August Tour

I'm writing this post from the comfort of a Canadian railroad car, beginning the last leg of my August tour.  In mid-July I was asked by the collaboration to give a talk in Boston on August 11th and present a poster in Toronto on August 22nd.  It seemed silly to go back to Geneva in between the two conferences, so I threw in visits to Berkeley, Naperville and Ann Arbor in between them.  It's been exhausting and I'm happy to say that I will be in Toronto for nearly a week.  I may even get to unpack my suitcase.

Getting asked by the collaboration to go to these conferences may sound like a big deal, but, in reality it is quite normal.  In our field collaborations rather than people are asked to give talks, and we use our favorite tool, committees, to divy up the engagements.  Talks are assigned to young people on the job market or to senior people as a reward for their service to the collaboration.  There is a priority list which makes sure that the talks are evenly divided so that no one gets overlooked.  Its a quirk of our system that often the presenter gives talks on analyses he or she has not worked on.  Its a legitimate method because each of us are authors on all of the analyses so we should be able to talk about any of them, but in reality the speaker has to do quite a bit of homework to put together the talk.  Half of my talk at the MIT concerned an analysis I didn't work on; it was useful to learn about it so that I could present the material in a coherent way.

Two days before I left Geneva I made a tomato tarte that was as good as it was simple.  It comes from David Leibovitz's blog, with very minor modifications.  David's recipes are always excellent, and this one is no exception.  I used an assortment of heirloom tomatoes of different colors which had a very pretty effect.  Its a very buttery crust, so you might want to try something a bit healthier, like this one.

Heirloom Tomato Tarte

4 or 5 medium sized heirloom tomatoes, sliced 1/2 inch thick

1/2 a small onion sliced as thinly as possible

A few tablespoons of dijon mustard (I used the unground à l'ancienne style)

plenty of fresh thyme, leaves only

salt and pepper 

olive oil

8 oz goat cheese; it's best to use one with a rind of some sort.  mine was very slightly aged so had a thin rind. 

tart dough:

1 1/2 cups  flour
4 1/2 ounces unsalted butter, chilled, cut into cubes
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 large egg
2-3 tablespoons cold water

First make the tart dough.  Mix the flour and salt in a bowl.  In a food processor, stand mixer or using your hands, mix or pulse the butter into the flour until the mixture has a crumbly texture and there are no large pieces of butter left.

Mix the egg and 2 tablespoons of water in a bowl.  Add to the food processer and pulse until the liquid is  incorporated and the dough holds together.  Add the extra water if needed.

 On a floured surface, roll the dough into a ball.  Roll until it is about 1/4 -1/2 in thick.  You can get it into the tart pan with an ingenious (and probably standard) method that David outlines: you flour the rolling pin and roll the dough up around the pin to transfer it to the pan. 

Press the dough into the pan and dock it with a fork.  Preheat the oven to 425F.  

Smear the bottom of the crust with the mustard.  You can put a nice thick layer on if you like mustard.  Then spread the onion on top, followed by half of the thyme.  

Arrange the tomatoes on top in concentric circles.  Mine didn't overlap, but they probably could without too much trouble.  Arrange the cheese on top and sprinkle with the rest of the thyme.  Add salt and pepper to taste and then drizzle with olive oil.

Bake for 30 minutes or so.  Be careful to check that it doesn't burn--as you can see from the picture below, mine was a bit charred.  Serve hot or warm.  I had leftovers on the plane and they were nearly as good as when it was fresh!

  

A winner and loser on the NYTimes

Denis Overbye, number one science writer for the New York Times, has to be one of my least favorite science writers. Well, let's face it, I don't know very many science writers by name, but if I come across an article about the physical sciences in the New York Times and it makes me groan, it was usually written by David Overbye. He got a lot of mileage out of the black hole LHC hysteria, and more recently, propagated unfounded rumors from a known rumor monger blogger of a Fermilab Higgs discovery. He has a penchant for sensationalism, and when he covers topics which delve into the 'mysteries of the universe' he likes to milk them for anything he can get, imagined or not.

He recently published an essay titled, "Rumors in Astrophysics Spread at Light Speed", which discusses the role of rumors in the physical sciences. It starts off pretty badly with an anecdote about an astronomer who said something at a public outreach talk that was misconstrued. Overbye calls this "2 sigma blues" which has nothing to do with the anecdote.  A 2 sigma result means something very precise, statistically, it is certainly not related to poor word choice.  What he really wants to talk about is a rumor that was started about a month ago by a physics-blogger-trouble-maker-rumor-monger, who said there might be a hint of the Higgs at FermiLab. This little rumor flared up all over the internet and generally pissed the FermiLab scientists off because they didn't want to be seen as crying wolf.  Overbye then philosophizes about why he thinks rumors like this get started.  Its certainly not his worst article, but it still makes me groan.  I just wanted to complain for a bit.

On a positive NY Times note, I found an excellent recipe for a provençal style potato and tomato gratin. I was shocked at how well it came out.  I made a few slight modifications, so I rewrote the recipe here.  You should use good tomatoes and good potatoes--preferably not the baked potato type.  I used some fingerlings and some other random variety I found at the market.

Provençal Tomato-Potato Gratin

2 garlic cloves

Olive oil

2.5 pounds tomatoes, sliced 1/2-1/4 inch thick
1.5 Tbsp fresh thyme leaves
Salt and pepper to taste
2 pounds potatoes, sliced about 1/4 inch thick
1 tsp herbs de provence 
.5-1 cup of grated gruyère



1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Cut one of the garlic cloves in half, and rub a 3-quart gratin or baking dish with the cut half. Oil the dish with olive oil. Mince the remaining garlic, along with the one you used to rub the dish and toss them in with the tomatoes. Add the thyme, and season to taste with salt and freshly ground pepper.
2. Make a layer of half the potato slices.  Mine were all different sizes, so it was a bit of a mess, but I tried to make it in more or less one slice thick.   Then season very generously with salt and pepper. I'm not kidding, you really want to salt it.  Sprinkle with half of the herbs de provence.  
3. Layer half the tomatoes over the potatoes.  I had them all overlap a bit.
4. Repeat the layers with the remaining potatoes and tomatoes. Make sure you salt and pepper the second layer of potatoes. Pour any juices left in the tomato bowl over the vegetables.
5. Pour 3/4 cup of hot water onto the vegetables. Bake 45 minutes.  The recipe recommends pressing the potatoes down into the liquid after 30 minutes, I didn't find this necessary. After the 45 min is up, sprinkle on the cheese. Bake another 30 to 45 minutes, until most of the liquid has been absorbed by the potatoes and the gratin is lightly browned. Or really browned, as in my case.  Serve hot or warm.

How an Analysis Becomes Official

In my last post I alluded to the fact that it is no trivial matter to take an analysis from a bunch of plots that I have made to an official statement of scientific fact put out by the collaboration. The road to approval is so long because in high energy physics, all members of the collaboration publish a result, not individuals. In fact, from outside of the collaboration you have no way of knowing who performed which analysis by reading the documentation. Most other scientists find this arrangement very strange since generally papers are very explicit about the level of involvement each name on the paper had in its production. High energy physicists take the egalitarian view that since our experiments are so large and complex, they cannot function without all of the members, and that the contribution of the person running the pixel detector is no less important that the person who is searching for the Higgs. Therefore, every name (all 3000 of them!) gets put on all papers in alphabetical order. The approval process is designed so that all collaborators can have their say about each analysis, which generally means that any result coming out of a HEP collaboration has gone through much stricter peer review than the average journal article. It also results in a lot of headaches for the person trying to get the analysis approved.


To explain the process, I'm going to employ School House Rock's awesome and educational, "How a a bill becomes a law". Rewatch it if you haven't seen it in a while. It's pretty great.



The Bill in question is my analysis and I play the part of the congresman who proposes it. My advisor is represented by the people who ask for the law, because she came up with the analysis concept. The drafting of the law, i.e. the dirty work of the analysis, kept me at CERN until obscene hours of the night for days on end in May and June. The committee fits best into the role of the Analysis Reviewers and Editorial Board, to which each analysis is assigned. These people look at the analysis in detail and typically ask you good question which drive you back to your computer to investigate, and in the end produce a better paper.

Once the board and reviewers deem the analysis mature enough, the paper (which, in this case, is not destined for a journal, but will be made public) is sent out to the collaboration and they are given a week to comment on it. This stage is equivalent to the Bill going to the House and Senate (imagine we have a single legislative body). At the end of the comment period the analyzer gives a talk about it, which would be equivalent to a floor debate. This part of the process involved me flying to Copenhagen to give a talk at our Collaboration meeting to a room of about 300 people. It was a little intimidating, but also fun because I got to use a nifty nearly invisible microphone that went over my ear and an enormous screen (12 ft tall, maybe?). My talk went smoothly, with no interjections or grumbling when the Physics convenor spoke the magic words, "Does anyone object to this continuing to the next stage?". Some of the analyses were contentious and forced to revise before coming up for a approval again. In most cases I agreed that the analysis wasn't quite ready and felt that the approval procedure had done its job.

Sadly, once ATLAS approves my analysis it does not go to Obama's desk. It instead goes to two of the three heads of management of the experiment: the Publication Committee chair, the Physics convenor and the Spokesperson. The first two read my analysis, and this is where it stalled a bit. I won't go into the details, but it was very confusing and frustrating. However, once those two "sign-off" on the analysis it is ready to go to the public and the long, arduous journey is over! The analysis now has the ATLAS stamp of approval.

I'm going to two conferences this August to present my work (and the work of others). Its quite exciting to know that for almost the first time I'll be showing plots that were made by me!

Something To Celebrate

This morning Kyle boarded a plane headed back to Berkeley, his seven week visit having passed entirely too quickly with decidedly too much work and not enough fun.  Despite the stress of collaboration approval deadlines for me, and the pressure to publish for him, it was great to share the CERN experience for a while.  We even managed to have a bit of fun on a trip to Sweden and on some weekend bike rides and hikes.

Overlooking Lac d'Anternne

Rather than wallow in loneliness on the evening of his departure, I thought I would finally share my first public physics result (!) and a meal that we had on the evening it became official.

While most theses in high energy physics are quests to understand one-in-a-million type interactions,  my thesis concerns relatively ordinary proton-proton collisions.   In these ho-hum interactions the protons interact a little bit, but not enough to produce the fireworks we are accustomed to seeing in the pretty pictures the experiments put out for PR purposes.

A W boson decaying to electron and neutrino: total propaganda

In the events I'm interested in the protons do not exchange quantum numbers, they merely jostle each other without combining to form new particles.  The jostling, however, does impart enough energy to one or both of the protons so that it disintegrates into many low energy particles.  The characteristic signature of these events is activity near the beams, but not a lot of activity perpendicular to the beams.  In particular I'm selecting events which have activity on only one side of the detector.  This requirement isolates these jostling type events so that we can begin to understand them better.  

A plot of the ratio of the number of events with activity on only one side of the detector to events with activity on either as a function of the ratio of jostling-type interactions.

These events are interesting to understand because they make up a non trivial component of the total proton proton interaction rate, but are hard to model theoretically.  They are also distantly related to what I think is the coolest measurement the LHC can make, which is the subject of another post.  Eventually, once I complete the analysis, I hope theorists can use the my measurement to understand these events better.  

In a latter post I'll go over what it takes for a result to become public (i.e. become collaboration approved), but for now it suffices to say, its nearly as arduous as doing the analysis itself.  When it was all said and done, Kyle and I had a little celebration at home, with a nice rosé de gamay, the summer speciality of this region, and the goat cheese and roasted tomato tart you see below.

Nothing beats roasted tomatoes

It doesn't really qualify as an 'original' recipe, rather it's a riff on this yogurt crust tarte fine at Chocolate & Zucchini.  I made the same crust she specifies, although I didn't have sesame seeds so I couldn't roll those into the crust.  I used goat cheese and milk for the spread and flavored it with chopped parsley, basil, lemon zest, salt and a tiny bit of red pepper.  Tomatoes were roasted the night before so it was relatively easy to put together!

 The next day I made a ghetto pesto by chopping everything by hand and topped the leftover crust with it, roasted mushrooms and the last of the tomatoes. Yum!  

My Return is Imminent

The first phase of my analysis is almost public.  It got caught up in a bit of politicking (what HEP analysis doesn't?) but hopefully within a day or two it will fully approved and I will be able to post some of the plots here!  I'll explain the process by which the experiment endorses an analysis when I post them, but it suffices to say that it is a slow, complicated, painful process.  Now that it is nearly over, I'll have some more time for blogging, which I'm really looking forward to.

I've mostly been cooking pasta when I have the time, but tonight it was so hot I made hummus from a recipe posted by David Lebovitz, which hit the spot!  Mine was rustic, as I have no blender or other electrified means of blending ingredients so I used a potato masher instead.  Still, with a salad and some freshly made (not by me) pita bread, it was a perfect summer dinner.

Weekly Update #1, Part 2

Well, I've been at CERN for almost 16 hrs today and most of that time has been spent working....  So here is what would've been my weekly update, except it almost entirely in pictures

Saturday I went on a bike ride through the wine country with some friends

It was Caves Ouvertes, a day when all the wineries opened up for free wine tasting and lots of yummy food.  Like the Russian River Wine Road.

This was the booze train, but the driver had a glass of wine in his hand...only in France...or french speaker switzerland

There are gorgeous tomatoes from Italy right now.

While writing the draft of my note I made a tarte inspired by this recipe.  It was the same except I used fine grain semolina instead of spelt flour, a 1:1 ratio of creme fraiche to broth, mustard greens instead of turnip greens, and I threw in some chopped peruvian olives (like kalamata) for kicks....yum.

I made a cherry tart with the left over dough...think Cheeseboard corn cherry scone in galette form.

I needed good food to fuel my writing!

Trying Something New: Weekly Update #1

It is clear that with advent of data, my time for writing has been reduced to next to nothing.  Most of my creative energies are going into my work, which is fantastic, yet it makes for some boring blogging.  Even worse, I haven't cooked anything particularly interesting in a while, the recipe I posted last time being the only exception.  So, in order to bring some balance to my work driven life and to perhaps inspire me to cook something bloggable again, I am attempting to post an update once a week, hopefully with a little bit of physics, a recipe and maybe something about life here.      

This week I have to have a draft of an internal paper on the first phase of my analysis done by Tuesday evening (Ack!) .  It is the first jump through a series of hoops I have to make it through between now and the conference in July iin which I am hoping to show my results (or have my results shown...which is another quirk of HEP).  The collaboration has to approve the public presentation of any plots, and its a multi stage process to get a community of 3,000 people to agree to do so.  The current strategy, which no one likes or completely understands, involves first writing an internal paper about the analysis which triggers the relevant physics group leaders to assign three to four analysis reviewers to it.  The reviewers give suggestions, over see the analysis and when they are reasonably happy the result is first sent to the physics group for approval and only then is it presented to the collaboration for approval.  Somewhere along the way a paper which is suitable for public consumption is produced.  This process doesn't sound too bad the way I've described it, but it seems to be infinitely more complicated in practice.  My fellow Berkeley grad student Seth has a blog post about one of his experiences with the approval procedure up at USLHC blogs.  It's aptly titled, "Collaborating isn't always easy".

In order to get the draft together I have a lot of work to do in the next 24 hrs, yet I find myself in front of my computer, writing in order to clear my head.  I just got back from CERN, having taken the second to last bus, which left CERN at 11:30, home.  I spent the half an hour long ride toute seule, listening to the Dixie Chicks, watching stop after stop go by empty.  It was rather depressing, yet calming at the same time.  Sometimes I find that all I need to release the stress of working hard and being far away from home is the crooning of Natalie and the rest of the girls from Texas.

I was going to continue this post with a brief description of my weekend (recipe included!) mostly in pictures but my internet connection is very poor so I'll have to finish it tomorrow at CERN.  I leave you with a picture of some of the prettier acquisitions from the Saturday market.  I have no idea what I'll make with the gorgeous beans, hopefully they come with some inspiration.

Catching Up

The minute I wrote that my hands were getting better the RSI flared up again, this time with a vengeance.  Blogging was low on the list of typing priorities so it was the first activity to be cut.  However, some days off, a three week trip to the US and a doctor prescribed wrist brace have brought them back to a manageable state.  

Since I was last in the habit of writing, I spent three weeks in the US visiting Kyle in Berkeley and going to a wedding in Charleston, SC.  The wedding was the only part of the trip which was a vacation per se, but it was certainly easier to relax when I was an ocean and a continent away from CERN.  (Being around Kyle had something to do with that too).  I did all my favorite things in Berkeley, most of which revolved around food: Kyle met me at the airport with some Cheeseboard pizza, we made numerous trips to Berkeley bowl, and I had an exquisite meal at Gather, my new favorite restaurant.

Gather, the interior is decorated with all reclaimed material...or something green like that 

(newspaper photo)

Gather opened in December of last year and my friend and fellow Fulbrighter, Abby, gave me the heads up because one of her good friend’s partner was one of the owners.  Kyle and I and a couple of friends went the first week and we were very impressed.  The  restaurant is so Berkeley.  Not 1960s Berkeley, which would imply peace signs and granola and hemp and patchouli, rather it embodies present day Berkeley, and by extension, the Bay Area.  My dad calls the current residents of my fair city, somewhat pejoratively, the hip-ousie*, referring to the community of well meaning liberals who can afford to indulge in local, organic, fair trade, mother-earth protecting, guilt assuaging, somewhat conspicuous consumption....  Yes, he is a cynic...and he still loves Berkeley despite of (and because of) all that.  I prefer to think that Gather represents the best of what the hip-ousie has to offer:  an obsession with locally sourced organic food that is creative and prepared with an acute attention to detail.  The constantly changing menu contains dishes for everyone from vegans to carnivores, with neither as an afterthought.  And its not that expensive, considering what you are getting.  I met up with a couple of friend for dinner and at one point I couldn’t pay attention to the conversation because the food was so good.  Seriously.

The haul...now let's see if I can actually use it all....

I’m now back at CERN and back to working 24-7.  I moved into my adorable new apartment, and with a trip to Ikea under my belt, I feel quite settled.  The best thing about my new place, besides the fact that right outside my door there is a stop for the bus which goes to CERN, is the Saturday open air market which is just a few blocks away in the old center of town.  This market is incredible...I went on friday and was quickly overwhelmed by the range of amazing food to buy.  Some highlights: Bertrand the wine maker from Beaujolais who comes every week to pedal his gamay and chardonnay based wines, the three or four olive stands, the woman who hacks off chunks of delicious whole wheat sourdough bread from enormous meter long loaves, the stand which sells only wild greens, the spice stand, the cheese stands where you buy the cheese directly from the maker...and of course, the produce, where the vendors love to flirt with young american girls to sucker them into buying their wonderful fruits and vegetables.  I went a little over board.

They are beautiful, aren't they?

The most interesting thing I bought were asperges des bois, wild asparagus.  It was from a stand which sold only three items: wild strawberries (fraises des bois)**, tiny new potatoes and the wild asparagus, all from the nearby Drome region of France.  Unfortunately, I didn’t make anything inspired with them, but just cooked them with some garlic, shallots and mushrooms, but they had a very delicate earthy flavor to them and a wonderful mouth feel. 

Instead of sharing my not so impressive asperges des bois recipe, I’d like to share something I made while in Berkeley.  It involves fresh garbanzo beans, which are probably still available.  Fresh, garbanzos, although a bit of work to shell, have a delightful grassy taste to them which is completely unlike the canned or dried versions.  And although they are rather delicate, they stands up to the sauce in the following recipe.  Enjoy!

**I bought some fraises des bois from another stand and wow, were they good.  These particular ones were called “mana des bois”, a fitting title.

*(it makes more sense when spoken: replace the bourge in bourgeousie with hip, as in hippie).

Fresh garbanzos from a google image search result

3 lg ripe romas, diced
2/3 bag of spinach
1/2 lb fresh garbanzos
1 shallot
2 lg cloves of garlic
zest of 1 lemon, 1 lime
juice of 1/2 lemon
red pepper flakes
1 tbsp corriander
1 tbsp cumin
salt

Blanche the garbanzos in boiling water for 1 minute, then dunk them in ice water and shuck them.

Finely chop the shallot and garlic and saute them over medium heat in a tbsp or so of olive oil.  Throw in some red pepper flakes to your taste.  Then the shallots are soft, about 10 min, add the corriander and cumin, stir, then add the diced tomatoes.  Cook over medium heat and when the tomatoes have begun to break down, add the garbanzos.  Continue to cook until the tomatoes are broken down and a sauce has formed.  Then add the spinach and lemon juice and cook until the spinach is wilted.  Then add the zest and serve!

Science and Your Country Needs You

I've been composing a post about why I've been silent for the last month (more hand troubles), but this came up and I decided it trumped any excuses.

Remember how I went to DC and asked Congress to support HEP?  And remember how one of the things we were asking them to do was to support the reauthorization of COMPETES?  We knew the funding was probably going to be hard to get in this economic climate, but that COMPETES was a shoe-in because it got broad bipartisan support in the past and Congress likes bipartisan shows of cooperation when there is no money involved (it was only an authorization, not an allocation).  Well, the door got slammed shut on COMPETES earlier this week, with broad bipartisan support behind the slamming, and there is only a little crack in the door that will bring it back to the table.  The about-face had something to do with pornography--read below and you'll see why.  It got sent back to the committee so I (we, science, the country, etc...ok, a bit of hyperbole but forgive me) need you to contact your congresspeople and tell them to support the reauthorization of competes!!

Send them a letter along the lines of:  "I was dismayed to see the America COMPETES act be recommitted and I strongly urge you to support its swift passage of the 5 year authorization.  Funding of science and technology is vital to both the economic and intellectual viability of our country"...or something like that.    You can find your congress person at   http://www.house.gov 


Here is a letter from APS about what went down:

The Issue: On Thursday, May 13, the reauthorization of the America
COMPETES Act, a bill that had previously received bipartisan support,
fell victim to election-year politics.  The framers of the
reauthorization bill had assumed both parties would support the final
product, having worked closely with the Republican Minority to create
a bill they hoped would be acceptable to most Members.  In fact, 5
Republicans voted for passage of the bill during Committee
consideration.

The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010  provides a 5-year
authorization for the DOE Office of Science, NSF and NIST that would
keep those agencies on their doubling track, a plan that most
economists believe is essential to maintaining economic growth.

Unfortunately, the vote did not remain bipartisan when it reached the
House floor for consideration.  Following all debate and consideration
of amendments from both parties, Republicans introduced a "Motion to
Recommit" that stripped out all the increased authorizations for
science.  This was done in order to freeze all spending accounts for
the next three years at 2010 levels.  To ensure that the motion would
pass, the motion also included a "poison pill" provision requiring
that all NSF personnel who had been identified as using office
computers to watch pornography be fired.  This unexpected, 11th hour
move forced nearly 100 Democratic members to switch their vote in
support of the motion to recommit, sensing that a vote against the
motion would have been portrayed as a vote for pornography.  In the
end the motion passed 292 to 126 returning the bill to the House
Science and Technology Committee for further action.  The Committee
is expected to bring the bill back to the House floor within a matter
of days with the Committee-approved funding levels.

Back in the game!

A couple of days off did wonders for my RSI problems and I am supposed to sign a contract in the next couple of days on a lovely studio in a charming french town.  I won't believe it until I actually have the signed contract in my hand, but I'm very hopeful!

Below is a picture of the first real meal I cooked in weeks!

As Heather, a South African, remarked, it was a 'proper' dinner.

My friend Heather, who hosted me so graciously last week, let me cook her and her roommate dinner last night.  It didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, but it wasn't bad.  It was based off of this recipe for artichokes.  The artichokes were great, the beans that I added were so-so.

Worked Too Hard

And rendered my left arm useless....well not useless, but I have to take some time away from the computer.  RSI is no joke!  I use this software to control/prevent it (This is a good one for linux/windows).  Highly recommended.  Working for a month straight with only 1.5 days off is decidedly not recommended.

Where the Higgs at, yo?

A Week Later

It has been a week since the first collisions and I'm happy to say that ATLAS has recorded over 10 million events!  That's more than enough for me to use for my thesis so I am one very happy grad student.  Now I just have to the analysis....

Today I gave a talk to the entire collaboration about the performance of the Inner Detector, Tracking and B-tagging groups (don't worry about what that means).  It was one of four talks given by 'young physicists' on the first 7 TeV results, roughly divided by subdetector and their related physics objects.  I was presenting the work of a very large group of people and I was quite nervous that I would accidentally misrepresent someone's work or worse.  As you might imagine it is hard to make that many people happy when you are presenting the results that they've worked very hard on!  At some point this morning I realized that most of the people in my 3,000 strong collaboration don't know who I am, so in giving this talk I'm introducing myself to a significant subset of the people in my field....ack!  Obviously only a small fraction of the 3,000 people were watching the talk and an even smaller fraction were in the room (it was webcast so people could watch it from the confort of their own institution or desk) but I still felt the pressure.  In the end, despite me rushing through unrehearsed slides, the talk went over well.  Luckily all the data and results looked so beautiful that the audience couldn't help but be happy!

I thought I'd share a few interesting recent articles:

Many of us grumbled at the trumped up Media Day the CERN management had scheduled for first collisions.  We thought it was a bad idea because there was no guarantee that we would actually get collisions on that day and the LHC did not seem ready.  Here is an alternative opinion on the subject and I must admit that the author has a point.

Last week the American Association of University Women published a report on the lack of women in science and engineering.  The New York Times also reported on it.  I haven't had the chance to read it, but it looks interesting.

Lastly, the BBC has a great LHC page full of information devoted to the project: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/

The Big Day

Tuesday was big.  It was huge.  It marked the beginning of what will hopefully be an era of paradigm shifting discoveries, of a new understanding of our physical world and of post graduate life for yours truly.  I'm going to try to capture a bit of the excitement of the day in this post.  I don't think I've ever had a busier and more exciting two days in my life!

For me the madness of first collisions started on Monday morning because of this plot by CMS.

I have no idea how this CMS person was able to post this on the USLHC blog.  

We would NEVER be able to do that in Atlas.

It is a plot of the position of the interaction points of protons in the LHC beams colliding with particles of gas in the beampipe.  The LHC beam pipe is under a good but imperfect vacuum, so every now and then one of the protons collides a stray molecule.  We refer to these events as beam gas events.  They are normally a nuisance, however on Monday the LHC wanted to make sure that the positioning of the two beams was good enough so that they would actually hit each other when they attempt collisions.  One method of doing this is to look at the position of these beam gas events and make sure they are coming from the same place for both beams.

An example of a beam gas event from CMS.

CMS said they could measure the position of each beam with beam gas events to pretty good accuracy  and presented the plots above as evidence.  A few weeks ago the ATLAS experts took a look at doing this and determined that it was hard and would require a fair amount of dedicated work to be possible.  However, Monday morning ATLAS management said that we needed to give the plot to the LHC as soon as possible.  Most of the experts were away at conferences or otherwise unavailable so I was asked to help Juerg, an LBL staff scientist in charge of the beam spot group, find these beam gas events.  At noon we holed up in an office and gave it a shot.

What makes finding beam gas events difficult is the fact that you have to separate them from beam halo events.

Beam Halo crap in ATLAS.

Beam Halo is caused by the beam interacting with gas or other material upstream of ATLAS.  It produces a lot of junk in the detector and is not correlated with the position of the beam.  The challenge is to separate these events from the beam gas events.  To make a long story short we worked all night on this.  Juerg went back to where he was staying and slept for a couple of hours, but I, having youth on my side, pulled the all nigher I never had in college and eventually found a way to separate these events in a run we were testing.  It was a small moment of triumph where I felt that I had made a significant contribution to the experiment.  Then we tried the method on the current data and found that it didn't really work because the events were much less contaminated by beam halo than the test sample and so the discriminator that I had found didn't discriminate anymore.  Still, in the end we were able to give the LHC a beam position that was not as precise as CMS's but precise enough to say that "we could not rule out that the LHC beams would collide".

We came to this conclusion at 6am, just in time to prepare for the collisions!  The LHC then tried twice to inject the two beams and bring them to full energy and failed.  Since it takes several hours between attempts, I took the opportunity to sleep for an hour after the second failure.

When I came back from my restorative power nap and shower, I headed back up to the satellite control room where I had spent the nighttime hours I should've been sleeping.  The satellite control room is a smaller, less impressive space two floors above the main control room where people look at the data after it comes off the detector.

The satellite control room on Tuesday Morning.

I was there as an extension to the event scanning team, a group of people whose job it was to find the prettiest events and make them public as soon as possible.  All the event pictures I've shown in the previous posts were made in this room.  I was not working on the event displays but on a webpage which took the data and made general plots available to the collaboration soon after the run started so people could get a feel for the events.

The LHC takes almost an hour to go from injection energy to collision energy so it gave us ample time to bite our nails and stare at the monitors which showed it's progress.  Once the monitors read "collapsing separation bumps", a sign that the were bringing the beams into collision position, the excitement and tension in the room was palpable.

When the collisions finally came we watched the monitors around us and saw event after gorgeous event flash by.  It was amazing and thrilling and reminded me why I like physics so much.  I was staring at collisions of protons that were turning their mass and energy into different particles and those particles were being observed by our detectors!  I was looking at the data that would go into my thesis!  The words that kept coming to my lips were gorgeous and beautiful and aesthetic appeal to the events was almost overwhelming.  Not long after we saw the first events the leader of the scanning team started yelling out event numbers and the room turned to chaos.  Luckily for me, the data I needed to run my processing scripts had a half an hour delay between when the events were taken and when they were made available to me.  I took that opportunity to go down to the main control room and watch the festivities.  It was packed and ebullient and the champagne was flowing.  I got there too late to partake in the bubbly drinking, but several people had the foresight to bring extra bottles for the satellite control room so we got ours a bit later.

I spent the rest of the day marveling as the events kept on coming and continuing to update my plots for the collaboration.  In a few hours we took as much data as we had in all of last year's lower energy runs. Eventually, around 6pm the LHC lost the beam and we left.  I attended a meeting, ate dinner with my group, drank some celebratory wine and slept for a glorious 11 hrs.  

7 TeV Press

NYTimes

BBC

CERN

ATLAS public

CMS public

COLLISIONS!!!!

I've slept less than one hour in the past 31 but it was totally worth it.

Webcast

Its very likely that I will not sleep tonight for more than a few hours, if at all.  If you want to watch the webcast, here is a link.  Collisions are expected as early as 7am CERN time (PST+9, EST+6).

Shift Summary and Outlook on the Upcoming Collisions

On Thursday I took my final shift for this block and, after three weeks of training and shifting, I was quite happy to not see the control room at 6:45am Friday morning.  Appropriately, the last hour of my last shift was the most exciting, complete with a bevy of experts swearing at the detector.  We lost control of two of the read out elements of the pixel detector and wresting them back into a state where we could communicate with them was a challenge.  I, having no idea what was going on, took orders and clicked where I was told to click and typed what I was told to type.  In the end all was fine (there was never any danger to the pixels or to ATLAS) and everyone, the experts included, learned something.

As I mentioned before, Tuesday is the big day when the LHC is going to produce, with the media to bear witness, its first 7 TeV collisions.  The preparations and build up to Media Day were already underway last week.  Twice we had video crews in the control room interviewing us at our stations.  I had the opportunity to speak with some filmmakers producing a documentary for a british funding agency and was requested to say an enthusiastic "ready!" to another team.  Besides the cameras in the control room there were many cameras in the Atlas Visitor's Center, which shares a smoked glass wall with the control room so that the visitors can see us scientists in our natural state.  When I first started taking shifts someone had taped a "don't feed the physicists" sign to the wall.  I now have great sympathy for zoo animals.  The visitors like to take pictures so you quickly learn to ignore their flashes and peering faces.

The view of the control room from the Visitor's center (via CERN)

As for as my part in the Media Day preparation, I am working on setting up a system so that members of the collaboration can quickly see plots as soon as the collisions happen.  Unfortunately I cannot share them here because we have rules about what we can show the public (almost nothing) but as soon as some pictures get made public I'll post them here!  

You can follow Tuesday's events from the CERN website, or even see a webcam of the Atlas Control Room if you register your ip address in advance.  

Me, a lobbyist? Not really. (Part 2)

In my previous post on my DC advocacy trip I forgot to mention one important step in the preparation.  Being a lowly grad student who's wardrobe consists entirely of birthday and christmas presents, I had nothing professional to wear, prompting me to go on an epic hunt for formal business attire.  I stalked the suit racks in the wilds of Walnut Creek, raided the shoe stores of San Leandro and made repeated forays into San Francisco for dress shirts.  Bewildered and overwhelmed, I bought several outfits and after taking pictures and sending them out to friends with pleas for advice, I settled on a nicely tailored Calvin Klein skirt suit and a pair of sensible black pumps.

    

Mama's little girl is all grown up and asking people for money!

I flew in to DC early on the first day and met one of my wonderful and amazing friends, Clare, for lunch near the White House.  Clare is busy saving the world from climate change through her position as the Special Assistant to the Special Envoy for Climate Change (really, the title is not a joke!) in the State department.  Hillary Clinton is her boss's boss, how cool is that!?!  The rest of the day was taken up by last minute studying of my primary assignments and a dinner with all the trip participants. 

It was not the most beautiful day, but the White House was still impressive.

The next morning we had a meeting at the Universities Research Association's DC office to assemble the packets of information we were going to give to our offices and to do last minute coaching on "the message".  Then we were set loose on the capitol!  I went to approximately 10 offices over two and a half days including the three I was assigned to as a primary: Braley, Giffords and Pelosi.  I went along to the other seven to keep the conversation flowing and provide moral support for the person who had the primary assignment.

The office I enjoyed the most was Bruce Braley's, in part because my cousin Caitlin, his communication's director, made sure his legislative staff took care of me and took me to meet the congressman himself, which is rare.  The vibrant office was overflowing with people talking to each other in every available space.  Caitlin pulled us into the congressman's room to meet him.  He was very friendly, genuine and enthusiastic.  He was particularly concerned with physics education and how to get people interested in the subject, particularly in the rural areas of his district where the high schools may not be able to offer physics every year due to lack of demand.  He was interested to find out about ways that the excitement of research could be brought into the class room through communications technology.  I left with a very favorable impression and was happy to read this account of the health care wrangling which credited him with giving teeth to the reform.  The rest of his staff was excellent and asked that we keep them informed of any way they can help us, which is especially nice considering that there is no high energy physics being done in their district.

Perhaps the most interesting visit was with the staff member in charge of science policy for Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison.  Senator Hutchison was engaged in a vicious primary battle for the republican governor candidate in Texas.  It had devolved into a how-wacko-conservative-can-you-get fight and Hutchison was getting pummeled.  She is a strong supporter of science and the ranking republican on the senate committee for science funding and hence a very important person.  Her staffer really just wanted to vent for 45 minutes about how frustrated he was for his boss, both with the democrats for health care and with the conservative elements in his party for being wackos.  He obviously believed in her and was sad to see her get so demoralized, particularly because many of the hits she was taking were for earmarks, which she always viewed as the way she protects and takes care of Texas.  We briefly got around to discussing science, in which we learned that he was from Downer's Grove, a town near where I grew up, and that he had attended the Fermilab Saturday Morning physics as a high schooler, something that I participated in as well.  The physics didn't take with him, however, he ended up an economist.  At the end of the meeting he told us that if there was anything we saw in the budget once it got to their committee that we didn't like, to let him know because "they could take care of it".  

The group getting ready to take a photo on the capitol steps.

The Hutchison visit was in the Senate buildings which were much nicer than the House equivalent.  With granite and gilt in abundance, the place felt spacious and calm, or stagnant, depending on your opinion of the Senate.   The House offices, by contrast, were like a network of beehives.  With the exception of a few offices and corridors, the place hummed, nowhere more so than the underground cafeteria where we ate lunch most days.  The petitioners in town to visit their Representatives, along with the staff and quite a few military officers congregated in the crowded space while on break, lunch or in between visits.  Whenever I had time to kill between meetings I could find someone else from our trip waiting around.  

The last noteworthy visit was, of course, with Nancy Pelosi's office, which was in the capitol building itself.  My secondary and I walked through the security on the side door and requested our visitor's badges.  We then got directions on how to reach the Speaker's office and got lost within two minutes.  We got lost three more times before finding the elusive office, including going down one hall that we were quickly ushered out of by a man who looked like he was plainclothes security.  Finding the office was so tricky because the building is full of narrow corridors and hallways that appear to lead to nowhere.  When we finally found the non descript entrance to the Speaker's quarters we walked through a small doorway into a hall with large ceilings, many doors and a young man sitting behind a desk in the middle of the hall.  It felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland.

Another view of the capitol building.  No foaming-at-the-mouth crazy racists protesters that day.

The young man directed us into a narrow elevator and which took us to what must be the attic, judging by its decidedly not grandiose decor and short ceilings.  After waiting a while, the harried science policy staffer took us to a conference room to hear us out.  Well, sort of hear us out.  He explained at the beginning that Senator Bunning's obstructionism had turned the day upside down for various reasons and so to not be bothered if he checked his blackberry while we were talking.  I think he spend 50% of the time listening and 50% of the time blackberry-ing.  Nancy Pelosi is very strong on science and we did not need to convince him of the value of basic research.  So he uncritically nodded in agreement with everything we said and I spoke fast to get in all in before the end of what we knew would be a short meeting.  He did ask interested questions about the baguette LHC incident, which, incidentally, I heard was actually not due to an errant baguette dropping bird.  After fifteen or twenty minutes were were back down the elevator, past the young man at the desk and on our way out of the building.

A mock-up of Hubble and an afternoon snack.

Other highlights of the trip included visiting the American Indian Museum and the Air and Space museum, visiting the high security DOE offices outside of DC to report on our visits, having drinks with my cousin and spending more time with Clare.  All in all it was a good trip but I am holding my breath until the budget gets passed, which, given the pace of Washington these days, might take a long time.  It was enlightening to see the way the government works, and I am now sure more than ever I do not want a career related to politics. 

Me, a lobbyist? Not really. (Part 1)

Our nation's capitol on a brisk February evening

Washington has been in the news quite often these days.  First it was Snowmagedeon bringing the federal government to a halt, then it was Senator Bunning holding up unemployment benefits because he was jealous of all the attention lavished on the weather, and finally, finally, the House and Senate passed Health Care Reform (Whooohooo!!).  With all of that going on you may not have heard of my trip to DC as a representative of High Energy Physics (HEP), which was not quite as newsworthy as a retiring Senator's grand standing.

Last fall, through a poster session aimed at outreach, I won an all expenses paid trip to DC as a part of the USLHC Users Organization (USLUO, an organization representing the interests of US institutions involved with the LHC) annual advocacy visit to the capitol.  Once a year USLUO teams up with the user's organizations of SLAC and Fermilab to remind congress people why high energy physics is worth funding.  While our budget is dwarfed by spending on, say, defense, our annual appropriations of hundreds of millions of dollars requires justification.

I think I was subconsciously aiming for 5th grade girls.

Here is a full resolution pdf of the poster.

Justification was necessary more than ever this year because the President's budget had come out quite favorably for HEP.  Normally you would think that a strong HEP budget request from the President  would make convincing appropriators easier, and in a normal budget year it probably does.  But this year is not a normal budget year.  The President, bowing to deficit hawks, also included a cap on total discressionary domestic spending.  The physical sciences (HEP included) was one of the few areas which received funding increases and consequently became a big fat target because an increase for us meant a decrease for others.

The mood on the Hill, as they say, was very positive towards science.  In fact, it is one of the few surviving bipartisan sentiments.   Everyone understands that we need investment in science and technology to keep our economy strong, and a 2007 report warning of our decline in technological capabilities, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, was on people's minds.  The America COMPETES Act, a response to the report which sets a path to doubling the physical science budget by 2017, was up for reauthorization as well so we were urging congresspeople to support it.  Simply stated, our mission was to get across the message:  "Thanks for supporting us last year, please support us at the President's request level this year and please vote for the reauthorization of COMPETES!"

The visit spanned three days and mostly consisted of meetings with legislative staff in Congresspeople's offices.  A couple of months before the trip we were asked to list, in a very specific format, our connections to different legislative districts.  Personal connections, such as knowing someone in the Congressperson's office, were valued most highly, followed by being a constituent, being a former constituent, having family members as constituents, etc.  The lists were sent to a Fermilab organizer-physicist, who ran a perl script to divide up the congress people among the representatives of our three organizations (hence the specific format--imagine if it was written in python).  We were responsible for getting an appointment with our assigned offices and for being knowledgeable about the districts.  Being a newbie to the trip and having connections to the Chicago area and the Bay Area, the two areas where most of the trip participants live, I had only 3 primary assignments: Bruce Braley of Iowa, Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and our kick-*** Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.  My connections to the first two came through a cousin in the Braley office and a friend and former Berkeley grad student in the Giffords office.  The Pelosi connection derived from a member of my group at LBL who had met her before to talk about science (tenuous but no one else going on the trip had a better connection).

Preparations for the trip included weekly meetings with the SLAC group to go over relevant legislation and other details about the trip, a half day long meeting at FermiLab with perspectives from the SLAC and Fermilab directors and science lobbyists on the mood in Washington, and finally, business cards.  Yes, business cards.  Everyone in DC uses them.  At the beginning of every meeting we'd trade cards, my kinko's pseduo-cards for their official Senate or House ones.  I got a template from one of the other trip participants, printed them on cardstock at Kinko's, and cajoled Kyle into cutting them for me.

They didn't look too bad....but USLUO needs a new logo.

Cards in hand I was ready to fly out to DC.... Stay tuned for part 2, in which I describe my three days on the Hill playing dress-up/grown-up.

Milestones

In case you haven't heard, early on Friday morning the LHC reached an energy of 3.5 TeV per beam,   its target energy for 2010-2011.  They did not collide the beams, in fact they lost them five minutes after reaching the historic energy, however they achieved a big milestone in reaching that energy.  The first official collisions at 7 TeV are due March 30th, when CERN hosts another "media day" where they invite the press to witness the event.  I'm sure the beam operators agree with us experimentalists that its pretty ridiculous to specify a day for first collisions.  It's like prescheduling a press conference for the birth of a child.  Sure there is a due date, but when the big event will actually occur is hard to predict.  Unlike labor, however, the first collisions can be held up by the "powers that be" if they look like they are going to be ready ahead of time.

LHC operators on Friday morning.

 I got this from a cool CERN page of pictures about the 7 TeV beams.

  While I was not in the control room for the 7 TeV beams, I was around for a crucial precursor test on Thursday night.  The LHC installed a new quench protection system (QPS) in the wake of the 2008 accident, to prevent the disaster that gave us this year long delay from happening again.  A quench, as I've mentioned before, is when a superconducting magnet, which has no resistance in its superconducting state, develops a resistance and suddenly losses its superconductivity.  I'm not sure if it's the new part of the system, or the existing part, but the QPS is now too sensitive.  When the LHC is turning up the currents in the magnets to bring them to the needed strength for a 7 TeV beam, the little fluctuations in the current values are enough to set the QPS system off.  This is problematic because what the QPS actually does is induce a controlled quench, distributing the energy more evenly along the magnet system.  In the tests performed early this week many magnets were quenching due to the QPS which is dangerous for the machine because the released energy heats up the superfluid helium and the LHC cooling system can't handle many magnets quenching at once.  As a temporary solution the beam operators decided to ramp up the current 5x more slowly than they normally do.  They were testing this fix by ramping the current in the magnets without beams durning my Thursday shift.  If it worked then we could ignore the QPS problems and procede with the 7 TeV beams, if it didn't the LHC would have to order new hardware to fix the problem which would've meant another 1-2 month delay.  We all held our breath and watched the LHC current inch upward on the monitoring plots during the 75 min ramp.  It was quite exciting when they reached the necessary current, even though there were not any beams!

The other milestone which makes this post title plural, is that I am now a fully qualified pixel shifter.  This isn't a big deal, all it means is that I get to sit at the Pixel desk all by myself and do what the experts tell me to do.  But still, it is kinda neat because I've had very little contact with the actual detector since I joined the Berkeley ATLAS group.  When I was at Orsay I worked on pieces of the Liquid Argon calorimeter, but since then I have been exclusively working on software.  It is fun to sit in front of four monitors and run calibration scans or monitor the detector status.  I'm sure the novelty will wear off soon, most likely next week during one of my four morning shifts, but for now it is amusing.