This is a kind of an inflammatory thing to say, just before the 10 billion dollar machine designed to understand the origin of mass begins to take data.  It turns out he was only explaining the portion of mass that comes from binding energies, which he claimed to be 95% of the mass in the universe, by some definition of “mass in the universe”.
• Apparently, the organizers of this conference have been getting hate mail.  It does seem to be kinda poorly organized.  It’s in San Diego, but is walking distance from nothing, so those of us who did not rent a car are stuck eating the scandalously expensive hotel food and without much non-physics entertainment.  I’ve been to the gym about zillion times.
• The talk entitled “flavor theory” turned out to be a talk on warped extra-dimensions.
• We still don’t know what dark matter is.  Some people still think that an excess in the cosmic positron spectrum is evidence of dark matter annihilation, but one speaker here said he hoped that “they will be able to overcome their irrational delusion and rejoin the ranks of productive people.”

Overall, it has been interesting and I’m glad I came, but the conference is now in its 6th day and I’m ready to go home.  Howard has renegged on his promise to post cute pet pictures on his blog while I’m away, so I’m doing it instead:

I sure do miss those guys!

 

My Lame-o Pictures from CERN

Last week, I traveled to CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), near Geneva, Switzerland, for work. I took a camera, but returned home with a whopping three pictures. The only place I went that was really photo-worthy, a French farmer’s market, was the one place I forgot to take the camera. But you’ve seen pictures of those before… miles and miles of vegetables that look almost comically perfect. And I can tell you, those pictures are accurate. The French are really serious about their farmer’s market.  Seriously, it made Ithaca’s fabulous farmer’s market seem like a road-side fruit stand.

The trip was really frenzied. Continental continued its spree brilliant customer service by denying me boarding on the flight out of Ithaca due to the plane being overweight.   So the trip got delayed by 24 hours and I ended up giving a talk basically right after I got off the trans-Atlantic flight. I don’t remember it very well — it was probably amusing, if not very informative.

I’d been to CERN as a summer student 9 years ago, but had forgotten just what a weird place it is. Building 40, where my workshop was, is about as nice as it gets:

And being there feels a bit like your hanging out inside R2-D2.  It is sort of the main building where a lot of meetings happen, and on the bottom floor are four doors labeled  A,B,C and D, each leading to conference rooms.  After my talk, I left our meeting for a few minutes and then realized that I didn’t remember which room I’d walked out of.  So I tried them all, but all of the conference rooms were occupied by particle physicists, who are a very homogeneous bunch.  Every room was occupied by a bunch of old white dudes, and I could not for the life of me remember which ones were “my” old white dudes.  Eventually I had to get help from a friend to find the right room again!

I’d also forgotten how very male CERN is too.  Particle physics definitely doesn’t have many women, and most of the people I work with are guys, but here at Cornell, when I walk outside my building, there are other girls wandering around.  Not so much at CERN.  Everwhere I went, a lot of people did double-takes when I saw me.  Maybe it was because I looked so deranged and sleep-deprived, but I think it was more like “OMG it’s a girl!”

The bathroom labels  at CERN (or possibly elsewhere in France/Swizerland?) are pretty amusing:

You have to look hard to tell the difference, no?  But we wouldn’t want the bathroom labels to be behind the times fashion-wise.  I’m kind of surprised the girl isn’t wearing kinky boots too.

Overall, it was a nice trip. I got to catch up with some good friends from grad school, ate lots and lots of good food, and hopefully convinced a couple particle physicists that the high-pitched voice they’ve been hearing at teleconferences is attached to a person who does occasionally know what she’s talking about.  It was also very exhausting, and I’ve just got a few days to recover before flying out to San Diego on Monday for a conference.  But, I’ve heard rumors that they speak English and accept dollars out there, and even have this weird thing called a beach!

 

Spring-y Saturday

Yesterday was a lovely day.  Nothing really exciting happened, and I even had to work a little, and come to think of it, caused my boyfriend to think I was crazy when I stormed out of a snooty restaurant when they told me to sit wherever I wanted in their empty restaurant and then said I was not allowed to sit at the table I’d chosen.  What dorks!  But despite all that, it really was  a nice saturday.

Howard and I took Oliver for a walk at the Cornell Plantations and to the pet store.  Our dog has reached new levels of spoiled: he was on his way home from a long walk and a trip to Petsmart (where he had been lavished with attention!) and had a new bone actually in his mouth, but was still whining about how unfortunate his life is, because he was not being allowed to sit with us in the front seat while he chewed his bone.  Silly doggie.

We also went for yet another walk later so that I could capture some of the very beautiful flowers blooming right now:

In the evening, I baked a chocolate cake and then I ate some of it smooshed together with ice cream.  If you’ve never had chocolate cake and ice cream all smooshed together, you are missing out on one of the best parts of life.  Unless you are one of those weirdos (ahem, Howard), who doesn’t like their food to touch, in which case you might want to avoid it.

Anyway, it was a very good day

 

Physicist Chic

I went to a career seminar last week where the speaker suggested keeping a journal.  Whatever you write about most is supposedly what makes you happiest and what you should be doing.  This blog is the closest thing I have to a journal, and I hardly ever write about my job.  Based on what I write about most, I should probably open a baked goods shop/pet boutique.

Since that is probably illegal, I’ll stick with physics for now.  I am actually starting to enjoy my new job.  It was stressful at first, getting up to speed on a whole new experiment and simultaneously trying to finish our CLEO paper.  Neither of those things is finished yet, but they are at least slowing down so that I’m able to do a little bit of useful and interesting work.

A while ago, I mentioned that one of the benefits of the new job is a lack of wood paneling.  The picture above shows what the entire building I used to work in looked like — nearly windowless, with very drab wood paneling and eerie fluorescent lights.  In the picture, I’m surveying the spread for somebody’s thesis defense party — not having to organize those parties anymore is another benefit of not being a grad student!  Those cut-outs on the wall are cross-sections of accelerator magnets — physicists really know how to decorate, huh?

In my new office, the wood paneled walls have been replaced by… cinderblocks!  Not very cool, but at least there are lots of windows, and the building doesn’t feel like an underground snapshot of the 70’s.

 

Home Alone

Howard is far away in Albequerque at the moment, so I have been rattling around our big house by myself.  The cats and dog always miss him when he’s away — I am too boring for them.  One thing Oliver does like about Howard being gone is that he gets to sleep in the bed with me.  This morning, I woke up squished between a purring cat and an unusually cuddly dog.  It was an excellent way to start the day.

After Howard gets back, it will be my turn to travel.  In the middle of May, I’m going to CERN (in Switzerland) and then a week after than I’m going to a conference in San Diego.  About a week after that, I’m going home to Arkansas for a little while.   I hate travelling, so I’m not really very enthused about any of this.

Anyway, speaking of Oliver sleeping in bed, is this funny or what:

Julius is all like “OMG, WHAT did you do with my mom!?!”

In other blog news of my pets, Oliver was featured on a really awesome dog photography blog, and Howard took some really cute photos last weekend.  Well, the pets look cute.  I am sadly not at my just-got-out-of bed best!

 

Look Ma — No Strings!

Particle physics continues to dominate my life, but there was time for a lot of doggie-related excitement this week.  In addition to getting to meet our blog-friend goodbear earlier this week, which was way awesome, something very exciting happened this weekend too — Oliver got a fence!  Howard and I put it up ourselves yesterday, and I think we might be broken for good.  It turns out fence building (even crappy fence building, which is the only kind we know how to do) is hard, hard, hard work!  And our wussy little physicist/engineer selves are not used to manual labor.  But we got it up, all in one rainy afternoon.

This is actually not the end of our fence-building plans.  We would like to enclose our entire (giganto) yard, but since that will require large outlays of both money and manual labor, we decided to start with a test enclosure, that is maybe 2500 square feet.

So far, it seems to be a pretty big success.  Oliver has been doing lots of running around, and although the fence is pretty ugly, I think I can live with it, at least until my life is a little more settled.  We were concerned that Oliver might try to jump the fence (it’s 4′) or dig under it.  Only time will tell, but so far, so good.  He hasn’t tried messing with the fence at all, even when there was a very enticing squirrel on the other side.

 

Is it for Making Meat Cakes?

We don’t eat meat cakes around here, so I used it to make a chocolate cake.  The cake came out of the pan, except for a big chunk in the middle that stuck to the “meat” imprint”

Here’s somebody who thinks I should spend all my time baking him meat cakes:

Sorry for the dearth of stuff on this blog lately.  I’m still working on trying to get the paper on my graduate research out the door, and my “real” job is crazy busy.  I don’t know why there is such a rush to study a detector that won’t be built for 10 years!

 

De-grandma-fication

In some of the pictures on this blog, you may have noticed that our house has some, uh, interesting architectural elements, such as this

scalloped wood thing that inexplicably ran along the long wall of our livingroom/dining room.  It always made me feel like I was in someone’s grandma’s house.  Not that I have anything against grandmas — weird 1950s details such as this make me feel warm and comforted when I am in my actual grandma’s house.  It’s just not the sort of decor I’d choose for my own home.

Howard and I have talked about taking down the weird molding for years now, but it finally happened in the last few weeks.  We were of course left big ugly scars on the wall:

(That balloon there is left from my thesis defense two months ago — it’s still buoyant!)  So, we had to paint — which was exciting because it’s the first time in years I’ve lived in a place where I was allowed to point the walls, but also not exciting because we had to look at 50,000 paint chips.  Somewhere during the 50,000 paint chips, my eyes glazed over and I decided a color called “mayan gold” seemed like a great idea.  My camera doesn’t have very impressive color reproduction, but this is roughly what mayan gold looks like:

Even though I amped up the yellow in this picture, it still doesn’t do the color justice.  It was hard to look at and think of anything other than French’s mustard, and, in some lights, actually hurt to look at.  So, after living with the mustard aka “mayan gold” for a week, we bought a new paint called “morning sunshine”:

which again is not very well represented in the picture, but it much nicer.  It makes me feel happy and at home when I walk into the room, which was the whole point of this exercise.

I have learned a few things from this adventure:

1. That thing you may have heard from your mom or some similar person about choosing a color slightly lighter than you think you want is actually true.
2. I am very susceptible to color naming.  I was totally smitten with the name  “morning sunshine”?  On the same paint chip, there was a color called “nacho cheese.”  Why would you choose a color called “nacho cheese”, no matter how lovely it may be?  And similarly with “neon celery”?
3. Buying paint is not a good time to be cheap — premium paint is worth it.
4. Improving one thing in your house reminds you of all the other things that suck, like pink carpeting, and ugly plastic chandeliers.

But at least it seems slightly less like someone’s grandma’s house and slightly more like my house.  Happy sunday, everybody!