Crazy Physics Nerd

National Lab Users' Trip to DC

2010-02-28T18:34:00.000-06:00

The months since my last posting have certainly been busy. In December we had the first record-breaking energy collisions at the LHC. I spent much of the month on shift at the ATLAS trigger desk, helping to make sure the data-taking infrastructure ran smoothly. It was an exciting time to be there. Although none of my shifts included the record-breaking 2.36 TeV collisions, I was there for a good bit of 900-GeV data. It was the culmination of 20 years of research, development, engineering, construction, and countless man-hours of work. And it all ran. Pretty darn smoothly. This week things are starting up again. We hope to run for two years at 7 TeV, possibly yielding new surprises about fundamental interactions of matter.

What occupied much of my time for the following couple of months began in the ATLAS control room. While on shift next to my friend and colleague, Steve, I mentioned my interest in the annual trip to Washington DC by a joint group of physicists from the Fermilab Users Executive Committee, the US LHC Users Organization, and the SLAC Users Organization. Turns out I'm still a member of the latter (at the very least, until my BaBar membership expires). Steve organized the SLAC contingent for two (or more?) years. Now that he's being all professorial, he passed on the reins to another SLAC colleague (from the EXO experiment). As we were talking, Steve asked if I'd like him to put me in contact with the new organizer to see if I might go this year. I figured it was about time for me to stop saying I wanted to go and actually get on with it.

A group of nine of us with the SLUO started preparing for the trip after the administration's budget request became available. The request included a 6.8% increase for the Department of Energy and an 8.0% increase for the National Science Foundation. These requests reflect the administrations continuing commitment to research and development, which are seen as drivers innovation and the economy, contributing to our country's long-term competitiveness. Inside those requests, the DOE's Office of Science has a 4.4% increase, including a 2.3% bump for High Energy Physics, while the NSF's increase allots a 2.8% increase to its Physics program.

Our message to Congress this year was simple: this budget is good for high energy physics. Please continue to support it. We understand that during a tough economy, when the president has asked for a freeze on discretionary spending, any increase in our programs comes from a decrease in other programs. Our goal was to convince the appropriators in Congress that the benefits of our field are worth the investment.

My own personal take on it goes something like this: The goal of our research is to understand and explain the universe. New discoveries of types of matter and of fundamental interactions represent game-changers. They allow us to see the world in a clearer way than before. That sort of paradigm shift leads to innovation. We've seen it with Newtonian Mechanics, with General Relativity, and with Quantum Mechanics. Virtually everything driving our way of life is based on these ways of understanding the universe. And they all originated in basic research. Now, this is the long-term view. 50 years, 100 years down the line, maybe someone will find a use for top quarks, or for CP-violating neutrino processes (should they exist). Still, there are short-term benefits as well. The devices we build to do our fundamental research typically can be used for other purposes. Particle accelerators are used for cancer treatments. Powerful x-ray sources can image the AIDS virus and have led to new drugs. The superconducting wire in Fermilab's Tevatron magnets ended up being useful to make office-sized MRI machines. Even if the applications of our main research goals are decades away (which will eventually drive innovation), the technology we need to create to go about our work drives innovation today.

So, how do we prepare for the trip? We begin by making a list of Senators and Representatives whom we have some sort of connection with: we live or work in their district, we were educated there, we have immediate family there. Once everyone's list (including the type of connection) is ready, they're all fed into some sort of perl script that spits out assignments. People typically get 5-10 so-called primary assignments whom they are responsible for contacting and scheduling meetings. While that process is going on, the group works on role-playing to get people comfortable with the visits. We also get our information packets together, which include our one-page "ask", and some supplemental information about the benefits of our work to society.

After weeks of preparation and scheduling meetings, the trip was from Feb. 24th - 26th. Based on people's primary appointment meeting times, secondary people were assigned to most meetings when they happened to be free. The offices I was able to book primary appointments with were: Senator Scott Brown (MA), Rep Jack Kingston (GA-01), Rep Ed Markey (MA-07), Rep Chris Murphy (CT-05), Rep Sanford D Bishop (GA-02), and Rep Norm Dicks (WA-06). All of my visits were with staffers rather than the Members of Congress themselves.

The people I met with showed a range of reactions: interested, distracted, helpful, bored, enthusiastic. There were commonalities though. There was universal agreement that basic science research needs to be done. Members of Congress are concerned with keeping America competitive as countries like China and India ramp up their research programs, and European countries continue to improve their own. Congress likes that we do outreach and wants to see more of it. I don't think they could get enough. They were impressed that Quarknet will allow students to analyze real data from the LHC. They are very interested in hearing that particle accelerators are used for cancer treatments, and that we can use them to help biologists develop drugs. In our packets we included information on how the tools of particle physics can help clean air and water, and how they can treat rubber used in tires to cut down on waste. We can treat nuclear waste to fix some of the problems associated with building nuclear reactors for power. Everyone I talked to was interested in hearing about these near-term benefits of particle physics. Anything to give them something they can take back to their constituents.

My warmest reception was from the office of Chris Murphy, who represents the district where I grew up, and where my parents still live. Now, some of it may just be that they were happy to see a success story from their region (in which I attended a public school that more than prepared me for college). Still, it couldn't be just that. I walked into the office and was met with, "Oh, you're the particle physicist!" Although the Congressman himself was busy, I was able to meet with his Chief of Staff and a couple of other people who seemed to be in the room just because they wanted to hear about physics. Apparently the scheduler had hyped my visit around the office. So we sat down, and the guy we were talking to wanted to know what I work on. He had heard of the LHC, so I told him that I'm working on ATLAS, which is usually about as much detail as people are looking for. But not this guy. He wanted to know specifically what I do. So I told him about the trigger system! I talked about being on trigger shifts in December during the LHC restart. My colleague talked about his work on Higgs searches at CDF. Although the conversation had to end due to another meeting that came up (this was on the 25th, the day of Obama's health summit), the woman who showed us out still managed to slip in a couple of questions about time travel in general and time-traveling Higgs bosons in particular. I'm told I was the envy of my peers for such a great visit.

It was a great experience overall. Even the conservative, small-government offices that had not supported our budgets in the past were receptive to what we had to say. Time will tell how much impact we have had, as Dear Colleague letters are circulated and votes are tabulated. Of course, we'll be watching. And hopefully next year we'll be back to thank them for their support.

Exciting times!

2009-12-06T03:31:00.003-06:00

The last two months have been busy (which I guess is par for the course in this field). We've been getting all of our simulated data samples ready for the trigger upgrade work, which has taken an obscene amount of computing power. At the moment my own involvement in that has been shifted to slightly lower priority as I'm now at CERN for a month of shifts.

I got in on Tuesday and I have not stopped running into people I know from BaBar. We're everywhere! I took a practice shift (data acquisition - DAQ - desk) last night, with both the shift leader and run control desks manned by ex-BaBarians (now Atlanteans, Steve?). I realized yet again how much I love being on shift. It's doing the work that the rest of the collaboration depends upon. DAQ desk is responsible for making sure the framework for taking data is running smoothly, all the way from the level 1 trigger until the data are shipped away from Point 1 to permanent storage. If any step in this chain is broken, we drop physics on the floor.

I started my practice shift hoping to see the first stable collision data, but unfortunately I was a couple shifts off. As of 7am CERN time today we got the first 4-bunch on 4-bunch proton collisions at injection energy. As far as I know, the plan this evening will be to collect as much collision data as possible, so my second practice shift tonight could be much more interesting than last night. Hopefully they'll just leave it alone and let the collider and detectors do what they were desiged to do! If this keeps up, my real shifts starting on Tuesday could be very interesting. If I'm lucky, I'll be one of the first to see the world's highest-energy, man-made collisions.

2009 Nobel Prize in Physics!

2009-10-06T20:11:00.000-05:00

Heard the news on NPR while doing my morning jog. This year the Nobel prize in Physics went to three Americans (we're 2 for 2 so far!) who worked on light-related technologies: fiber optics (Charles K. Kao) and charge-coupled devices (Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith). It's a nice demonstration of how both classical and quantum ideas continue to bring about huge changes in our daily lives. I also like how it contrasts with last year's Physics prize, which went to three Japanese physicists whose work directly impacts mine, but for which any applications are still a long way off. This year's prize gives a more tangible demonstration of how basic research can lead to world-changing technologies.

The principle behind fiber optics is based on the way light behaves when it moves from one medium to another -- an example we're all familiar with is from air to water. Put an object halfway in water, and you can see that the light is being bent. Turns out that if light is moving from an medium with a higher index of refraction (water) to one with a lower index (air), when the angle of the light hitting the boundary is large enough, the light gets bent back in to the medium instead of going through. This is total internal reflection, and it was studied in detail beginning in the mid-1800's. According to the scientific background for this year's prize, by the 1920's people were studying the idea of passing light along small glass rods such that the light is kept inside by total internal reflection. Problems arose when trying to pass visible light through the fibers: the light quickly grew weaker (attenuated) as it traveled along the fiber. What Kao brought to the game was detailed investigation of why the light was attenuating. Turns out, it was primarily due the light interacting with impurities (mainly iron) in the fiber, rather than attenuation due to the fiber itself. Kao suggested using fused silica as a fiber material that would be relatively free of impurities. Eventually, this turned out to be something that could be manufactured on a large scale. Today, much of our communication infrastructure (phone, cable, internet) runs through fiber optic cables.

The other half of the prize also led to devices we use all the time: digital cameras. However, the idea behind the charged-coupled device is fundamentally different from the idea behind fiber optics. While total internal reflection could be explained by the classical physics of the 19th century, it would take quantum physics to deal with what's known as the photoelectric effect. When you shine light on an object, it's possible the light can be absorbed with the result that the object kicks out electrons. When this was first studied around the turn of the 19th-20th century, people expected that if you shined more intense light (more energy per unit area at the surface), the electrons would get more energetic. What actually happened was that you could kick out more electrons, but they weren't any more energetic. Rather, the color of the light controlled the electron energy -- higher frequency light led to more energetic electrons. The eventual quantum explanation for this was that light was made of individual particles -- photons -- that each could interact with exactly one electron. So, the intensity (number of photons) didn't affect the energy of the electrons. By the way, Einstein came up with this explanation in 1905 and got the Nobel Prize for it in 1921.

Whew, meant for this and the above to be a single paragraph. So -- how do we go from the photoelectric effect to digital cameras? Once you have light kicking around electrons, you've got the start of an electronic signal. By the late 1960's, work on semiconductors was really coming along. Apparently Boyle and Smith at Bell Labs were charged with coming up with a more efficent way to transport electronic signals through semiconductors, primarily for computer memory. However, because of the photoelectric effect, the same efficient transfer of signals could be used to read out a grid of semiconductor pixels exposed to light. The number of electrons created in the semiconductor is directly proportional to the number of photons hitting it. Once you can move and store this information, you can reconstruct the image that was projected onto the grid. This so-called charged-coupled device (CCD) was conceived in 1970 and now forms the basis of modern imaging technology, including digital cameras, medical imaging equipment, the Hubble telescope, and detectors used in particle physics experiments. It's a really nice demonstration of how basic research in the very early 1900's helped lead to an application almost 70 years later that really was a game-changer. This is how fundamental science research can pay off.

So, congratulations to Kao, Boyle, and Smith!

Mandatory Binding Arbitration

2009-09-13T17:17:00.004-05:00

You know what really boils my soup: mandatory binding arbitration. It's something I first noticed about 4 years ago in my cell phone bill. Well now everyone's doing it. Check your contracts for a little clause that says if there are any disputes, you agree not to sue the company. Rather, you will abide by the decision of an arbitrator outside the court, and that is your only remedy. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if everyone weren't doing it. As it stands, I can't just turn down a contract with one company and go to another because no other such company exists for most services. (Dish Network may be one decent alternative to cable -- I have to check a bit more into that.) This group seems to be doing some good work, and they have updates on current legislation. I was glad to see that one of my senators, Durbin, was a co-sponsor of the Senate bill. I contacted my representatives along with the House and Senate committees on the judiciary, urging them to support the bills. Here's what I wrote them:

Dear [_____],

I am writing to urge you to support the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2009 (S. 931 / H. R. 1020), which is currently with the Committee on the Judiciary. This is an important piece of legislation to protect consumers, who do not have the leverage to negotiate a contract without a clause for mandatory binding arbitration with large companies.

Most of the companies with which I have contracts require arbitration to settle disputes. This includes my bank, my credit card, mobile phone service, and cable/internet service. If there were other companies offering similar services without mandatory binding arbitration, I would have a choice to use them; unfortunately I do not. To use mobile phone service as an example, four of the major providers – Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile – all require binding arbitration as part of their terms of service. Similarly, I have cable and internet service with Comcast. Both Comcast and DirecTV require arbitration in their contracts. With so many major companies requiring binding arbitration, as a consumer I have no real choice in the matter.

Please support the Arbitration Fairness Act as it moves through the committee, and vote in favor of passing it.

Sincerely,

Dr. Joseph Tuggle

Out of the blue and into the black

2009-09-11T17:30:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I forget that with the LHC, we're on the verge of what are likely to be the most exciting physics discoveries of my lifetime. In my day-to-day life it's easy to get caught up in the details of working on simulations, reading papers in which the Standard Model wins again and again, listening to talks about the discovery potential of the LHC. We've dealt with repeated delays after coming tantalizingly close to collisions last year. Granted, these startup problems are about par for the course, but I - and probably many of my colleagues - have been plodding along, in a sense, forgetting that incredible discoveries could be right around the corner.

Maybe it's just because I'm going through it personally with this new generation of experiments, but I feel like this time it's different. For me, the last really new discovery was of the tau lepton in 1974. It ushered in experimental evidence of a third generation of fundamental particles. After that, there was a spot in the table of particles for b quarks (1977), t quarks (1995), and tau neutrinos (2000). Looking back on it, to me it seems that not only were people reasonably sure these other third generation particles existed, but also we knew something about their properties. The Higgs seems different to me. We know something like the Standard Model Higgs exists, but we don't believe it's the end of the story.

If you think of the Standard Model as an arch built of stone, the Higgs is the keystone that holds it together. The "Standard Model Higgs" is the plainest-possible, most utilitarian keystone that will hold the arch together. We know it's there, but we don't know what else might go along with it. Maybe it's a fancier keystone with gold trim, or made of marble, or something we haven't thought of. It feels very much unknown and alien to me, like we're about to fly out of the blue and into the black. And maybe it's because that part of the future feels so unreal to me that I tend to ignore it. I move along as if things will continue the way they have been. My mind doesn't believe that, but my heart seems to.

Halfway decent customer service

2009-08-30T16:10:00.002-05:00

The last couple of times I've had to deal with customer service, they've been surprisingly good. Recently I talked to people at T-Mobile and at Comcast; both had accents so I suspect the call centers had been outsourced. Still, they were exceedingly more polite than any American-accented representatives I've dealt with in the recent past. Almost (but not quite) annoyingly so. The gentleman at Comcast seemed downright horrified when I told him our cable had been out for over 24 hours. Maybe it's his training, or maybe it's the culture, or even just overcompensating for not quite knowing the right words, but it sounded heartfelt. I wanted to tell him, "Dude, it's ok. It's just cable. I do have other things to keep me occupied." He immediately credited my account for two days without my asking, also a plus. So, Comcast, even though I still think you're a bunch of monopolistic bastards, nice job on the call center. But not cool for disconnecting my cable when my neighbors moved.

Taking Stock

2009-08-20T17:36:00.002-05:00

Well, here I am, nearly 8 months into my first real job as a postdoc. After a bit of a blog hiatus (let's call it a summer break), it seems like a good time to take stock of how things are shaping up.

We hope to have data for my experiment, ATLAS, starting sometime late this year. What have I been up to? Working on an improvement to the system that tells ATLAS when to record data. We're supposed to have potentially 40 million collisions per second, and we can only write a couple hundred of them to disk. So, we had better make them interesting. My piece in all of this is to help design a system that incorporates information from the flight paths of charged particles
(muons, pions, electrons and the like) into the decision. Months ago I promised an entry on how that works, so I'll have to deliver on that soon.

By this time I had hoped to have a clearer idea on what kind of physics topic I'd like to study once the data start rolling in. The LHC is going to be a top quark factory, producing up to tens of millions per year, so that seems like a good place to start. Of allthe particles we know, the top interacts most strongly with the Higgs (or whatever it is that generates particle masses). Also, every subsystem of the ATLAS detector is required to detect the top, so it's a good way to learn a bit about everything on the detector side. Still, there are a lot of subtopics that one can study in top physics. I'll be trying to narrow that down in the few months I have before we get data.

Life in Chicago is good. Out of all the cities I've lived near, it may be my favorite (though DC and Boston are close behind). The winter was damn cold, but this summer has been cool and mild, in comparison to the usual heat and humidity. I'd better enjoy it while I can -- I've
heard things over in Geneva are not usually so nice. Olivia and I started off the summer with the Chicago Blues festival, had some amazing food at the Taste of Chicago, and caught the fireworks on the 4th by going down to Promontory Point at the end of our road. We've still got several more museums to explore, not to mention day trips to Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan to pull off before we head on over to Switzerland. At this point, I imagine the move will happen sometime in spring or early summer next year, depending on how the LHC startup goes.

Fermi is everywhere

2009-05-14T19:54:00.004-05:00

As much as some scientists try to distance themselves from religion, it's kind of funny that physicists have their own form of patron saints. These are scientists who did so much for the field, they've become icons: Newton, Einstein, Feynman, and so on. Lately I've become very aware of another "patron saint" of high energy physics, Enrico Fermi. I'm surrounded by references to him! I work at the Enrico Fermi Institute, his portrait looks over the room during our seminars, and across the building from us is the site of Chicago Pile 1, where the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction took place. Hell, I walk by Fermi's Chicago home (5537 S Woodlawn) every day on my way to work! His name shows up all over the place, from measuring atomic nuclei in fermis (10^-15 meters), to the weak interaction's Fermi constant, to the Fermi satellite (nee GLAST) measuring the highest-energy photons the universe has to offer. I'm 50 miles down the road from Fermilab. Students of quantum mechanics learn Fermi's Golden Rule to calculate energy transition rates in the presence of small perturbations to a system. And I almost forgot about fermions!! Just to rattle off a few more I've heard, we've got Fermi liquids, Fermi surfaces, and Fermi-Dirac statistics. Wikipedia can fill you in on the rest. Now, if that's not indicative of a patron saint, I don't know what is.

Neat, a conference invitation!

2009-03-12T19:24:00.002-05:00

Oh wait... it's from this guy. Ah, yes, the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. Where have I heard that before...? Right! That was the conference that accepted a paper written by jargon-generating program. Sorry Prof. Callaos, I'll be taking my jargony papers elsewhere.

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds

2009-03-09T19:05:00.005-05:00

Had an interesting experience at our lunch seminar today. John Coster-Mullen gave a talk on historical physics research that he's been doing for the last decade and a half or so. He had originally gone to school for physics, but decided not to finish, and along the way ended up driving trucks. Somewhere in all this, he got interested in the Fat Man and Little Boy, the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Apparently in the 70's, many documents related to the design of these bombs were declassified, although the precise specifications are still not public. Mr. C-M combed through thousands of declassified documents and conducted face-to-face interviews with the aim of reverse-engineering the design of the weapons. He has self-published his work in a book. From what I understand, the designs he has come up with differ in significant ways from some conventially-known details in these circles. He claims that controversial details of his designs have been (unofficially) confirmed by people who were involved in the creation of these weapons.

I particularly liked the many pictures that were shown during the presentation. As I looked at the bombs and absorbed the details of how they were designed, I started getting a bit emotional. There was so much thought and effort put into these weapons, so many man-hours with the aim of destroying so much human life. So much physics, such as how to turn the separate expanding spherical waves of the Fat Man's detonators into a unified inward-moving shock wave to implode and compress the terrible core of plutonium. The way these men must have thought about physics must feel very different from my experience. I hope it did, at least.

The discussion ended with the message that by now, the design of nuclear weapons is not the major hurdle for someone who wants to use them. The only barrier standing between humanity and this kind of destruction is the difficulty of getting the necessary material. There was concern expressed over the lack of funding for programs dedicated to keeping fissile material away from the bad guys. I wonder if the non-proliferation groups might hire a high-energy physicist...

I love Google Calculator

2009-02-20T13:40:00.003-06:00

I wanted to find out the minimum transverse momentum for a track traversing the silicon in ATLAS, and discovered that Google Calculator was my new best friend:

elementary charge * 2 T * 520 mm in MeV/c = 311.784156 MeV / c

EDIT (Feb-25-2009): Google Calculator doesn't protect you from making an idiot of yourself. For example, using centimeters instead of millimeters (WHY is mm the standard in ATLAS?). Anywho, I've fixed the Google Calculator thinger above. I was off by a factor of 10.

Finding a niche

2009-02-18T17:49:00.002-06:00

It's a weird position, just starting new on an experiment. Especially when that experiment itself is new. I've only been on the job a month, so I suppose what I'm feeling is to be expected. The biggest thing is that I feel isolated. Of course this is true geographically, since Chicago is nowhere near Geneva. They're having an ATLAS week over there, so I'm catching up on the daily presentations (several of which are given by former BaBar members). It's got me wondering how well-connected others in my position feel after 6 months or a year on the job.

I have no idea yet what type of physics I'll be working on. Even though we won't get data until autumn at the earliest, I feel like I should start laying the groundwork for an analysis. With 2000 people on the experiment, it's hard to find a place to fit in, to find some interesting yet uncovered experimental signature to use for my own work. Tomorrow I'll start going over the presentations from the heads of the various physics groups to look for those all-important words... "manpower needed."

Quick one today

2009-02-16T07:19:00.001-06:00

NPR interviewed an reporter on economics, who suggests that the current stimulus won't do much to help us get back on track. The good news? When asked at the end where we should put our money, he points to science. Ok actually he points to medical research, but if you clip out the word "medical" from what he says, the statement is really applicable to all types of science.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100746977

Let's wait and see...

2009-02-10T09:20:00.005-06:00

Perhaps I spoke too soon. The American Institute of Physics has put out a summary of the Senate version of the stimulus bill. It's a nice comparison of the differences from the House version, as they relate to science. The Senate version appears to contain about half the funding for the NSF as the House, but considering this isn't our usual source of funding, that's not bad at all. The Senate version is very vague, including "$1 billion to help America compete globally". I guess that's good? The DOE Office of Science is allocated significantly less money by the Senate, going from $2 billion down to $330 million for just laboratory infrastructure and construction. Again, since it's not our usual source, I don't see a huge problem on the surface of it. I am very interested in what they'll do when the normal budget comes around. My hope is that the stimulus package will not have a significant effect on annual appropriations.

[Update, Feb 11: Apparently that business with zeroing out NSF funding was just a proposal: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/science/11science.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink]

In other news, the LHC startup has been pushed back a little. Now they're talking about beams in September, with data at 10 TeV in October. The running plan has been changed to go through the winter, when we would normally shut down, on through fall of 2010. Keeping my fingers crossed for data!

Come on!

2009-02-07T08:36:00.003-06:00

As reported over at Cosmic Variance, in the mad dash to come up with a bipartisan stimulus package, somehow $1.4 billion for the National Science Foundation has disappeared. Everyone can agree that science isn't good for the economy? Really? In some sense, I suppose I shouldn't complain too much. Out of the $110 cut from the previous version of the Senate bill, something in the ballpark of $40 billion was cut from educational programs. Because we don't need those for a strong economy either. A few weeks ago, Jake Young at Pure Pedantry argued that too much science support in the stimulus bill could bring it's own problems. He's got a point -- science programs do better with a stable, reliable source of funds than with short bursts and droughts of it. Although my first reaction to the NSF cut was as the title says, perhaps it's better that I keep my eye on the real prize -- a better picture for both the DOE and NSF for FY2009 (especially since we're already 4 months into it).

Late happy new year

2009-01-18T14:38:00.003-06:00

And I'm back! The last six weeks or so have involved an extended moving process from California to Chicago. In the meantime I defended my thesis and effectively (though not yet with a diploma) finished my PhD. On January 5th I started my new position as a postdoc for the University of Chicago. I'm now on ATLAS, and I've got a lot to learn. I'll post some details of my starting project a bit later.

One fun fact I learned recently: diesel fuel jellifies when it's too damn cold. How cold is "too damn"? Well, according to this authoritative source, between -2.2 and +5 degrees Fahrenheit. And last week, when my furniture and other apartment necessities were supposed to be delivered, the temperature was hanging around at about -10 in the morning, topping out at an even 0 around lunch. Fun times. We got our stuff two days late, which in the grand scheme of things probably isn't too bad, considering this is the coldest weather Chicago has seen in 13 years. Yay good timing.

A minor point I forgot to mention

2008-12-18T10:19:00.002-06:00

Several weeks ago I posted that I was defending my thesis on December 12th. Well, I did it! And I passed! I was glad to have a couple of good friends from UMD present, and they did their duty in assisting me with imbibing many glasses of beer afterwards. The defense itself went reasonably well. The beginning was rough when a professor asked me about the origin of CP violation from interference between B0 mixing and decay (a central point in my dissertation). I overthought the question and started going on about CKM matrix parameters and whatnot, when really, he just wanted to hear that there was a phase difference between the direct decay path and the mixing-then-decay path. Oops. Still, my advisor told me they didn't wait 2 minutes before signing my papers at the end. That's to my credit either for merit, or for having the foresight to schedule my defense on a Friday afternoon (on the last day of classes, no less). In any case, my formal schooling is over! Next month it'll be on to LHC work.

Cautious Optimism

2008-12-18T09:41:00.001-06:00

The 2009 U.S. science budget seems to be going in the right direction so far. The House has decided to recommend fully funding the requested appropriations for the National Science Foundation, along with other programs including NASA. This would be a nice change from the funding debacle of last year, when the omnibus funding bill made significant cuts to the science program. The Senate has already agreed to most of the new funding, though there are still some details to iron out. As far as the numbers go, the NSF is on track for an increase of $789 million (13%). What sort of bang do we taxpayers get for our buck? The recommendation will fully fund an upgrade to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), which from what I remember would actually put us within reach of detecting graviational waves. The IceCube project at the South Pole would remain on track to finish in 2011 (it's a one-cubic kilometer detector of neutrinos set in the antarctic ice). There's another project called the Atacama Large Millimeter Array that I know nothing about, but they're funded too. On the downside, the House isn't planning on providing all the requested funds for graduate research fellowships, but they still do provide an increase of almost $19 million. This brings the total to $107 million, so it's still significant (the program includes the GK-12 fellowship that I participated in during my first year of grad school). Here's to hoping that next year our senators and representatives will put their money where their mouth is.

The Atom Smashers

2008-12-01T21:54:00.000-06:00

I just finished watching The Atom Smashers on PBS, and it was the best layperson-oriented high energy physics program I've seen. Actually, maybe it's the only one I've seen (how sad), but they did an amazing job. Best thing since Nova's "Einstein's Big Idea".

The show was billed as a personal look at Fermilab's physicists and their hunt for the Higgs boson. It accomplished its goal of showing that physicists really are normal(ish) people with jobs and dreams and lives just like everyone else. There's the mother taking care of her kids. There's the couple who commute halfway across the country every week. There's a guy rollerblading around the Tevatron ring.

What I didn't expect was the underlying message of a rallying cry to America. We need to fund basic research. It was great seeing John Marburger squirm as he tried to explain how the administration and congress support basic research, and then Sheldon Stone gets on to say, basically, "Show me the money." He quoted numbers as to how basic research even in the Department of Defense was being cut! But another aspect of physics funding came out as well... It's really hard to explain why we need to fund these very long-term projects. You can't say with certainty that X experiment will produce Y tangible benefit to society. However, we know that eventually the benefits will follow. To the woman on the Phil Donahue show that suggested the money put in to particle physics might be better spent on cancer research, I have a press release for you.

Joe's got a thesis

2008-11-21T13:29:00.000-06:00

It's official -- I'm defending my thesis back at the University of Maryland on Friday December 12th. Things are moving fast now. The draft is basically done, and so is my talk. I'm making preparations to move. We'll be out of the apartment in California in a couple weeks. The plan is to bum with parents/in-laws for most of December, then drive to a new city and a new job. My first real job I guess. On to a new research group and a brand-new experiment (which will hopefully start taking data in summer-ish of next year). More updates when I have the time.

Discussing obscure matters for fun

2008-11-14T19:33:00.000-06:00

As my thesis defense and (hopefully) graduation rolls closer, I've realized I actually am becoming more like those postdocs and professors that I always had trouble understanding. What I mean is, I'd hear these people discussing very technical questions in their off time and think, "You're not at work! Why are you talking about it?" Well, I guess I'm one of those guys now...

At lunch today, a postdoc, myself, and several other grad students ended up in a discussion how particle physics could get some money from Homeland Security if we only built giant water Cherenkov detectors in the nation's shipping yards. The idea is that any nuclear fissile material would be spitting out more neutrinos than could be accounted for in the normal course of things, so if the shipping containers remained in the yard long enough, and if the detectors were big enough, we could figure out which container was emitting too many neutrinos. Then we confronted reality and decided that if we were to detect these neutrinos within a few hours, the detector might need to be about as big as the Spaceship Earth structure at Epcot. Or thereabouts. That's no more than a shot in the dark.

Then, during coffee break, we got into a LONG discussion about how to calculate uncertainties for points in a certain type of plot. Yeesh. That's one of the things about any experimental field... you end up worrying a lot more about your uncertainties than you do your actual result.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

2008-11-04T23:58:00.001-06:00

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOBAMA

Legacy Datasets

2008-11-03T21:22:00.001-06:00

I promised myself I'd blog this before getting sucked into Fallout 3 tonight. Last week our Computing Coordinator Emeritus put the issue of preserving the BaBar dataset this way: It may rise to the level of a moral obligation to the citizens that funded our experiment to make it all available after we are essentially done with it. The possible International Linear Collider is at least a decade away, and it seems that BaBar, Belle, and other electron-positron experiments may have the last word on certain measurements for a long time. In the meantime, I'd say it's likely that the LHC will discover something, and there may be keys to describing these new phenomena hidden in legacy datasets. Of course, if there were no costs there would be no question about making our legacy dataset available. The reality is that it will take a lot of man-hours (and therefore funding) to put the dataset in a preservable form and make it available, and this cost has to be weighed against the possible benefit that it would bring.

Let's call that the first-order effect. The second-order issues could be even more daunting. There's a lot of meta-data to worry about with these experiments. It's not enough just to put up the "raw" data (whatever that might mean); you also have to preserve things like detector environmental conditions (was a power supply on the fritz, were there cooling problems, voltage fluctuations, etc). Do we put our electronic logbook online? I know there are things written in there that probably shouldn't go out to the general public! Still, the logbook can be an essential source of information when tracking down problems with the data. Finally, the worst bit of meta-data is the stuff that isn't written down. We have a lot of information stored in people's brains, and as they leave the collaboration, that's going away. Documentation is a perennial problem.

At first glance I was all for the idea of long-term preservation of our dataset. And I'm not against it now, but the "how" is very daunting. You have to strike the right balance between detail (like drift chamber hits, calorimeter cluster timing) and usability (reconstruction software that interprets these low-level quantities). You have to try to predict how your dataset will fare 5 or 10 years down the road, and put it in a form that will still be useful then. Someone should find out how that went for the JADE collaboration, which recently put out a new result 22 years after the last data were taken!! Actually, this paper sparked the discussion in our own collaboration about dataset preservation. Getting back to the original point, we do have at least one moral obligation in all this -- to give it our best shot.

My last collaboration meeting?

2008-10-31T11:58:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we finished up what will probably be my last BaBar collaboration meeting, which included a B-Factory Symposium on Monday. You'd expect something like this to be bittersweet, and I suppose it was a little, but not that much. High energy physics is still a small world, even with thousands of people each on ATLAS and CMS. Many of the people I have worked with recently will be moving on to one of these experiments (or already have), so this week was more a milestone than a parting. It was nice to see that my specific analysis working group is still in high-gear, churning through measurements involving interactions in which a quark changes its identity (its so-called flavor) without changing its charge. Most of these analyses use the full BaBar data set, which amounts to about 700 terabytes of data and another 1300 terabytes or so of simulation. That's a lot of bytes (2,000,000,000,000,000 of them).

And speaking of huge amounts of data, there was a lot of interesting talk this week on what we and other high energy physics experiments should do with our data after we're essentially done with it. I'll try to get to this over the weekend...

And congrats to my postdoc buddy Steve for some blog recognition!

Hello world

2008-10-26T19:27:00.000-05:00

Up to now this blog and its sparse postings have been anonymous and somewhat impersonal. So, in the tradition of Cosmic Variance where they have postings by people who happen to be physicists, my intention is to post here on topics that are not necessarily limited to physics. Because I am a physicist, and because I don't mean for this to be a diary-like blog, most of the posts will probably be science-related. And hopefully more frequent than they have been.

So, hi, I'm Joe. I'm a graduate student in experimental particle physics at the University of Maryland. For the past three years I've been based at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center to work on the BaBar experiment. During that time I've published work on two related analyses that I might talk about here at some point. If you want, you can read them here and here. In a few months I hope to have graduated and begun work with the ATLAS collaboration for an institution that will remain nameless for now (I'm not on their payroll yet!). In the meantime, I'm preparing my thesis and defense presentation, trying to psych myself up for another move (seems to happen every two years), and at the moment I'm enjoying Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

A New Satellite in Orbit

2008-06-11T20:08:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to the GLAST Collaboration on the successful launch of their space telescope! I know I'd be nervous if I strapped a $690 million piece of equipment on top of 10,000 gallons of rocket fuel (and that's just the first stage)! It's about 350 miles up there, in orbit. I've heard we might be able to see it from the ground, so I'll try to find that information.

Women in Physics

2008-06-10T23:28:00.000-05:00

Apologies to my (nonexistent?) readers for taking quite
a long time off. Going to try to keep at this more regularly,
but I guess I can't make any promises.

Yesterday at SLAC we had a public colloquium by Patricia Rankin of the University of Colorado at Boulder about the issues surrounding underrepresentation of women in science, particularly in physics. She really made the case that there are ingrained, societal prejudices ("gender schema") held by both sexes, and most of these are subconscious. Fortunately there are ways around this. Although outright, blatant sexism isn't as prevalent as it used to be, it's still below the surface. This was timely, given the recent attention to Sherry Towers' analysis of gender dependence in postdocs' next employment step after working on D-Zero.

Prof. Rankin described being told by colleagues, "You're a woman, of course you'll get tenure. And you're doing really well for a woman anyway." She talked about studies in which identical resumes were handed to employers, except that some had male names while others had female names; the ones with male names tended to be rated more highly. There was an interesting experiment where college students were given pictures of people to look at, usually with some object like a desk for a sense of scale, and they were asked to judge how tall the person was. What the test subjects didn't know was that for each picture of a male, there was a picture of a female of the same height. So, the average height of the males in the pictures was exactly the same as the average height of the females. And yet, the average of people's guesses showed that they tended to rate the males as taller. This was the same for both males and females doing the judging. So, it's not so much a gender problem as a societal problem, something everyone needs to help solve.

Of course, that's the big question -- how do we go about solving something so pervasive? It's such a huge project to contemplate tackling that for most of the talk I felt dumbfounded, my mind turned into a blank page when it came to solutions. But there are things we can do. Prof. Rankin mentioned an orchestra that began holding auditions with the person playing from behind a screen. The hiring rate for women jumped to about 50%. She cautioned people in management positions to consider the language they use when they write recommendation letters for women: do you use words like "decisive", and "motivated", and "strong"? Do you take the opportunity to offer career planning advice, to introduce your employees into the social networks in your field? What about support for families? Apparently male physics professors with young children are more likely to get tenure than those without, but the opposite is true for women. Think about how you feel when you see a father take his kid to work one day. He's a good guy, showing his kid how the world works! How do you feel when you see a woman bring her kid to work? Also, Prof. Rankin suggested holding people accountable. If you advertise a position and the demographics of the applications do not match those of the applicant pool, maybe there's a problem with the people doing the hiring. Don't take it as an excuse that "well, they're just not applying!" So, yes, things are better than they used to be, but they're not where they should be, and we all have some role to to play in getting there.

No Need to Send Bruce Willis and Steve Tyler for This One...

2008-01-20T18:10:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago astronomers got pretty excited about a possible asteroid strike on Mars. Now, I'm a bit out of my depth here in astrophysics territory, but it seemed like a pretty neat story. The asteroid in question (2007 WD5) was found at the end of November this past year by the Catalina Sky Survey. By the end of December, scientists knew enough of its course to predict that it had a decent shot of slamming into Mars around 3am (PST) on January 30th. That in itself is pretty neat to me. This thing - about half the size of a football field - was moving at 28,000 mph (relative to Mars I guess), and they could already say it had a 1 in 75 chance of impact at that time! Pretty neat. The subsequent crater would be about half a mile wide. In the picture here the asteroid is the circled object. The other stuff is smeared out because the telescope was tracking the asteroid, and so the field of view was moving. Linked from this page.

So, why do people care about this? Well, for starters, the asteroid passed fairly close (within 5 million miles) to Earth about a month before it was discovered, so there was some concern that it could come back around in a few decades. From what I've read the risk to Earth is small. However, most of the excitement about this guy was the possibility to actually see an asteroid impact. Scientists said it would do about as much damage as the Tunguska incident in Siberia 100 years ago. This would give us the chance to study what actually happens in the impact process, and how the crater forms. We could test theories that correlate the size and speed of asteroids with the amount of damage they do. Also, I understand that the dust kicked up into the Martian atmosphere would give some more insight into the mineral composition, and could tell us more about the likelihood of life existing, or having existed, on Mars.

Unfortunately by the time of this writing it looks decidedly unlikely that this event will happen. I put this topic in my agenda around the end of the year, when the refined odds of an impact were about 1 in 25. The most recent update from NASA was on January 9th, with odds of impact reduced to 1 in 10,000 after an influx of information from various observatories.

A Grim Year for Science

2008-01-12T13:00:00.000-06:00

Well, friends, it's going to be a tough year for high energy physics. Basic science research overall, actually. After about a year of both the administration and congress saying how much basic science research impacts the long-term economic and technological viability of our country, it came time to pass a budget to back up these words. The fiscal year started in October, but that deadline passed. Finally, at the end of December, after a late-night cram session consolidated 11 appropriations bills into an omnibus spending bill (careful this link is to a 600-page document), we got our budget. And it looks really grim for science.

The America COMPETES act, which received support from all branches of government and both major political parties, authorizes a doubling of the budget of the Department of Energy's Office of Science over the next 10 years. This Office is responsible for funding a large portion of high energy physics research in the US, notably the national labs SLAC and Fermilab, among others. To accomplish this budget doubling in 10 years, a 7% per-year increase would be necessary. The administration, house and senate all agreed that we should do this. Well, a quarter of the way through this fiscal year, when the budget finally passed, we didn't get a doubling. We got 2.6%. Keep in mind that inflation alone is 3-4%. So, really, our effective funding has been cut. In high energy physics, funding was indeed cut by 8.5%, not accounting for inflation. The administration, the house, and the senate had previously agreed to an increase of 4%. So, where did the money get cut from?

The bill provided no funds for Fermilab's NOvA program, which would have made key measurements of neutrino mass, how the three types neutrinos change identity between each other, and possible differences between matter and antimatter due to neutrinos. This is one of the hottest areas in high energy physics! Just 10 years ago we weren't even sure neutrinos had mass. Without mass none of the measurements I mentioned could be done. The funding bill also destroyed the US contribution to an experimental fusion reactor - one of the best chances we have to study how to use fusion for abundant, environmentally friendly, safe energy. This project, called ITER, was the Office of Science's #1 priority in its 20-year facilities plan. We were committed to putting in $160 million this year! This sends the wrong message to our international partners, and damages American credibility. Also damaging to our international image is the $45 million cut from work on the International Linear Collider. That project is supposed to be the next big thing after the Large Hadron Collider. Once the LHC tells us where to look for new fundamental particles, the ILC will allow us to perform precision measurements of those particles' properties! We were supposed to spend $60 million this year. Now with a quarter of the fiscal year gone, we've already spent about $15 million, which is all we ended up being alloted. So, the major labs stopped work on the ILC on January 1.

The American Physical Society wrote in a press release that if funds for the Office of Science are not improved, "the consequential layoffs of scientists and engineers throughout the nation will discourage American youth from pursuing these fields, just as the country needs their participation to sustain economic growth and national security." Well, those layoffs are happening. Fermilab announced that it will lay off 200 people out of its force of 1,900. Those that remain will have to take 2 days of unpaid leave per month (basically another 10% cut). Lab director Pier Oddone said that "Fermilab has not had to face a problem like this in its history.” SLAC is going to have the largest layoffs in its history: 125 people on top of the 100 people (out of a staff of 1,600) it was already in the process of laying off, due to funding and the end of the B-Factory, which was supposed to be at the end of September. Well, now the B-Factory, the project that supplies the data for my PhD thesis, will end 7 months early. We were aimed to increase our data by 50% and set new world records for electron-positron colliders. It's really a shame that some of the most beautiful physics ever to be done in this country will go down the drain. It's a shame that the politicians didn't back up their rhetoric about the importance of science with the funding to implement it. The American Physical Society notes "with some dismay that had Congress applied the same discipline to earmarking as it did last year, the damage to the science and technology enterprise could have been avoided."

I'll give the rant a rest. I think you get the idea. Here's a set of fun facts from Fermilab if you want the gory details, and also a New York Times editorial by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman. Please write your representatives if you care about basic science and the long-term economic viability of this country. We have been a world leader in science for the past 70 years, but that position is now threatened. Although personalized letters are best, a form letter is better than none.

What is High Energy Physics?

2008-01-05T14:05:00.000-06:00

High energy physics is a field of study concerned with finding the fundamental building blocks of matter, and describing the interactions between them. What do fundamental building blocks (really small things) have to do with high energies? In a sense, it's all about image resolution. Take electromagnetic waves -- they can be in the form of visible light, x-rays, ultraviolet (UV) rays, microwaves, radio waves, and more. What distinguishes these different forms of electromagnetic waves is the wavelength, which goes hand-in-hand with the energy: the shorter the wavelength, the higher the energy. For example, microwaves are of a lower energy than visible light. They have a wavelength of a few centimeters. Visible light on the other hand has a much shorter wavelength: a few hundred nanometers (billionths of meters). Because visible light has a much shorter wavelength, it can fit into much smaller spaces or crevices, so it gives you better image resolution. Go take a look at the front of your microwave oven. See a grid on the window? It should look like this picture. The holes in the grid are smaller than a centimeter, so microwaves cannot get through -- this keeps you from getting cooked when watch your food heat up. On the other hand, the grid holes are much bigger than light waves, so they get through and you can see inside. The whole point of this is that you need higher energies to see smaller things. Quantum mechanics tells us that this principle applies not only to electromagnetic waves, but to all fundamental components of matter. For example, you can use electrons at higher energies than visible light to take pictures of things smaller than visible light waves, like viruses.

In high energy physics we use this principle by accelerating subatomic particles and making them interact at, well, high energies. This usually involves smashing them together. The high energy involved allows us to "see" what is going on at a very small scale. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC, pictured here), where I'm doing my PhD research, accelerates electrons and their anti-matter counterpart, positrons, to high energies for various purposes. At my experiment, BaBar, we collide them together at a very specific energy so that we produce a lot of particles called B mesons. More on that stuff in a later post. The point here is that the energy we use allows us to probe distance scales as small as 10^-16 meters, or about ten times smaller than an atomic nucleus. The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago operates by colliding protons and anti-protons together at much higher energy, corresponding to a distance scale of 10^-19 meters! The tiny distance scale allows us to probe the inner workings of reactions between fundamental particles, while the large amount of energy goes into supplying the mass of the fundamental particles we're studying. The Large Hadron Collider, currently finishing up construction at CERN in Switzerland, will also collide protons and anti-protons, but at an even higher energy, letting us see down to 10^-20 meters. At that energy level, we hope there is enough energy available to create the mass of new fundamental particles that have never been observed before, like the dark matter I talked about in my previous post.

How Little We Know

2007-09-08T13:43:00.000-05:00

One of the things about cosmology that hasn't yet really sunk in with a lot of people is that in the last 15-20 years, we've come to realize just how little of the universe as a whole we understand. Everything around us is made up of protons, neutrons (these two make up all atomic nuclei), electrons (which carry electrical power), and photons (light). These are part of the standard model of particle physics. However, this model that accounts extremely well for everything we normally encounter turns out to be only 5% of the story. Another 25% of the universe is some form of unknown matter that's called, for lack of a better term, dark matter. The remaining 70% is a mysterious form of energy known as (big surprise) dark energy. I want to emphasize this point... our best and most well-tested theory of matter only explains 5% of what's out there. If that's not a reason to study particle physics, I don't know what is.

For now I'll make a gross oversimplification and say that we have a theoretical model for the known particles that has stood up to every test we've subjected it to over the last 40 years. Fairly recently, by looking at the universe on a large scale, we've realized that this type of matter only accounts for about 5% of the total energy density in the universe (I'm using matter and energy interchangeably thanks to Einstein's famous relation E = mc², which says that matter and energy can be converted into each other).

How do we know there's more out there? As early as the 1930's, the astronomer Fritz Zwicky noted that the rotation of galaxies seemed to be too fast for them to be held together by gravity, which is the only long-range force we have any evidence for. Based on the amount of matter contained in the stars and interstellar gas/dust in various galaxies, their rate of rotation was so fast that they should be flying apart like a poorly-made amusement park ride. Either something was wrong with our understanding of gravity, or there was more matter in these galaxies than we thought. Einstein's theory of general relativity (GR), which is a theory of gravity, has also withstood all experimental tests, so scientists are pretty reluctant to toss it. On the other hand, if there's more matter than we thought, it has to be something very strange -- something that almost doesn't interact at all, except through gravity. If it was a type of normal matter like what we know about (protons, neutrons, or electrons), then we would be able to detect it through normal light, or x-ray emissions, or radio waves. But no luck there. So, the hypothesis was that some unknown form of matter was pervasive throughout the galaxies in the universe. How can we test that?

One of the consequences of GR was that since matter and energy are interchangeable, gravity affects the energy of light just as it does matter. The presence of matter creates a gravitational field, which can actually bend the path of light -- just like a regular glass lens. This means that we can detect matter, even if it's unseen, by the way light passes through space. NASA detected direct proof for dark matter last year, in a galaxy cluster 3.4 billion light-years away. The image here shows two galaxies that have collided and passed through each other. Stars are the bright points of light, interstellar gas/dust in red (detected by X-ray observations), and dark matter (detected by gravitational lensing) in blue. One reason this is so convincing as proof for dark matter is that you can see that the blue area has passed right through without really being slowed down, while the red has gotten caught up in the mix, due to various interactions of the dust. The dark matter has passed through without interacting, as expected. Based on observations of galaxies on a grand scale, it looks like there's about 4-5 times more dark matter out there than regular matter.

So, now I've accouted for something like 30% of the energy density in the universe. What's the rest? Everywhere we look, galaxies are moving away from us. The farther away they are, the faster they're going. Not only is the universe expanding, the expansion is accelerating as well. Just like when you have to use more gas to accelerate your car, the acceleration of the universe has to be driven by some sort of energy. My understanding of this is very limited, but as far as I'm aware, there's no known source of dark energy.

Just over 100 years ago, people thought we had science pretty much figured out. Now we know we've only got 5% of the universe pinned down.

At Least it's not a Doomsday Device

2007-08-25T20:44:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, Fermilab made public their plan for continuing US-based research using particle accelerators in case the International Linear Collider (ILC) project gets delayed. In a style reminiscent of Dr. Evil, they decided to call it Project X. Personally, I think they should just keep that name, but there are a few other not-so-awesome names on the table. So, what is Project X good for? I admit, I'm a bit sad that the two major accelerator institutions in the US, SLAC and Fermilab, are shutting down within the next couple years. Even if the ILC does eventually find itself in the US, it sounds like it won't be ready for research until at least 2020. That's a real shame, since the existing accelerator facilities here would not be used to their full physics potential in the meantime. As I understand it, the reason is primarily one of funding. So, the only choice for high energy physics research with accelerators will be outside the US for a couple decades. Project X is Fermilab's try at extending the strong US legacy of fundamental physics research. The idea is to use parts of the accelerator at Fermilab, and also build a small linear accelerator there to complete the project. This could give us a chance to work on ILC design issues (Project X can be tuned to have the same beam parameters as the ILC) as well as do some high energy physics in the US. It also sets Fermilab in a position where it could make a more compelling argument to host the ILC -- the location of that monster is still up for grabs. Of course, the best reason to build it is the physics we could get out of it. The report from Fermilab's steering group focuses on learning more about neutrinos (and I really should find out how you do that with intense proton beams), making a beam of muons (the electrons' heavier siblings) to study whether a property of matter called lepton flavor is conserved, and also looking at exceedingly rare decays of certain short-lived particles to study other basic symmetries of nature (or lack thereof). Overall it sounds like starting research and development on Project X is a good idea for now. It's prudent at least, and strategic. Of course, if the ILC gets moving on time, then Project X will get put on the back burner. I am interested in hearing what sort of science would be do-able at Project X -- it would be nice to do some hands-on physics here in this country during the next decade.