Subtitles

This blog is on its 2nd subtitle (3rd if you count initially not having one). The first try was “Living The Good Life as a Berkeley Graduate Student” which was lame and cliche. This second attempt, “Flavors from the Natural and Culinary Worlds”, is sure to make particle physicists groan. The relevance of flavor to cooking is blatantly obvious but the relevance of flavor to physics is apparent to only a lucky few. As a particle physicist I study quarks, the constituents of protons and neutrons, which are the fundamental building blocks of matter. There are 6 known quarks which we distinguish by their “flavor”, an attribute which denotes how they interact with other fundamental particles. In particular I am interested in what we call “heavy flavor” or massive quarks. I hope to write my thesis on a measurement of the production rate of the bottom quark at the LHC. The bottom quark, or beauty quark if you call it by its underutilized but more elegant name, is the 2nd heaviest quark in the Standard Model. Its production rate is an interesting measurement in its own right since it is not well predicted by theory, but it is also an important for developing a technical understanding of heavy flavor at the LHC, which we expect to show up in many new physics searches.

The physics lessons aside, I am not happy with this subtitle either, so expected it to change. Suggestions are appreciated!