The end of the year...much more snow in real life!
2009 has been a spectacular year for me and for the world of physics! My time spent thus far at Fermilab has been amazing. I’ve gotten to become an “ACE” on the experiment CDF (Collider Detection at Fermilab), am putting the final push into a spectacular analysis that promises to be my thesis (a Search for Gauge Mediated Supersymmetry), have gotten to be at the U.S.’s beating heart of particle physics during the exciting start-up the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), and got engaged to a wonderful and supportive woman!! (Please note that these are not listed in any sort of order of importance…)
As I look forward to the upcoming year and wish all of my friends and colleagues in the field a Happy Holidays I become very excited at what results we will have in hand in the coming year.
For myself and my group at Texas A&M we have been hunting down the many challenges of doing a delayed photon search at CDF. With many many hours spent pouring over plots, code, bugs and results we are always moving closer to being able to go to full analysis and potentially end my time as a graduate student. This alone is enough to be excited about and I can’t wait to share our results (once we have them and get them blessed) with the rest of the physics world.
With the Tevatron humming along as good as ever delivering some of the highest quality particle physics data to be had we are sure to have lots of good events for our hunting. As recently posted on the Tevatron’s facebook (via Ron Moore, another quantum diary blogger)
Store 7444 colliding with initial luminosity = 306 ub^-1/s! Finally – first time over 300 since the summer shutdown!
and
The Tevatron delivered 51.3 pb^-1 to the experiments over the past week with 137.5 hrs of collisions.
With messages like these coming to my Facebook account I have a lot to be excited about right here at the Tevatron.
But even more so we saw some amazing things come out from the world of particle physics and dark matter detection in 2009 that make me look forward to 2010 even more.
Result recently presented by Lauren Hsu at Fermilab on behalf of CDMS showing tantilizing possibility of the detection of Dark Matter
As the image here shows the CDMS collaboration (of which Texas A&M is a member of) just showed their latest results for runs taken over the last year.
For those of you who don’t know CDMS is a direct dark matter detection experiment that uses really sensitive equipment deep in the bottom of a mine to shield itself from outside sources to search for dark matter interactions.
As Lauren Hsu put it at the Fermilab colloquium, they are at the “Low Background Frontier”. Their results showed two observed events with an estimated background of 0.8 events. Now this isn’t enough to call it finding anything…but it is tantalizing. And as my friend Homer said, “you could sneeze those other two events into the signal region…”
However you choose to look at their results it is enough to keep you on the edge of your seat for what is coming in 2010.
So as not to overstate the obvious, we also have the LHC coming online in 2009 and looking to ramp up their activity in 2010. With the world’s highest energy collisions soon to come quickly in the early months of next year we will quickly have all kinds of things to analyze and discuss.
So in closing I want to wish everyone a safe and happy holidays and and am looking forward to a very good new year! Cheers!
Maybe there are some new particles in ol' Santa's bag for all of us
