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Posted: July 13th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Not-work-safe discussion and pictures, after the bump…

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Posted: May 23rd, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Time to give people updates. As of Monday I’ll be having a badge that says I have limitless access to Brookhaven National Laboratory, where I plan to do my Ph.D work in the Collider Accelerator Physics division. You can find the website here. Thus far, I’ve been shown around by Dr. Vladimir Litvinenko, who runs the show and might be one of the coolest professors I’ve ever met.

This move means that my love of quantum field theory will become peripheral at best, and the energy scale will increase by about nine orders of magnitude. It also means that the number of accelerator physics grad students graduating with me in the entire country can be counted on two hands.  This means the odds of my getting an academic job after I graduate goes through the roof. Which is good. Because I’m too stupid to succeed otherwise.

Anybody who wants to visit me and check out some damn cool physics, just let me know and I can use my mad connections to show off. Most importantly, I’ll be eventually Dr. Webb again, and I’m much happier for it.

Posted: May 5th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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    It turns out that if I had actually “liveblogged” through the whole thing, it would have read something like this:

“Grading is terribly boring. The people on the college radio station lack the basic level of professionalism I would expect from a Dunkin’ Donuts employee, but at least at some point I can distill that the university had no clear instructions on what students should do, which is stupid. Jesus grading is boring.”

Yeah, that would’ve been about it. Threats over, watched a talk by Anand Sivaramakrishnan about adaptive optics, and now back to the daily routine.

Posted: February 25th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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So apparently there is a roaming gunman on Stony Brook’s campus who, according to the college radio station, used a gun to steal a slice of pizza. The official notice is as follows:

University Police received a report that a young male fled the Student Activity Center Cafeteria and later displayed what was reported as a handgun. The individual was reported to be an African American male, approximately 25 years of age, wearing a black coat and black wool hat. He fled in the direction of Harriman Hall. University Police are searching the area and investigating the report. Remain alert, proceed with caution and notify University Police if you see anyone fitting the description of the individual or anything unusual. You can reach University Police by callling 911 from any campus phone or XXX-XXXX.

The stoned idiots on WUSB are keeping me updated with their inane babble, but every once in a while they ha ve a good nugget. To be clear, the campus appears to be relatively normal, the campus is not locked down, and there are just people wandering around campus.

I’m hiding out in my office while the university puts together an official thing that describes what, exactly, is going on. The police have failed to actually lock down the campus, but certain bigger buildings on campus have been locked. I have no idea what’s actually going on, but since I’m basically hiding in a hardened bunker in the basement of the physics building grading, I’ll keep the internets posted on what I hear on the radio station that isn’t just white noise.

Posted: February 25th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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