Where’d You Get That Supercollider Shirt?

I was skimming an old review of the Coachella Festival today and I couldn’t help but notice that a singer from the band MGMT was wearing a Supercollider shirt on stage. The Superconducting Supercollider was a proposed hadron collider in Texas, and was cancelled after about a quarter of the the tunnels were dug due to US federal budget limitations. It would have been bigger than the LHC, explored higher energies, and been running by now, but so it goes. Construction started in ‘91 and terminated in ‘93, so that’s probably when the promo shirts were made. I’ve got one too, which I discovered in a box in the server room in at the Pheno Institute in Madison a few years ago. I keep it in a nitrogen vault to preserve it, and mostly only wear it to conferences. I’ve been debating scanning it and getting it reprinted or recreated, just ’cause its so ridiculously awesome.

Social Instability

When you work at an international lab, most of the people you meet and become friends with are only on a 1+1 or 2+1 postdoc, or need to go home every few months for exams, or are only out on a two week or two day assignment. People on permanent assignment also go to at least one conference each year. This does mean you get to meet lots of interesting people from interesting places, but also means your personal interactions also carry an explicit sense of instability. This is also true at any major university, but there’s sort of a communal experience via the academic year. Even though people make friends with students from different years, there are aways people with the same timescale as you. The instability is there, but there are enough people on the same schedule that I found it less isolating and unpredictable.

Here its a bit different, for better or worse. Students and postdocs normally arrive individually, adjust, work and leave on a schedule dictated by their particular institutions. When I first arrived I made a big effort to learn the language fast and make friends off site but, none the less, scientists who aren’t from this city still form the core of my friends. What’s kind of nice is that its like an extended vacation for many people. They come here with few or no local personal attachments or responsibilities, and view their time here both as a career opportunity and simply a great personal experience. Combine this with incessant welcoming parties, going away parties, housewarming parties, and someone-is-back-in-town-for-an-editorial-board-meeting-lets-get-battered parties, and you get a pretty good time. When I was still living at the university we had all these things, but they weren’t so frequent or uniformly spread in time. Then again, scheduling a regular card game or road trip on a weekend when everyone is in town is a bit tricky.

This week is an extreme example, but it gives you an idea. On Sunday, one friend got back in town for after being at her home univeristy for two months. She’ll only be here until the fall, I think. On Monday a friend I haven’t seen in a year came back for just two days to sit in on a meeting. Last night was the probably the last time I’ll play cards with two guys working on the ILC Alignment and Survey project, which recently lost its UK funding. Tonight I go see my a friend who used to be a postdoc for my group, who I haven’t seen since he moved to LHC business a year ago. Its great to see people graduating, getting new and exciting jobs and all, but its a bit sad at the same time. I also notice it when people ask how my thesis writing is going, and where I’m looking at postdocs.

Particle Flow Calorimetry

I took a break today from thesis writing to attend the weekly computing seminar, since it had calorimetry in the title, which should supposedly be one of my skills. The slides aren’t posted yet, but whenever they are you can find them here. Mark Thomson was the speaker, who also has a few papers out on the same subject on the web, this one seems to have the most overlap with the talk.

The idea goes a bit like this: If you want to test new physics at a collider, you need to measure collision products very carefully. Specifically, testing electroweak sector models (all this higgs hubub) requires identifying and differentiating Z and W bosons real well. Single production Z and W’s both decay in to quark-antiquark pairs. We can’t see quarks in detectors directly, but we observe sprays of particles called jets which have basically the same energy and direction, etc. So they want to measure jets real well at the proposed and under-development International Linear Collider (ILC), and the main technique to do this that they are trying to develop is called Particle Flow Calorimetry (PFC).