Exciting week behind me. Just after coming from South Dakota we had my son’s 2nd birthday party followed by a frantic week of preparation for the conference in Reims, France and reports for the Double Chooz Collaboration meeting in Reims, too. The wonderful events that made me even busier are 2 graduate students and one undergraduate that would like to do research in the neutrino physics group. I was thrilled but it also took time to explain them their projects. Alex is an undergraduate looking for a senior thesis project and I had a right thing for him. He will evaluate light concentrators for the LBNE DUSEL, first by simulation and then by building a prototype and testing. He likes project a lot. I think this will be a lot of fun and timeline of October to June seems realistic. As for the other two, Frank likes the idea about building his own light ray tracing simulation for LBNE, while Ally will do some simple software analysis to get her started. We’ll see how it works.
So I was also preparing a talk for the LowNu meeting in France and was in terrible doubt how detailed introduction should I make since the speaker before me was speaking on closely related issue with geo-neutrinos. I ended simply asking him a day before the presentation, we sorted things out and voila – it worked like a charm for both of us. There was no repetition of facts.
As an exercise I calculated the geo-neutrino event rate for LBNE (part of my talk) if it was filled with liquid scintillator and the numbers are huge! Thousands of events per year as opposed to 75 for 4 years in KamLAND! I love big detectors. Although LBNE will probably never be a liquid scintillator detector it felt good to see such a high event rate. Well, if they put enough PMTs inside and add some gadolinium, anything is possible.
On another note, the meeting in Reims is just wonderful. I met some very interesting people working on Borexino experiment and SNO. We had a wonderful dinner in a vine cellar from nineteenth century with 18 km of tunnels filled with unbelievable number of champagne bottles. What a place! They gave us a tour of the vine cellar, explained how they make their exquisite champagne that they export in more than 50 countries and then fed us like kings. The champagne was amazing and they served us a couple of kinds with dinner.
As for the blog title, it is about choosing a new name for LBNE. Although some people think that Long baseline Neutrino Experiment is a perfectly good name, a number of people think we should find something more catchy. I happen to agree – while the name shouldn’t be cheesy or dull, LBNE is really a boring name. There is a bunch of alternatives at:
https://wiki.bnl.gov/dusel/index.php/Proposed_Names
People couldn’t decide at the meeting, so we will vote by email on the narrow choice of three most popular once.
I can’t wait to see the results. Some of the names are BISON, nuGOLD, ANNIE, HOME, CANON…
I will let you know in the few weeks.
Cheers.
Tomorrow we will start a Double Chooz meeting. Everyone is getting anxious for two reasons: we will get data within 6 moths from now and we are competing not with two other experiments. I have never been in the science “race” before. It is interesting.
