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!