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.