Since I’ve Dragged You This Far

Since I have documented every little tiny milestone of my thesis research here, you may as well know that our paper has been officially published.  As my partner on the project said, this finally puts a period on our work.

So, coming soon, exciting details my new job, working on CMS track trigger studies.  Try not to get too excited

 

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.

 

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!

 

All Done (And off to Celebrate!)

Look what came in the mail today:

It’s all done and printed up!  But something seems off.  Let’s take a closer look:

Why did they underline the D?  It’s not supposed to be underlined.  It looks dumb that way!

Well, underlined D or no, I’m still off to the carribean tomorrow to sit on the beach and drink fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them.  And to facilitate not thinking about particle physics, I’m not taking my laptop.  Have a good week, everybody!

 

Three Guesses How This Week Went

If you are one of my regular readers, you will not be surprised when I say it sucked. A few weeks ago, I wrote about a pi0 finding study I did out of the goodness of my heart. I presented my final talk on it yesterday to a room full of about 50 people, 48 of whom were men, and one of them yelled at me.  Fun!

In happier (and still not surprising) news, my pets were really cute this week:

 

I Hate pi0’s

What is a pi0, and why do I hate them?  I’m glad you asked.

A pi0 (pronounced pi-zero) is a meson, which a quark and and anti-quark bound together.  Back when we were taking data, a lot of them were made in the CLEO detector.  Pi0’s are a bit harder to deal with than most of the other particles we detect, partly because they decay before they have a chance to actually enter the detector, and partly because their decay products (usually two photons, a.k.a. two packets of light) are not charged.  We are a lot better at detecting charged particles than we are neutral particles.  Nearly all of the detector is devoted to detecting charged particles, and we just have one component, the calorimeter, that detects neutrals.

One of the decays that I’m studying at the moment involves pi0s, so in order to look for that decay, I have to look for pi0s.  But as usual in particle physics, when you look for something, you don’t find it all the time.  The detector has cracks and dead bits and such which cause us to miss them a lot (about half the time actually).  For the work I’m doing, it’s necessary that I know how many pi0s were produced in the detector, not how many I can actually observe.  In order to figure out how many were produced from the number I observed, I use “fake data” — simulated particle decays that are fed into a complicated model of the detector that tell me at least in theory what fraction of the time I’ll be able to see the pi0 in the detector.

But of course nothing is perfect, certainly not complicated mock-ups of detectors (and simulations of physical processes that are not yet measured or theoretically understood!).  So I have to figure out how accurate my fake data is at simulating the real data.  I have been studying this for several months now.  I have been thinking about pi0s so much that most of my dreams are about them.  I keep having this recurrent dream where I’m calculating a bunch of numbers related to pi0 finding over and over again but the calculation never comes out right.

FINALLY the study is basically done and I’m going to give a talk about it this Friday.  The study will be useful to people other than me, so I have gone to a lot of trouble to make it applicable to the work of others.  You would think they would thank me for this, but in fact some people have implied recently that I have been keeping my work from them (never mind the fact that not a single one of them has ever come to me and said “hey I’m interested in your work, how’s it going”).  Grrrrr.  I’m glad this will all be over soon.  Tomorrow I have the third appointment for my root canal, and it’s kind of a toss up at this point over what I least want to think about: the root canal or pi0’s.

I’m going to go and work on my talk now, even though I’d rather make these cookies.

 

Another Anti-feminist

I wasn’t aware of the existence of anti-feminists until Charlotte Allen wrote her bogus indictment of women in the Washington Post (that I got really upset about in another post). Recently a women in physics mailing list pointed me to an article in “The American” (whatever that is) by another apparent antifeminist, Christina Hoff Sommers. This time the target is not women in general, but women who are also physical scientists. It is pretty well written and contains a lot of interesting information, so it’s worth a read. And I agree somewhat with her thesis that we should be careful of attempts to “fix” the problem of the underrepresentation of women in science, but I take a lot of issue with how she makes her point.

Basically, she says that all research claiming that women in science face bias is flawed. She nitpicks some of these studies with a fine-tooth comb. I can’t help pointing out (though I know this is evidence of me being an arrogant physicist), that I was really amused by the fact that she sent some research done by physicists to some social scientists. This reminded me of a date I went on once with a social scientist who tried to impress me with his ability to fit data points to a line. That’s not impressive, and even if it was, who would try to impress a date with that? Needless to say, I didn’t go out with him again. Hopefully the social scientists mentioned in the article are more competent than that guy, but the best they could come up with is that the data should have been analyzed for multiple variables at once rather than one at a time. That is probably true, but Hoff doesn’t mention that the low statistics available to any study of women in science probably makes that difficult.

While nitpicking the articles she agrees with, she glowingly praises a single study she agrees with (that concludes that women are better “empathizers” while men are better “systematizers”). She doesn’t provide any of the details of how that data was analyzed, and more upsettingly, she uses this rather vaguely statement to leap to the conclusion that men are more suited to being scientists than women. She concludes the article with this:

American scientific excellence is a precious national resource. It is the foundation of our economy and of the nation’s health and safety. Norman Augustine, retired CEO of Lockheed Martin, and Burton Richter, Nobel laureate in physics, once pointed out that MIT alone—its faculty, alumni, and staff—started more than 5,000 companies in the past 50 years. Will an academic science that is quota-driven, gender-balanced, cooperative rather than competitive, and less time-consuming produce anything like these results?

Um, I think it would produce better results (and I’m not sure that Lockheed Martin should be considered a precious national resource). But Hoff’s objection to a lot of the research about women in science is that it is done by women in science, so I guess my actual experience as a female physicist is not relevant. Apparently women with degrees in philosophy are more suited to address the problems of female physical scientists.

I don’t understand the motivation of these anti-feminists. Are they just dreaming up the most unlikely position they can come up with so as to get their name in print. Or do they really believe this nonsense?

 

Silliness in the NY Times

Today’s edition of the New York Times has an article on the front page about some people suing various LHC related entities to stop the collider from operating due to fears that it may produce black holes. I think giving a couple of crackpots a forum on the front page of a respected newspaper is probably a bigger crime than this:

which appeared in the continuation of the article on page A14 of the print edition (it’s been fixed in the online version).

 

The Boss, Graduation and the Madness of 42.44N

One of the bizarre things about living in upstate New York is that the frigid winters make you think 30 degrees feels warm. Today it was 45 degrees and sunny, and it felt like summer. Oliver and I went for a run to the dog park for the first time in a few months and it was really lovely.

In other news, I had a meeting with my advisor today. Apparently Cornell got far less money to complete CLEO data analysis than they requested, so if I don’t finish my PhD by January, I will have to get a teaching job. We both agreed that that is not a desired situation, so I have an actual deadline for graduation: Jan 20th, 2009. Exciting!

And finally, the most exciting news is that we are driving to Buffalo tomorrow to see a Bruce Springsteen concert. I’m so excited! Hopefully I can get through the 3 hour ride without Oliver puking on me….

 

Farewell CLEO

The particle detector CLEO, which has been running for 28 years (it started taking data the month before I was born!) and on which I have been working for nearly 6 years now took its last data today. Here, our operator Henry takes the last run:

while a bunch of other dudes wait around for the end:

Here are yet more dudes waiting around, watching the displays of the final events:

I tried to get Maury, the director of our lab, to give me a smile, but this is as good as I got:

Here is an unremarkable picture (of a CLEO operator taking a picture of the Run Manager as rare particle physics dudette Hanna watches) , except that the clock reads 8 am — the exact time that CLEO finished taking data.

Throughout all of this, my friend Peter was ignoring all of the mayhem and trying to process the last run to get a picture of the last double-tag event:

I’m not sure if this was shock at something that had happened or a yawn. I suspect the latter. I mocked him kind of mercilously about worrying about processing this last run so much. But now I kind of want to see that last event too.

Working on CLEO has not always been a walk in the park. Early on, I was pretty convinced I was going to quit. But I didn’t, and I think I made the right decision. I’m glad I stuck around to see the end.