Vector Boson Fusion and You

In case you're interested in a widely disparate group of excitable yakkers, I urge you to check out a TEDx event taking place on June 10th here in New York, TEDxFultonStreet. In addition to beekeepers, fossil hunters, and Tibetan monks, the event will feature a talk by me, about particle physics experiments that search for something called a dark photon, and why its discovery would revolutionize our understanding of nature at the smallest scales, and how it has implications for physics at the largest scales, too.

For a very long time, I accepted the fact that, despite its being one of the three major international airports serving the metro area, getting to LaGuardia via public transit was invariably an insane, mind-numbing hassle of epic proportions.  Why should it take two hours of multiple subway transfers and an interminable, standing, over-crowded, jostle-ride on a wheeled nausea-buggy to get to LGA from lower Manhattan?

Now I just take a cab.

There was a Q&A after the screening of the new documentary, Particle Fever...

...at Film Forum, last Saturday.  That's me on the left.

The others on the panel, from left to right, are Savas Dimopolous, one of the main characters in the movie; Claudia Raschke-Robinson, cinematographer; Mark Levinson, director; and Kyle Cranmer, Professor of Physics here at NYU (and, incidentally, one of the main people in charge of the Higgs final results from ATLAS, the LHC experiment we both work on).  Being Film Forum, the questions mostly involved the filmmaking challenges faced by Mark and Claudia, but there were a few physics questions, too, that Savas, Kyle, and I got to comment upon.

My favorite thing about the event was the confluence of eminent particle physicists -- theorists and experimentalists -- from around the NY metro area who had somehow all descended upon this one screening.  Those I saw included the following, in random order:

1) Alberto Sirlin, Professor Emeritus at NYU, and responsible for some of the first calculations of electroweak radiative corrections, and without whom quite possibly none of the other physicists in the audience or film would be doing what we do.

2) Peter Steinberg, Brookhaven and ATLAS experimentalist who studies heavy ion collisions, researching phenomena like quark-gluon plasma.

3) Yuri Gershtein, Rutgers and CMS experimentalist, who just happened to be sitting next to me in the second row.

4) Rouven Essig, Stony Brook theorist and experimentalist, and one of the main people driving the interest in probing the dark sector via medium-energy fixed target experiments.

5) Rachel Rosen, theorist and Assistant Professor at Columbia.

Those are merely the ones I noticed.

I took some time away from paper writing last week to participate in an outreach opportunity at the opening of the STEME Education and Research Center, at NYU's Steinhardt School.  Our NYU experimental particle group has a big display that discusses the LHC and ATLAS, and essentially I help put it together and stand next to it, fielding questions about dark matter and antimatter and the Higgs boson.

And the Standard Model Lagrangian.

When I stand next to this part, comments usually take the form of a father bending down to his child and ribbing her or him (sometimes literally poking his physical elbow into the child's ribs) about, "How'd you like to solve that equation on your math homework, huh?  Huh?", followed by an eye roll and a legitimate question from the kid about what it is.

Several recent days have featured prominent chunks of ice floating on the East River.

I'd like to say that this has made it much more convenient to get to, say, Light Industry, but, alas, there's not quite enough ice to cross the river on foot.

For this reason (and not at all because this is the high season at the LHC for pushing papers out, which has taken every moment of my time, and rendered me completely ignorant of any cinema or music or pop-up antique knife shows I'd normally be aware of, helas pour moi), I've been stuck in the Villages, working on research, for weeks and weeks now.

And why did a svelte, possibly slightly intoxicated Russian woman in a top hat with "2014" scrawled on it try to spontaneously make out with me when I stepped out to go to a bodega?

Odd: I took a summer quantum mechanics class at Berkeley, while I was an undergrad at UCSC, and I think this is my first time up the hill at LBNL.  I ran into people I wasn't expecting to run into here, too, just like at SLAC.

This year I'm thankful for h1->GetXaxis()->SetLabelOffset(999), that my coffee and bagel places stayed open till 3, and for electroweak symmetry breaking.

I neglected to mention that another portion of our Higgs Nobel celebration included vigorous mountaineering.  I will let you guess as to what high-energy experimentalists talk about when they find themselves out of their offices and hiking to the top of the highest mountain in North Africa.

LUX results watching party at NYU. Modestly attended, no rumors heard, lots of introductory slides about the Sanford lab. Do all these things portend the discovery of dark matter? No clue.

While we wait, one of my favorite Lush songs.

Update: LUX does not see dark matter, and sets another strong exclusion.

They also do not see anything in the "favored regions" of previous experiments.

ATLAS name-checked in the Nobel Prize announcement, the importance of the Higgs mechanism acknowledged by the Swedes, and the collaboration Nobel celebration here in Marrakech completed, the only logical thing to do was to submit to rigorous instruction as to the variety and benefits of Moroccan spices at the local market.

The wide variety of spices promising to cure any and every possible ailment proved too much for me, and I ducked out early, to go search for local musicians or artisanal door makers.

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs, “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”.

There are a couple of us from NYU here at the ATLAS Week conference.  We were only two out of a collaboration of ~3000.  The whole room erupted into applause when the announcement was made.

Excellent.

The primary focus of my research, however, is the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, at CERN.  Every year a large gathering called ATLAS Week is held, often in interesting, non-Geneva cities like Copenhagen or Barcelona.  This year it's in Marrakech, and the proximity in time and space to the previous conference in Rome made it a good opportunity to join.

After meandering around Barcelona for seven hours with my backpack and my ATLAS Week poster rolled up in a plastic bag from the print shop in Rome (more about that later), I arrived late at night, paid too much to a taxi driver to take me to my hotel, and crashed asleep.

The next morning, a Moroccan sunrise greeted me and summoned me to the meeting with seductive promises.

"Get up, James.  Presentations about the Status of the Magnet and Cryogenics in LS1 and the Searches for Squarks and Gluinos await you.  And extremely sweet mint tea."

"No need to convince me, sunrise.  I understand."

The conference venue is the Hotel Kenzi Farah.

And after the first day of seductive talks about the top quark mass measurement, the allure of being tourists in yet another main market in a large city was too much, and before we knew it we were ATLAS physicists in the Jemaa el-Fnaa.

After still more mint tea on a terrace overlooking the market, it was time for the tourism to end.  Primarily because the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics was happening the next morning, and it essentially went without saying that we were all extremely anticipatory, given the fact that our collaboration and our compliment across the LHC, CMS, discovered the Higgs boson last year.

Time is an important parameter in particle physics, so this is best done in chronological order.

I left New York on September 28th, heading to Rome to give an invited talk about APEX, an experiment I work on that searches for something called an A' or dark photon at Jefferson Lab, in Virginia.  The conference was called MENU 2013, and it doesn't matter that it stands for MEson-NUcleon interactions, and the thing APEX looks for is a new vector gauge boson.  The facilities that predominantly do hadronic spectroscopy can be used for dark photon searches, too, so it's a good match.

I was at Heathrow for all of three hours, and Heathrow is a mall these days, so my London experience was perhaps not the highlight of this visit.

But Rome was full of colleagues and ancient buildings.  The conference was held at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, in the middle of central Rome, so it was impossible to avoid being a tourist on the walk from my hotel to the venue.

They allowed us roof access briefly, which allowed me to hang out with the Vatican in the distance.

And then I became tired of grumpy-faced auto-snapshots and sampled both the thriving local avant-garde hip-hop scene...

...and the typical Roman fare.

Note: Rome has a great craft beer scene.  I think this was a Brewfist X-Ray Imperial Porter.

When not wandering around on my own, I  spent a decent amount of time wandering around with Philip and Natalia while they continually tried and failed to locate a non-mediocre gelato.  I had one, too, and I must confess that I've had better back home in the Village.  But we were largely confined to the touristy areas, and didn't have much time to search far afield.