The big news today is that one of the biggest accelerators is shutting down after 28 years of excellent service. When SLAC closed down PEP-II, I wrote a tribute to the tune of American Pie (called “The Day the Mesons Died”) so it’s only fair that I do the same for Tevatron.
Although most of the time, Tevatron was an accelerator that always happened to be on the wrong side of the continent or the wrong side of the Atlantic, I did start my particle physics career with the help of CDF. I worked on Monte Carlo simulations, trying to find a strategy for measuring Bs oscillations. That’s where it all began, and for that I’m grateful.
So here we are, Tevatronic Rhapsody, (hastily written in the gaps between work) to the tune of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. If you really want to annoy your office mates, you can sing along with this backing track.
Tevatronic Rhapsody
Is this the data?
Is this Monte Carlo?
Caught in a meeting
No escape from the next slideshow
Open your eyes
Look up to the slides and see
Is that the top quark?
Is it the final piece?
Because it’s rarely come
Quickly go
Mass is high
Lifetime low
Any way it decays doesn’t really matter to me
(\ell b)Bs just flipped it quarks
Put an s where there was b
Now it violates CP
Bs, you were too heavy
But not for D0 and CDF!
Bs, ooooh
You decayed into hadrons
And showed us how to violate CP
With a phase, complex phase
Because antimatter mattersToo late, our time has come
No funding for the beams
No more events to be seen
Goodbye antiprotons
We’ve got to go
Got to analyze the data for resultsBs, oooh (any way the fit goes)
You went to two muons
More often than in the Standard Model
[Celebratory guitar riff]I see a little silhouette-o of a peak
Is it Higgs? Is it Higgs?!
Will we get a Nobel Prize?
ICHEP, Lepton-Photon,
Conferences they go onSet the limits! (Set the limits!) Set the limits! (Set the limits!) Set the limits! Make a plot!
Upload the taaaaalk!Here is a spectrum, with strange topology
It is a dijet, it’s an anomaly!
Technicolor, or a monstrosity?Heavy top, lighter top, is it CPT?
CPT? No! It violates Lorentz!
CPT?
CPT? No! It violates Lorentz!
CPT?
CPT? No! It violates Lorentz!
Violates Lorentz!
(CPT?)
Violates Lorentz!
(CPT?)
Violates Lorentz-enz-enz-enz!Oh bottom mesons, and charmed mesons, and baryons, we saw them!
The quark model had positions set aside for all, (except the X!)So you think you can stop us and turn off our beams?
So you think we won’t be publishing reams?
Oh, data
We’ve still got loads of data!
Just gotta publish
Just gotta analyze data[Time to rock out]
The universe, it matters, anyone can see
More than antimatters, to me
Have a great Friday! And congratulations to everyone who worked with Tevatron. Today is the end of a glorious era and A Job Well Done (as we Brits say).
