A nice article on the changing of ATLAS leadership in the CERN Courier.   It really gives a sense of the sustained commitment that it has taken to make a huge project like ATLAS become a reality.

I am very proud to have helped the collaboration to construct ATLAS. Twenty years ago we could only imagine the experiment in our dreams and now it exists,” says Jenni. “I could lead the collaboration for so long because I was supported by very good ATLAS management teams where the right people, such as Fabiola Gianotti, Steinar Stapnes, Marzio Nessi and Markus Nordberg over the past five years, were in the right places.”

It’s also interesting to find out in the CERN courier that your own experiment is a lot larger than you might have realized (i.e. it’s officially 3000 people!  I can’t say I’ve ever met even a fraction of them myself…).

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President Obama addressed the National Academy this morning.  I missed the telecast but I’ve been reading the transcript.

Federal funding in the physical sciences as a portion of our gross domestic product has fallen by nearly half over the past quarter century…We double the budget of key agencies, including the National Science Foundation, a primary source of funding for academic research, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which supports a wide range of pursuits – from improving health information technology to measuring carbon pollution, from testing “smart grid” designs to developing advanced manufacturing processes. And my budget doubles funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science which builds and operates accelerators, colliders, supercomputers, high-energy light sources, and facilities for making nano-materials. Because we know that a nation’s potential for scientific discovery is defined by the tools it makes available to its researchers.

He also finally officially announced ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy.  And new commitment to improve science education. Exciting times in we are.  And not one to miss an opportunity, I bet he left a lot of the audience misty-eyed with this (worked on me):

At root, science forces us to reckon with the truth as best as we can ascertain it. Some truths fill us with awe. Others force us to question long held views. Science cannot answer every question; indeed, it seems at times the more we plumb the mysteries of the physical world, the more humble we must be. Science cannot supplant our ethics, our values, our principles, or our faith, but science can inform those things, and help put these values, these moral sentiments, that faith, to work – to feed a child, to heal the sick, to be good stewards of this earth.

We are reminded that with each new discovery and the new power it brings, comes new responsibility; that the fragility and the sheer specialness of life requires us to move past our differences, to address our common problems, to endure and continue humanity’s strivings for a better world.

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Only two weeks left until the end of the academic year! This is always a very busy period, which is my excuse for not writing anything recently. Very little academic business gets done around the university during the summer, so all sorts of things need to get wrapped up before we get to the end of the term, and there are always so many year-end events for our students too. And of course I still have my class to teach; this is going farily smoothly, but I will probably need every last minute in the next two weeks (or at least until I have prepared the final exam) to bring it to a happy ending.
As it happens, I also have a cluster of research-related travel right now — not helpful for getting my teaching done, but it gives me something to write about. I spent some of this week in San Diego, where those of us working on CMS software and computing gathered to discuss the state of the world. These meetings are more typically at CERN, but someone (I’m not even sure who, actually) came up with the brilliant idea of doing them next to an ocean this time instead. That’s great for me — not the ocean part, so much, but it’s always a challenge for me to get to CERN, what with the long distance and the fact that it’s hard to go for less than a week. For these meetings, I was able to teach on Tuesday morning and catch a flight here that night, and still attend most of the workshop.
As has been true for some time, the question we have been struggling with is are we ready for the start of the LHC, and if not what do we have to do to get there. I think that the greatest value of this meeting (heck, any meeting, I suppose) was to bring together groups of people who don’t usually talk. It turns out that there were cases of people working on different aspects of particular problems who had very different understandings of some of the issues. For instance, there was a dispute over whether “24 hours” actually meant 24 hours, or something more like 48 hours. And in some cases, one group of people didn’t know about work that another group was doing that could in fact be very useful to the first group. In short, there’s nothing like actually getting people in the same room to explain themselves to each other.
But once again, I was struck by just how complicated this experiment will be. The challenge from the computing perspective is how interconnected everything is. We want to make sure that a user can’t do anything that could essentially knock over a site (or possibly the whole distributed computing system) by accident. Certainly there were times in the meetings when someone would ask, “why do we have to make it so hard?” but honestly, sometimes it just is that hard.
Anyhow, next week I’ll be in Denver for the April general meeting of the American Physical Society. I’ll write about it then…much more physics content, I promise!

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Last night I was catching up on some of my favorite TV shows via the web and I came across this ‘Bones’ episode called ’The Science in the Physicist’ which caught my eye. It aired two weeks ago so it’s quite recent, and based on the title this was supposed to be fun. And, oh yeah, it was !!

The dead woman had worked in an elusive secretive high level physics lab on the discovery of the God particle, i.e. the Higgs, using the Large Hadron Collider. Hmm. In addition she was the editor of one of the major journal publications in science. The lab was headed by a blind, good-looking dude working on super-conductivity, and the other main characters worked on garnering energy from earth quakes and cutting edge radioactive dating techniques. So this apparently was your run-of-the-mill typical physics lab. Hmm. All the people were young and extremely good looking and swapped sexual favors at leisure. Exactly how I would describe the LHC or Brookhaven . The whole thing wouldn’t probably be worth mentioning if it weren’t for the extremely inventive ways how physicists kill each other. So she was working on destroying the earth via black hole generation, but that didn’t kill her. What did was that she refused to speed up the publication of an article in her journal. So the young and ambitious scientist decided to kill her by implanting highly radio-active material in her office chair. Hmm. That got things started, she developed a tumor at the right place in her body, but she didn’t die fast enough, and the publication date of the competition was looming. So he decided to kill her by ramming a pen in her throat (not very inventive), but in order to dispose of her body he freeze-dried her in liquid nitrogen and then blew her to bits and pieces by exposing the body in a high pressure vibration chamber (very inventive). The several thousand pieces of her body could then be neatly recycled in two standard garbage bags and only her engagement ring, made out of a piece of a meteorite that her physicist fiancee had discovered, gave away her identity. Hmm.

Oh my, that was quite a whirlwind tour through science, from the heavy metal geek students to the conspiracy loving black hole fanatic over LHC, Higgs, superconductivity, seismic oscillations, vibrations and radioactive dating. And all that in 60 minutes. Was it entertaining ? You bet ya ! But it also left that old feeling of consternation that for the general public there is actually no difference between a physics laboratory and a UFO convention. All these clichees were rolled up into this common approach of: we don’t understand what you’re doing, it might be cool, but we don’t care, and in the end you’re a bunch of freaks anyway. I always liked ‘Bones’ because it shows the nice dynamic interplay between science and a more hands-on societal approach, which is displayed in the interactions of the two main protagonists, she a scientist, he an FBI agent.  But this time they drove the ‘otherness’ of science to the breaking point and in my view made a little bit too much of a mockery out of serious science. 

I had a similar experience last week, right after the Quark Matter conference in Knoxville. Apparently the local TV station had sent over a camera team to catch the purpose and vibe of the meeting. Here is the clip, decide for yourself.

There is certainly an element of self-deprecating humor in our field. You won’t understand what we do, so we don’t even try and rather make fun of ourselves. On the other hand the reporter didn’t even try, and although ending the piece with a free-form rap from the wait stuff is funny and entertaining, they should have probably tried out our LHC rap instead.

In addition the LHC apparently  also made it into ‘South Park’ this week, when one of the parents stole a piece of the LHC to build a propulsion engine for a school race with toy cars. By accident he discovered a warp drive and was scolded by a bunch of aliens for it. Well, that’s funny, although I haven’t seen it yet.

With all this exposure some good might come out of our pop culture popularity, but we have to be careful and aware. And quite frankly I am not sure whether I should look forward to ‘Angels & Demons’ or not. We’ll see. Until then, nanu nanu.

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…taking a software-mandated ergonomic rest break while your code is recompiling anyway.

Ergonomic injuries — i.e. strain from typing, bad posture, etc. — are actually among the most common injuries for experimental particle physicists, because our jobs usually involve many hours a day sitting in front of a computer. My lab takes such injuries extremely seriously, which is why I have software to remind me to take a break and stretch every so often. It may sound silly at first, but the advice of my colleagues who have been in the field longer is that ergonomic concerns are quite real, and that it’s worth taking whatever steps are necessary to avoid them. (And that’s why, although I might not get paid much, at least I have a nice chair.) So I almost always follow my ergonomic software’s advice to the letter — I even took an extra few seconds’ break to make up for any strain I might have incurred while taking this picture!

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April Fools’ Day is over, but I’m still not that into the Higgs Boson. There are two reasons for this, one that is particular to me and where I am in my career, and the other more general.

The reason particular to me is that I’m already a fifth year graduate student, and finding the Higgs will take a long time — likely at least a couple of years of running at design luminosity, which will take a while to reach. (Luminosity is a way of measuring how quickly the acclerator is producing collisions.) So no matter how enthusiastic I were about the Higgs boson, it wouldn’t be a good project for me to take on right now; I need a project that I can do with the first year of data, because even then I’ll be taking longer-than-average to graduate.

But the Higgs isn’t my first choice for something to work on later, either, because just finding the Standard Model Higgs Boson won’t be as exciting as it sounds. We know the Higgs Mechanism is real: it relates the masses and interactions of the W and Z bosons to each other, and works extremely well. What we don’t know is what’s really behind that mechanism. The simplest possibility is the Standard Model Higgs field, with one Higgs boson. The next simplest possibility would be a Higgs doublet model, which is the minimum required by Supersymmetry and leads to 5 Higgs particles. (Why five? Well, it’s complicated, but here’s a numerological hint: 4 – 3 = 1 and 2*4 – 3 = 5. Basically, the Higgs field comes with four “degrees of freedom” at a time, but three of them are “eaten” by the W⁺, W^-, and Z bosons to make them massive. Then the remaining one(s) become physical Higgs particles. I know it sounds completely crazy, but it’s more or less what the math says.) The Higgs field also might be a composite of some very massive fermions, and only look like the Standard Model at low energies. But anyway, the point is this: if the Higgs boson isn’t the Standard Model version, then there will be other exciting new particles to search for as well. But if it is the Standard Model version, finding it will be more like meeting an old friend than discovering a new particle: we know everything about it already, except its mass.

So personally, I’d rather go straight to searching for new particles, and skip the Higgs entirely.

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One of the best things about being at CERN is that you often get to attend interesting events like seminars that happen here all the time. Most of the prominent scientists in high-energy physics speak here at some point, and hearing them explain their ideas first hand is better than only reading their published papers. Also, CERN often hosts events like the one I attended yesterday, a birthday party for the nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia (the video and talks are linked to from this page).
There were interesting historical talks by many of the key players from CERN’s past. Parallels between the start-up of the SPS collider where the W and Z bosons were discovered in the early 1980’s and the LHC were drawn as several speakers drew a line from the work Prof. Rubbia did in accelerator physics decades ago to the LHC that is going to start operations later this year.
Carlo Rubbia is a legendary figure in the field, and many of the people yesterday emphasized how his intelligence and knowledge combined with his forcefulness to get projects done, even when many outsiders were skeptical they could be made to work.

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It may be cheating, but sometimes I have to go no further than the US/LHC front page to find something to blog about.  This morning, this “headline” from Scientific American blogger John Matson caught my eye:

• Did an undergrad spot a bug that the pros missed?

Reading the entry and the original Princetonian article, it turns out that Princeton undergraduate Xiaohang Quan found a bug in the CMS software for reconstructing the particles that come out of a proton-proton collision inside the detector.  (Reconstruction is the process of interpreting the singals from the detector as particles.  For example, an electron is identified when a charged track matches up with energy deposited in the electromagnetic calorimeter, a photon is identified when energy is deposited but no track matches, and so on.  This picture helps.)  My first reaction was that this isn’t news at all: if CMS software is anything like the software on ATLAS, then bugs are found in it all the time!

The software for our experiments is extremely complicated, trying to do myriad things at once, and it has (at a conservative guess) several hundred people working actively on it at the same time.  All of them are adding features — for example, new and better ways to look for particles — and changing things around, which introduces a constant stream of incompatibilities and bugs.   So we constantly have major glitches; then we (constantly) find them, and (constantly) create more.   Very few of us are really “pros”; we’re physicists, not computer programmers, and it shows when you look at our code and how it’s organized.

And many of our collaborators are undergraduates, and they aren’t just working with us in order to “gain experience.”  They are, and are expected to be, serious contributors to the overall experiment.  They generally don’t take on extremely long-term or full-time projects, but they test equipment, investigate ways to explore new physics, and give talks in meetings.  And yes, they introduce bugs in the software, and find them too — just as do graduate students, postdocs, and professors.

In short, Quan’s achievements don’t somehow imply that the rest of CMS was asleep at the wheel — they show that we all work together, and that every collaborator counts.

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cavern!

Ok, forget the song business, noone is apparently that interested, but there was some dancing going on, notable for the locale: the CMS cavern, rather than the quality of  the participants.   Perhaps we all better stick to our day jobs.

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Well, now that it has been demonstrated that the Higgs Boson cannot exist, I might as well just go home and take the rest of the day off.  Maybe I’ll flip through the newspaper and see if there are any promising jobs in the financial sector.

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