I spent the day at home while a four foot tall hole in the side of my bathroom was repaired, and while trying to ignore the shriek of copper pipes being cut I pressed forward with my research. I’m beginning to understand why research is such a difficult thing to make headway in. In the merely academic problem I’ve been studying of late, I’ve literally discarded an entire binder of research notes and started over, realizing that methods I thought would work at the time were actually bunk. I had high hopes at the beginning of the summer: to get a publication at least in the rough draft stage by September or so, but that’s just a distant dream now. Now, I’m wrestling with an almost purely academic problem that has literally taken me a month to sort through.

It’s frustrating, watching so far two months of work be able to be summarized in about forty lines of code and maybe five written pages of notes. But I guess, at the end of the day, all your research and all your work will appear as a ten page journal article, so really it’s not a major thing to worry about.

At the same time, I gave my first presentation to a research group. Fraught with typographical errors, it was an effort to explain my research to an experimental group we are collaborating with, only to find that we weren’t talking about the same thing when we were talking.

Posted: July 26th, 2007 under Physics.
Comments: none

The other day I introduced one friend of mine to another. He asked her the obligatory “what do you do at CERN?” question. She answered that she was working on liquid argon calorimeter calibration. To which my friend promptly asked her, “No, what do you really do for CERN?” She answered without skipping a beat that she was working on Higgs to di-gluon.
There is this double life going on everywhere at CERN. As the accelerator comes closer and closer to being turned on, people are anxiously awaiting the real physics to begin. In the meantime, people are busying themselves working on hardware and calibrations.
This is not solely an artifact of timing, however. Historically in physics, one has to put in their service time before getting their hands on the real deal.
With big research projects, it takes a multiplicity of different tasks to keep the whole experiment running smoothly, not all of which are entirely glamorous. All of them are entirely necessary, though, and it takes a physicist to carry them out.
So the culture of service time gained momentum, and it really is a meritorious concept given the fact that each physicist benefiting from the use of such highly complicated machinery should have some hand in building it.
The time for service work is drawing to a close at CERN, and soon the real physics will begin with the turning on of the accelerator. However, if it were not for the completion of the service work, we would certainly never see that exhilarating day.
-Julia

Posted: July 23rd, 2007 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

This weekend, I went to go see Le Tour de France. On Bastille Day, to be exact. It was amazing to see all the riders whiz by. They rode extremely close to each other, but each one maintained focus on the goal and didn’t collide.

What was more amazing to me still was the amount of support personnel for Le Tour. About an hour or so before the cyclists came through, the team representatives, merchandise vendors, police officers, financial supporters, and yet more drove by in their vans and cars setting the crowd abuzz with anticipation.

Even after the riders came through, there were still more support personnel to follow. Cars with bicycle racks were on hand in case of a spill, and emergency vehicles followed closely as well.

The same can be said of CERN, and of any nationally funded laboratory. There are hoards of support personnel, working sometimes in the background and sometimes right in the open.

I am friends with a few people in the publicity office, and they seem to always be busy photographing or schmoozing some foreign head of science. The monetary investors want to be sure that their funds are well spent.

When these political heads of science come, they want to meet with the physicists. They want to hear about their projects and work. They want to find how their money can be better spent.

And we scientists have to be ready. We have to focus on our goal of effectively funding our research and communicating its importance in clear and basic language. We have to learn how to work closely with our support without crashing heads.

-Julia

Posted: July 23rd, 2007 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

    What some of you may know, but most of you probably don’t, is that I’m quickly turning into a very big soccer fan. So of course I watched the friendly between the LA Galaxy and Chelsea FC. The game was not as close as the 1-0 score would indicate, given that Chelsea got a very bad offside call and they still took somewhere upwards of twenty shots on goal, but the Galaxy looked particularly tough, especially on defense.

As a general observation, American teams tend to have a much scrappier style of play than their European counterparts, but are decades behind in terms of technical ability. That was definitely illustrated during this game, where a viciously physical Galaxy defense managed to hold Chelsea (unarguably one of the best soccer clubs in the world) to one goal, but at the same time were unable to get many shots off themselves. The closest thing to a real shot was Landon Donovan’s botched open header that should have been the equalizer. Tactically, the Galaxy’s offense seemed unprepared for a skilled defense, attempting to force their way into the box rather than use a variety of methods to keep the defense off guard. They did the equivalent of a basketball team running the pick and roll ad nauseam. Of course, so did Chelsea, but they were going to win such a competition.

Of course, the most important part of the night was David Beckham’s debut in the United States. I’ve never seen that much excitement about twelve minutes of play, but the importance of this game is that someone in Europe has taken an active interest in really exporting soccer to the US. Although Beckham may be a bit past his prime in the European leagues, he is still world class talent by American standards, and will hopefully elevate the level of play in MLS as a consequence of his presence. Perhaps it won’t be that long before US soccer isn’t some grand joke on the world stage, and that we are actually capable of fielding teams that are genuinely competitive with the best countries in the world.

But then, the broadcasters don’t really have time to show advertisements during a match, so maybe MLS will continue to sit behind the other major American sports leagues.

Posted: July 22nd, 2007 under Personal.
Comments: none

Congratulations to Dominik Schneble and the rest of his group in the basement at Stony Brook. After two and a half years of trying, with one laser problem after another, Dominik’s group (with whom my research is very closely affiliated) have finally succeeded in creating the first Bose-Einstein condensate at Stony Brook. At 5:55 AM Saturday, after a solid week of 24 hour shifts attempting to make the condensate after their laser was finally released from customs, the group observed the characteristic absorption pattern indicative of a BEC in flight. This was done just in time, too. Daniel Pertot, a German exchange student, had left the lab at around 8 AM, noting in the log that “this is not working. I’m going home.” Just ten minutes later, a large note simply said “BEC?!”. At this point, Daniel was called and returned to witness the condensate before he returned to Germany, ending his tenure at Stony Brook with research worthy of a masters thesis. Read more »

Posted: July 16th, 2007 under Physics.
Comments: none

What we all knew was pretty much inevitable has just happened: Grigory Perelman has declined the Millennium Prize. The modern-day hermit mathematician, who a few years ago provided a proof to the geometrization conjecture, of which the Poincare conjecture is a special case, has thus far refused to accept any prizes or awards for his work. Instead, one of the greatest mathematical minds of our time prefers to live in an apartment with his mother in St. Petersburg. Thus far he’s turned down the Fields Medal, an award from the European Mathematical Society, and now the Millennium prize money.

By all indications, the man seems to prefer solitude, and to simply work for the sake of solving problems. But really, who can blame him for shunning the limelight? The way the world responded to his proof was positive, but internal politics marred his work. Shing-Tung Yau and two of his students at some point began making claims about gaps in his work. It’s understandable that an adviser would try to get his students in on what Science declared to be the most important discovery of 2006, but to stake such claims is taking a grand contribution and burying it in politics.

I believe that the world needs more Perelmans, people willing to contribute and be satisfied that their work is complete and excellent. While I do not understand why he declines so many opportunities at financial gain, I do appreciate the fact that he refuses to accept accolades when his work is reward enough.

Edit: Well, call me an idiot for trusting a news source, but the Clay Institute’s website in no way mention’s Perelman’s receiving or declining said prize. I apologize for this — in the future I’ll be a bit more vigilant in the hunt for correct material.

Posted: July 10th, 2007 under Mathematics.
Comments: none

I recently went down to see the ATLAS detector. This involved a helmet and very long elevator ride.

Down at detector level, we were greeted by a magnificent sight. The detector spanned 10 stories or more (far larger than my prior baby, the four-story CDF detector). It presided over the bottom of an immense cavern, accessible to the large detector pieces only by an impressive hole in the ceiling. The pieces have to be lowered, ever so carefully, by rope.

The detector is still in the process of becoming, as Aristotle would say. The layers are splayed apart, waiting for the last of the wires and cooling tubes to be connected before the next pieces can be situated and undergo the same treatment.

All this must be done with mind-boggling accuracy. The tolerance for placement of each of these delicate parts are, well, almost intolerable. There are scores of people making sure each part goes smoothly, ensuring a working detector come beam time.

These are not the only preparations critical to a successful turn-on. As soon as the beam comes on, we will need to start taking data – and making sense of the information being read to disc.

This involves, among many other things, understanding the quirks inherent in the system. My job is to study the eta readings in the liquid argon calorimeter (LArCal).

We do this by studying Z to ee events. The mass of the Z boson is extremely well known, and for this reason, it has become the standard candle of high energy physics.

We generate random Z events using a random generator such as Pythia or Jimmy, and feed this data through our LArCal simulator. We then take the readings from our LArCal and run it through our analysis program.

Since we know what the mass of the Z boson is, we know what to expect out of the eta readings from Z events. When the data doesn’t match up to the expected, we know that there is some bias in our machine that must be corrected. We apply a correction factor, alpha, to the readings at each point in the machine and analyze the data again. In theory, once these weights are applied, we should get the expected.

This must be done each time we modify our programs. The corrections should get smaller with more well written programs. However, we cannot take this for granted, and many people are working hard at ground level ensuring that when the detector finally comes to life, it will not be in vain.

-Julia

Posted: July 9th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

I do love a good crackpot. Not me as a crackpot; that’s a different kind of crackpot. I’m referring more to the crazies that gain massive publication attention by claiming to have created a perpetual motion machine, or somehow discovered that there’s actually a black hole in the core of our sun.

Just today, these guys were scheduled to display a perpetual motion machine based on “…the principle of time variant magneto-mechanical interactions”, whatever that means. The thing about Steorn is that they went very far to prove their claim in the standard pseudoscientific method: they went straight to the media. What amazed me about this case is that they actually took out a full page ad in The Economist to “validate” their research. Read more »

Posted: July 5th, 2007 under Physics, Uncategorized.
Comments: none

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything for pleasure. As of late, it’s been the odd technical report and lots of code.

Writing code is tricky business. It’s easy to get lost in the moment and forget the larger details. I spent the last part of my Friday at work perfecting my plotting macro to get my labels just so.

That’s what I find I do quite a bit as a high energy physicist (in training). Most of my time is spent perfecting various aspects of my code, be it an analysis program or histogram macro.

It’s easy to get caught up and forget what the code was meant to do in the first place, and that’s the science. We perfect our jet finding modules while forgetting why it was so important to see a jet signal in the first place.

The devil is in the details, but not just because we need to take caution. We also must maintain focus. If we forget the science, then we forget the pleasure of writing code. We forget the awesome potential for amazing advances that each of our if-else statements represent.

A few years ago, a math professor of mine stressed to me that the key to success, what separates the good scientists from the great ones, is attention to detail. We just need to learn to strike a balance. We have to be good code writers and good thinkers, or else we risk losing the motivation to do both.

-Julia

Posted: July 1st, 2007 under Physics.
Comments: none