Milestones

Hello, all,

Many's the time in the last several months that I thought to post a new blog entry, but some reason or other prevented me, usually busyness, or a sense that blog writing was a luxury and a triviality I couldn't afford or countenance given the state of affairs personally or in the world.

Take recent events, for example. What's the point of blathering to you about the niggling details of my life when considering the images that are currently flooding our media (ai! the pun was not intended...); so my thinking went. Way too many other more important things to be engaging our attention in.

Apologies then, for breaking down, even while some of these current events are still unfolding. What shook me loose, you may ask. This last week saw the coincidence of two major milestones for the CMS collaboration: the restart of the LHC for 2011 running, and the release of a whole slew of new physics results from the dataset collected in 2010 for publication in journals and presentation at world conferences such as the one occurring now, in Moriond, Italy.

Well, perhaps not so much a "coincidence" as a triumph of careful planning; this was by design. While the LHC was down over the winter break hundreds of scientists and graduate students were laboring feverishly over "analysis notes" that they hoped would be approved for eventual publication and presentation within the time scale of months. In perhaps a month or two, once the LHC is running full tilt these results will become obsolete; we will have managed to collect in that brief period more data than all of last year.

I was (and still am) one such graduate student. We had hoped to have our results ready by early February to jump through the numerous review/approval hoops set up by the collaboration prior to Moriond. But it turned out not to be. Still we are working hard in the hopes that with the improvements we make in these last two months, we will find favor with the reviewers before the analysis passes its "freshness date." But regardless of whether we are approved, the analysis forms the basis for my dissertation, which is also being feverishly written in hopes of a successful completion by the end of this semester.

At the same time, our excellent adventure (bogus journey?) in Europe appears to be drawing to a close, since in anticipation of my imminent graduation I have managed over the break to secure a position as a postdoctoral researcher with another American institution still working on the CMS project. We expect to be moving back to the U.S. before year's end. Most of my readers will already know this, I just record it here for posterity.

Take care,
-PKBGD