Kiwi Particle Physicist

Kiwi!

2007-09-19T13:35:00.000+09:00

This little animation has been doing the rounds since last year. I finally got around to tracking it down on YouTube and posting it. Very moving.

Rugby World Cup Odds

2007-09-07T18:28:00.000+09:00

The first game of the 2007 Rugby World Cup - France versus Argentina - kicks off in a few hours, and I thought it would be interesting to have a look at the odds on some of the teams before the tournament starts. All odds are taken from the best odds listed on odds aggregator BestBetting.

As of this morning (Japan time) the odds and winning percentages for the traditional top five and Japan are as follows:

New Zealand (1.63, 61.3%)
France (7.60, 13.2%)
South Africa (8.80, 11.4%)
Australia (13.00, 7.7%)
England (36.00, 2.8%)
Japan (5001, 0.02%)

The site also allows you to make graphs showing the change over the last few hours, days, or weeks. See some of the graphs below.

1) Graph showing the change since 2007/07/04 of the decimal odds for various teams to win the Rugby World Cup. Colours represent New Zealand (Black); France (Blue); South Africa (Green); Australia (Canary Yellow); and England (Red) respectively. Japan is not shown.

2) Graph showing the movement of the implied winning percentages of six teams since 2007/07/04. Colours represent New Zealand (Black); France (Blue); South Africa (Green); Australia (Canary Yellow); England (Red); and Japan (Magenta.)

3) Identical to graph 2) above, except with the frontrunners NZ removed and vertical axis scaled so it's easier to see the movement amongst the minnows. Note France, whose winning chances have risen from about 7% two months ago to over 13% this morning.

So there you have it. According to everybody who is willing to put their money where their mouth is, New Zealand have a 61.3% chance of hoisting the trophy, the remainder of the top five are given 35.1% combined, and the other 15 teams a miserly total of about 5% combined (note that the total sums to greater than 100%.) The ABs have dropped a few percent from the start of the tri-nations, but not too much of a shift. The big surprise is the winning chances for the French which have shot up over the last couple of months. Is this based on their performance in the Six Nations, or perhaps everyone is overestimating home ground advantage?

On a personal note, this is my third World Cup in Japan, and as far as I can remember the ABs were overwhelming favourites going into the last two as well. Neither of those ended very nicely. 60% sounds like pretty certain odds - I just hope they don't choke it for the third time in a row.

Typhoon 9

2007-09-07T09:57:00.000+09:00

I'm back up at the lab in Tsukuba again, for the first time in a couple of months. We have the annual summer shutdown at the moment, so the accelerator and detector aren't moving. Instead everybody is busy organizing and participating in a variety of summer schools.

Firstly we had Belle Plus, a four day summer school for high school students. This was the second time we held this event, the first being around this time last year. Overall I think it went pretty well. All the students seemed to have a fairly good time and I think we managed to fix a few of the minor problems we had last year. Belle Plus was from Thursday to Sunday last week (8/30 ~ 9/2).

Secondly we have "Belle Sofware Festa" from Wednesday to Friday this week (9/5 ~ 9/7). This is basically an interactive tutorial aimed at students trying to learn how to use the Belle Software, although there are a handful of senior staff who are sitting in as well. I'm not sure if it's a good thing that the people in charge of running the experiment are sitting here asking questions about how to log onto the computers, but at least they're trying. Up until now we haven't really had a common complete set of documentation for the analysis procedure, which has made it hard for new students to get involved with analysis. This event is long overdue, and I'm sure the slides will come in handy for future students as well.

So, that's what I've been up to for the last week or so. There was a bit of excitement last night though as the first major typhoon for the year came through Tsukuba. The animation below, which I took from the IMOC Weather Page site shows the hourly rainfall in central Japan from 10AM yesterday (9/6) until 10AM today (you have to click to view on some browsers.) The peak rainfall were I am was about 30~40mm per hour at just before midnight last night, but it's still pouring down now. Hopefully it will have passed by the time I go home tomorrow.

Pi Day

2007-03-14T13:59:00.000+09:00

Today, March 14 (3.14) is Pi Day, where we honour what is arguably the most important mathematical constant we know of. Pi was originally defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it’s diameter, but it has a habit of popping up in a variety of unrelated places, for example when calculating particle lifetimes or interaction cross sections. To celebrate today I thought I’d post the number here, up to the end of the Feynman Point, along with a nice animation from Wikipedia that illustrates where the number comes from by unrolling a circle's circumference. Enjoy.

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841
971693993751058209749445923078164062862
089986280348253421170679821480865132823
066470938446095505822317253594081284811
174502841027019385211055596446229489549
303819644288109756659334461284756482337
867831652712019091456485669234603486104
543266482133936072602491412737245870066
063155881748815209209628292540917153643
678925903600113305305488204665213841469
519415116094330572703657595919530921861
173819326117931051185480744623799627495
673518857527248912279381830119491298336
733624406566430860213949463952247371907
021798609437027705392171762931767523846
748184676694051320005681271452635608277
857713427577896091736371787214684409012
249534301465495853710507922796892589235
420199561121290219608640344181598136297
7477130996051870721134999999 and so on

ILC Cost Estimate

2007-02-08T13:28:00.000+09:00

The Reference Design Report for the ILC has just been released this afternoon in Beijing, China. For the first time the design committee released a "preliminary value estimate" of the cost for the ILC in its present design.

- 1.8 Billion ILC Value Units for site-related costs, such as the costs for tunnelling in a specific region,
- 4.9 Billion ILC Value Units for the value of the high technology and conventional components;
- Approximately 2,000 persons per year or 13,000 person-years for the required supporting manpower (= 22 million person-hours)

Here one ILC Value Unit is equal to $USD1 or about JPY117, so that will come in at about $7b to $8b for the whole project. At one stage some people in the loop were guestimating about $11b, so this estimate sounds a little bit on the cheap side. I hope they can pull it off.

This cost estimate will now have a big effect on the site selection process over the next couple of years, and also on the decision on whether or not to upgrade the Belle experiment and build a Super B factory here at KEK. It will be interesting to get everyone elses reactions here at Belle, although I have a fairly good idea what some of them will be saying already.

Update : The reports are now available for download on the web at the ILC site. The full report [PDF] and a two page outline of the cost estimation [PDF] can be found on the site.

It turns out the above estimate does not include the tunnels for the 1000 GeV Stage Two Upgrade, or the funding to construct the detectors, "which are assumed to be funded by a seperate agreement." This will probably bump the cost up to $8b to $9b for the 500 GeV Stage 1 project, excluding the costs for land aquisition.

Great Weather

2006-12-18T14:39:00.000+09:00

Brilliant high resolution photo of the most recent spacewalk from NASA

It was taken at December 12 during the first EVA of the mission, and shows the astronauts installing a new truss segment. You can see the lovely weather in New Zealand in the background. Country looks great. Can't wait to get home in a week from now.

BGM/Luminosity Party!

2006-11-17T22:02:00.001+09:00

During the meeting two days ago we heard that the KEKB accelerator team had reached a new world record luminosity of 17/nb/s. It’s been over a year since we hit 16/nb/s, so it’s well overdue. Oide san, who is in charge of the accelerator, promised us we would have 30/nb/s by this time next year though. We were originally planning on having a party last night anyway, like we do for every BGM, but it took on a new meaning with this result.

Unfortunate Timing...

More photos are here, here, and here, although some of them might only work from inside KEK.

Afterwards a few students headed back to the dorm for round two. This used to be a standard procedure whenever there was a meeting here, but recently we never seem to be able to get enough people together. A lot of students left the experiment last year after finishing their masters degrees. On top of that, quite a few of those who are left have moved up to Tsukuba permanently, so there aren’t normally very many of the old crowd together in the dorm anymore. Last night though there were about ten of us, so we bought a few drinks and snacks beforehand and sat in the lounge yapping until about 3-ish. Good evening. Missed the start of the meeting today, but it was worth it.

Recovery

2006-11-16T15:43:00.000+09:00

Spent most of yesterday afternoon trying to recover the data I wiped. Luckily I had a backup from just four days ago on the computers in Osaka, and I hadn’t made too many new changes since then. I basically just copied all the old data files and scripts from the corresponding directory back to the Belle computers, tweaked a few of the scripts, and then ran them again to recover the changes since the last backup.

Things could have been a lot worse. Ever since the hard disk on my Mac PowerBook G4 kicked the bucket last December -- taking my masters thesis and two years worth of presentations and notes with it -- I’ve been very careful about taking backups. I usually back up data on the uni and Belle computers every couple of days, important files on the PowerBook every week or so, and the rest of my files about once a month. Strongly recommend it (mum!).

While I’m at it I think I’ll use this chance to plug the Mac’s. The service I got when the disk packed it last year was awesome. It’s not unusual for hard disks to bury themselves, especially on laptops, but the Mac guys here in Osaka came and picked it up, replaced the disk, and had it back to me in three days over the Xmas holidays. They even replaced it with a new 60GB disk free of charge because they had run out of 40GB version! Highly recommend them.

I’m up at the lab since Tuesday evening for a three day BGM (Belle General Meeting). We have a party tonight and then the last day of the meeting is tomorrow. Will probably head back to Kyoto on Sunday. Off for a run before I start on the beers.

Brainmelt

2006-11-15T13:15:00.000+09:00

I was just using the Belle computers this morning trying to get some work done on my analysis. I wanted to wipe all my old files that start with "fp", so I tried to type

rm fp*

Except instead I ended up with

rm fp *

I'm awesome! At the time I was in the directory with all of my data files and the scripts which I use to run the analysis on them. I have an old backup from a few days ago in Osaka, but it's going to take a while to get everything back to where it was. I think I'll go for a commiseration beer.

Bottom Baryon Discovery

2006-10-25T14:58:00.000+09:00

Congratulations to CDF on the discovery of the Sigma_b plus and the Sigma_b minus, the first baryons to contain a bottom (b)-quark.

In addition to the stable up (u) and down (d) quarks, which make up ordinary matter, there exist heavier unstable quarks named strange (s), charm (c), bottom (b) and top (t), which can be combined to make exotic particles that don’t occur naturally in the world around us. The Sigma_b plus (uub) is an exotic relative of the proton (uud), where the bottom quark has replaced the usual down quark. The Sigma_b minus contains a b-quark and two d-quarks, and is a relative of the less well-known Delta minus.

Tomasso has a good post on the discovery, where he shows the graph below of the mass distribution of the Sigma_b candidates they found, and there is also a good explanation of the discovery on the Physorg page, from where I borrowed the above diagram.

KEK Soccer Tournament

2006-10-16T19:12:00.000+09:00

We just finished the last game of the KEK soccer tournament today. It was another 0-0 draw. That’s four 0-0 draws out of four matches. Unfortunately we didn’t make it through to the semi finals.

I think we had a pretty good team this year, and we didn’t play too badly. Our defense was very well organized, and the midfield and forwards played alright as well. We just need a bit of practice at putting the ball in the net. It seems that this is a fairly crucial skill to have mastered for soccer.

At least it was a bit of fun. We’ll just have to try again next year I guess.

Nobel Prize to COBE

2006-10-03T18:57:00.000+09:00

The Swedish Academy of sciences have just announced the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics for this year are John C. Mather and George F. Smoot "for their discoveries supporting the Big Bang theory." Here's the press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

This year the Physics Prize is awarded for work that looks back into the infancy of the Universe and attempts to gain some understanding of the origin of galaxies and stars. It is based on measurements made with the help of the COBE satellite launched by NASA in 1989.

The COBE results provided increased support for the Big Bang scenario for the origin of the Universe, as this is the only scenario that predicts the kind of cosmic microwave background radiation measured by COBE. These measurements also marked the inception of cosmology as a precise science...

According to the Big Bang scenario, the cosmic microwave background radiation is a relic of the earliest phase of the Universe. Immediately after the big bang itself, the Universe can be compared to a glowing body emitting radiation in which the distribution across different wavelengths depends solely on its temperature. The shape of the spectrum of this kind of radiation has a special form known as blackbody radiation. When it was emitted the temperature of the Universe was almost 3,000 degrees Centigrade. Since then, according to the Big Bang scenario, the radiation has gradually cooled as the Universe has expanded. The background radiation we can measure today corresponds to a temperature that is barely 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. The Laureates were able to calculate this temperature thanks to the blackbody spectrum revealed by the COBE measurements.

COBE also had the task of seeking small variations of temperature in different directions (which is what the term 'anisotropy' refers to). Extremely small differences of this kind in the temperature of the cosmic background radiation – in the range of a hundred-thousandth of a degree – offer an important clue to how the galaxies came into being. The variations in temperature show us how the matter in the Universe began to "aggregate". This was necessary if the galaxies, stars and ultimately life like us were to be able to develop. Without this mechanism matter would have taken a completely different form, spread evenly throughout the Universe.

COBE was launched using its own rocket on 18 November 1989. The first results were received after nine minutes of observations: COBE had registered a perfect blackbody spectrum. When the curve was later shown at an astronomy conference the results received a standing ovation.

The success of COBE was the outcome of prodigious team work involving more than 1,000 researchers, engineers and other participants. John Mather coordinated the entire process and also had primary responsibility for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation measured by COBE. George Smoot had main responsibility for measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation.

Congratulations guys. This was an extremely important discovery for physics as a whole, and cosmology in particular. As pointed out in a previous post, a Nobel Prize in Physics for this experiment was widely anticipated. At the moment the Big Bang theory of the universe is the only one left standing, thanks partially to the work of the COBE experiement.

Map of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy of the universe taken by COBE. The different colours represent different temperatures, and show that there were small differences in density in the early universe. The islands of slightly higher than average density became the galaxies we can see today.

Results of the measurement of the blackbody spectrum of the universe (upper graph). The black dots represent the data taken by COBE (FIRAS instrument), and the curve shows the theortical prediction from the Big Bang theory for a universe with a temperature of 2.725 Kelvin (minus 270.425 degrees Celcius). The agreement is so good you can barely see the data points over the curve.

The final word goes to xkcd, which I have shown before.

Nobel Prize Speculation

2006-09-28T12:29:00.000+09:00

The winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced a week from today, on Tuesday October 3. Peter Woit has a post about it, with people discussing their favourites it the comments. The leading contenders at the moment seem to be:

1) The COBE and WMAP teams, for their discovery of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and
2) Michael Berry and Yakir Aharonov, for theoretical condensed matter physics.

Personally I’d like to see it go to Kobayashi and Maskawa for their theory of CP Violation. As of this summer the unitary triangle is looking very consistent, and their names have come up before, so it wouldn’t be too unexpected.

I should point out though that there is a fairly strong bias towards High Energy Physics and cosmology here. Over the last few years more than half of the Nobel Prizes have gone to condensed matter physics, and the prize could of course come from there this year as well. Look forward to seeing who wins.

Belle Back for Autumn

2006-09-21T10:55:00.000+09:00

The KEKB accelerator was fired up again after the summer shutdown at 09:00 on September 19. There were problems with the injection system of the HER (high energy ring), which meant we couldn’t get enough electrons stored in the rings for collision for the first 24 hours or so, although it looks a bit better now. The LER (low energy ring, positron) beam seems to be working normally. Collisions started at about 19:30 last night, and we started taking data at 22:43 after a few hours of tuning.

The graph below shows the recent performance of the KEKB accelerator. The horizontal axis represents time and shows the last 24 hours. The yellow line in the third graph from the top shows the instantaneous luminosity (collisions per second), and is currently about 8.145 /nb/s, compared to our world record of 16.517 /nb/s. It will hopefully climb fairly quickly over the next couple of days. The dark green line (right axis) in the same graph shows the integrated luminosity -- which corresponds to the total amount of data recorded -- for the runs so far. You can see the text "Collision Tuning" at the top of the graph, which indicates that the accelerator experts are still trying to figure out the best way to get the two beams to collide with each other. Things don't always work exactly the same after a long shutdown as they did before, so it takes a while to make sure both beams are stable and on target so that we can get as much data as possible out of the machine.

I'm amazed at how easily they have managed to bring everything back online after having people down there fiddling with it for the last two months or so. I have shifts in another three weeks or so, so hopefully it will all be back to normal by then.

Soccer, Game 2

2006-09-20T15:30:00.001+09:00

Had the second game of the tournament today at lunchtime. We had another 0-0 draw, this time against Zaimu (Finance Department.) Overall I thought we played pretty well -- better than last time anyway. The main problem was that we were playing seven aside on less than half a normal field, which makes it pretty crowded, and we didn’t have enough room to move the ball around. In addition to that, none of our long passes were hitting their targets. It was the same for the other team as well. We pretty much just slugged it out in the middle of the pitch for the whole 30 minutes.

We have two games to go, and we probably need to win both of them to have a chance of making it to the next round.

I will head back to Osaka this evening. Should be there for the next three weeks or so until I have a set of experimental shifts again.

Iwabuchi takes a kick in.

Discussion after the game.

Wire Chambers

2006-09-17T12:24:00.000+09:00

Belle Plus is off to a good start. Yesterday we had an introductory lecture from Abe san, and then Haba san gave us a tour of the KEKB tunnel and the Belle detector. Afterwards we had dinner and a welcome party, where I was in charge of running a group trivia session, and then we all headed back to the dorm for (non-alcoholic) drinks. All the students seemed really interested, but they are different ages and at different levels so I think we might have a bit of a challenge ahead of us. I spent half the evening explaining how to calculate velocity, distance and time to a first year student, and then spent an hour or two explaining how the weak interaction works and what Feynman diagrams mean to a third year. It’s a bit difficult to entertain everyone at once.

This morning Uno san helped us make wire chambers. A wire chamber is a simple particle detector made out of a tube filled with gas, and a wire with high voltage applied passing through it. When a charged particle (a cosmic ray, for example) passes through the tube, it kicks electrons out of the gas. These are attracted to the nearby wire because the high voltage in the wire creates a strong electric field, and by counting the number of electrons passing through the wire you can calculate the energy of the original cosmic ray.

The students started off with a square pipe and endplates, which had openings for the high voltage supply and the gas input. They paired off to assemble the whole thing. Afterwards we got all the wire chambers together and tested them. They all seemed to be working, but unfortunately we ran out of time. I think Uno san wanted to wire them up in coincidence and count cosmic rays, or measure their angular distribution. It was good fun though. It’s always a good experience when you get to build stuff yourself and check that it works.

Fun Few Weeks

2006-09-16T13:35:00.000+09:00

Everything’s been going great recently. I’ve had a very busy couple of weeks, with a few days R&R thrown in as well. I haven’t posted anything in ages, but I’ve got a mountain of drafts sitting almost ready to go.

I popped back to KEK late August for a few meetings. We had the whole Osaka group up here, including the new first-year grad students, for the first time. It was supposed to be a group study session, but Hara san (our advisor at Osaka) found a rock climbing gym, so we all headed out for a day of bouldering, and then stopped for steak and beers on the way back.

The next day was the annual KEK open house, so we took the chance to go and have a look at all the other experiments here we never normally get the chance to see.

After finishing with the last summer school in Nagano last month, I was asked to help with organizing the summer school for Osaka University. This is a three-day/two-night trip to somewhere nearby for the HEP theory/experiment groups, nuclear physics theory/experiment groups, cosmology, astrophysics, and space science theory/experiment groups, and the experimental laser fusion group. I popped back to Kyoto/Osaka from the lab here earlier this month to help with organizing the program and to attend. Good fun.

Over the last week we had a Belle Analysis Meeting (BAM), which are normally held every couple of months or so, and where everyone presents their results to get approval from the rest of the experiment before publication. After that, on Wednesday and Thursday, there was the conference on B Physics and New Measurements (BNM), and I got roped into helping with odd jobs there as well, including helping the visitors set up their wireless connections, and running around with the mikes during the question sessions at the end of each talk.

The KEK soccer tournament started a couple of days ago, and the Belle Football Club drew our first game against the Shisetsu (Plant and Facilities Department) team. They were supposed to be one of the stronger competitors, so it wasn’t a bad start to the tournament. Got up early this morning and went for a run as well, for the first time in ages. I did two laps around the accelerator (6.6km) in 28’30”, which is not too far off a new PB.

Anyway, back to work. From today we (actually Nara Women’s University) are hosting Belle Plus at KEK. It is a program aimed at high school students, where they will have the chance to come up here for a long weekend and see what we do, and get the chance to play around with the detector and software a little bit. I am the class supervisor for the software group, and am basically in charge of showing them around, answering their questions, and just generally getting them organized for the next three days. We start in an hour or so, but the kids are piling into the cafeteria for lunch as I type. When this is finished I have the second game of the soccer tournament on Wednesday, and then I’ll head back to Osaka for a few months concentrated effort on the analysis. I have been working on it for three months already and am making only very slow progress. Apart from two weeks worth of shifts after the detector starts up for the Autumn run, I should be pretty much focused on getting it finished.

Updates from the last few weeks will appear gradually over the next few days as I get a bit more free time.

Could a black hole at the LHC end the world?

2006-09-14T15:23:00.000+09:00

There is an article at the Sydney Morning Herald that talks about the possibility of a Black Hole being made at the LHC and destroying the Earth. This issue seems to pop up quite often when starting up a new accelerator. Needless to say, there's nothing to worry about.

They asked "What do you think? Is it worth playing the odds?" and posted everyone's responses on the site. Here's the comment I left.

It's absolutely worth it.

As pointed out in the list of threats in the Wikipedia article linked above, the particle collisions that will be produced at the LHC are similar to those that occur naturally in our atmosphere anyway. Cosmic rays (mainly protons) with much higher energy than those to be used in the LHC experiment collide with protons in the atmosphere, and have done so since the beginning of our solar system. The collision energy of a single proton at the LHC is equivalent to 10^5 TeV, whereas cosmic rays have been observed with energies as high as 10^8 TeV, about 1000 times higher.

If there was any danger of a stable black hole or some other dangerous matter forming in collisions at these energies, then we would have been wiped out already.

I can't wait to see the first results from this machine when it gets up and running in a year or so. It will hopefully tell us a lot more about why our universe is here, and deliver a few suprises along the way.

As someone else pointed out though, it might just be a cunning way for the experiment to get a bit of publicity. Works well for the experiment, and gives the media something else that they can hype up. Everyone's a winner.

Dark Matter Exists!!

2006-08-23T01:23:00.000+09:00

There is a great post by Sean at Cosmic Variance on the new Dark Matter discovery. The post was slashdotted early Tuesday my time, so I couldn’t get at it until this evening. It’s compulsory reading for everyone.

There are just two important things to note here. Firstly, as pointed out in the article and comments, approximately 90% of the visible mass of the galaxy clusters lies in the intergalactic gas, and only about 10% comes from the galaxies themselves. The gravitational field from the galaxies that remain in the cluster after the collision is negligible. This is not where the gravity is coming from. Secondly the dark matter is only weekly interacting, both with other dark matter and also with the plasma. The Dark Matter in both clusters wouldn’t be slowed down by the collision. You would expect it to end up with the visible center of the clusters, where it would have been before the collision, which is exactly what the results show.

Of course, now we finally know for certain that this stuff exists, the next challenge is to figure out exactly what it is, and to make some of it here on earth. This is one of the most interesting problems in particle physics today, and will be one of the major goals of the Large Hadron Collider and the International Linear Collider.

Science Humour

2006-08-19T20:39:00.000+09:00

I’m a bit behind on this one, but there are a handful of good science gags going around at the moment that I wanted to put up. The first is from Cynical-C Blog, via Cosmic Varience, on the latest US government response to the terror threat in London. They have decided to fight back by classifying an entire state of matter as a terrorist threat.

Next are a few good comics from newly discovered site xkcd, also via Cosmic Variance, which are doing the rounds.

And last but not least, another couple of classics from PhD, where Professor Smith has gone off on holiday.

Dalitz Plots

2006-08-12T17:26:00.000+09:00

Great post on Dalitz plots over at Superweak, via Tommaso. Although these plots have been around since the 1950’s, they have become popular tools again to analyize the results coming out of the B factories. As described in the post it is possible to use Dalitz plots to measure the complex phases that occur in three-body decays from the interference behaviour of the plots. We use this method at Belle or BaBar to get information on the complex phase in the KM matrix.

Home Again

2006-08-09T23:58:00.000+09:00

All finished. The second lecture from Tanaka-san was this morning, and most of the HEP experiment students headed back together after lunch. HEP theory and the nuclear physics students still have one more day, but we finished early because there were less of us. Actually, the organizers were talking about trying to get a lot more students, double or so, for the next year.

Just on the train back from Nagano to Nagoya at the moment. It’s a really nice trip. It heads up through the mountains in SW Nagano prefecture and then through Gifu I think.

It has been a full on five days. The lectures and talks by the other students were all really interesting. I wanted to write everything up before I forget, but I’m a bit tired and can’t spit out anything coherent at the moment. I had a really great time. Learnt lots as well, and even managed to get through the week without sleeping through any lectures, unlike the last time two years ago. I think that's actually quite an achievement, given the compulsory socialising over beers until about 3AM or 4AM every morning. Absolutely buggered though, will post a summary and a few photos over the weekend.

Thanks to Kuwabara from Tokyo for organising the high energy physics experiment session. He did a great job rounding everyone up, arranging the lectures and drinks and just generally making sure everyone had a good time. Huge success. Cheers mate.

Exploration of New Physics at the TeV scale at LHC

2006-08-08T18:35:00.000+09:00

Today we heard from Professor Tanaka from Okayama University, who is working on the LHC detector and physics at the LHC experiment. This morning was mainly just an introduction to the experiment. He had a lot of slides on the physics, and he showed two very cool animations which show the size of the ATLAS detector, and give a basic outline of what happens in the accelerator and inside ATLAS when a collision occurs. Very very awesome. How come we don't have PR guys doing stuff like that for our experiment?

Kick Baseball

2006-08-07T18:01:00.000+09:00

Just finished the first two days of lectures on neutrino mixing and the KamLAND experiment.

This afternoon we headed off to a local high school and borrowed their sports ground for a kick baseball tournament. About 140 students from the summer school took part. We split into two pools of four teams for a league tournament, and then a final. My team lost our second game 11-10, but won the pool on point difference. Cleaned up in the final 12-10. Everyone looks exhausted. We were playing on a standard-issue Japanese high school sand sports ground, so I took a bit of a beating when I was feilding.

Welcome party tonight. The organisers are really going out of their way to justify compulsory beers here every single day. As long as everyone is having a good time...

Summer School in Nagano

2006-08-06T12:14:00.000+09:00

At a hotel in Kijimadaira ski resort for the annual Nuclear and Particle Physicists of Japan summer school. Last night we had a lecture on Physics at the LHC by Prof Hagiwara (KEK), who came to talk at Osaka a few months back.

We followed up the lecture with a few beers downstairs in the lecture hall, and then a few more beers upstairs in the lobby before bed. Par for the course here I think.

Stunning Victory

2006-07-12T22:56:00.000+09:00

Just had the KEK relay yesterday evening. Each team consists of five people who run the same 2km course, and a total of 11 teams from the various experiments and subgroups in KEK took part. I was in one of the two teams from the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Sciences (IPNS).

Our team won overall with a time of 36’47". Second place was General Administration Department A, who were 59” behind, and third was the Computer Science Centre team at 2’26”. I overtook three others and got the award for fastest in the third leg (7’07”), and Sekiguchi from our team was fastest in the fourth leg (7’21”) as well.

It turned out to be a really good day. We weren’t too confident going into the race, but everyone was stoked with the result. We should have more or less the same team next year as well, so we’ll have to go for the hattrick.

IPNS A (red bibs) and IPNS B (white bibs). Before ...

... and after.

New Posts

2006-07-11T00:17:00.000+09:00

Still trying to update all the half-finished drafts from last month. Scroll down for new posts. The first is about the group meeting from 6/28, the second is from 6/10 with an update from the ILC School

Sorry

2006-07-07T23:27:00.000+09:00

Three of my five regular readers have complained about the lack of recent posts. Sorry people. I’m afraid I don’t really have a good excuse this time. I haven’t really run out of stuff to write about. I’m not too busy to take the time to update either. I actually have a handful of drafts reading for posting, which have been sitting there for a while. I’ll try to tidy things up a bit and post one every day or two for the next little while.

In other news, life is going well. Finally getting the hang of the analysis software, and making some actual progress for the first time in months. I can’t wait to get stuck into the real data from the experiment and discover something.

Rainy season has finished and the weather is getting better. Just went for a run this evening with the relay team. Every year at KEK they have a 5x2km relay race, with teams from each of the departments. Last year we won the race by about 10s, with a time of just under 39 minutes. This year’s race will be held next Tuesday, so it was a bit of a last chance trial run. Three from our team just ran under 7’20’’ tonight, so hopefully we’ll be able to win the trophy back again for a second year. I’ll have the results next week.

Group Meeting Presentation

2006-06-28T18:58:00.000+09:00

Every Tuesday morning our lab gets together for a weekly meeting, and then afterwards someone has to give a presentation. Normally we take it in turns each week, but I’ve been away a bit and skipped my last few chances, and it finally caught up with me yesterday. Usually the person giving the presentation explains what they’re working on, or they introduce a recent physics paper, and we all go through it and tear it to shreds together. I decided to go a different route, however, and give a summary of what I learnt at the ILC school last month.

I spent most of the night before going through and copy/pasting the slides from the lectures notes. In the end I had to condense so much out of it, and then make up for the gaps with other slides of my own, that it wasn’t as time effective as I thought it would be. I ended up with way too many slides, and I only got through a rough intro, and an explanation of the electron and positron sources and capture section. It’s my turn again four or five weeks from now, and I’ll try and finish off the rest of the machine then.

Overall the reception from our professor and the second year masters students and doctors students was pretty good, but the new students were fairly quiet throughout the whole ordeal. I’ll have to try a bit harder for the next talk. On the bright side, one of the kouhais sounded interested, and is thinking of attending the ILC school the next time it is held.

Suprisingly accurate comic courtesy of PhD.

B-Lab and Open Access to Data

2006-06-25T22:03:00.000+09:00

JoAnne over at Cosmic Variance has an interesting post on whether our data should be made public. Apparently at SUSY06 Tao Han proposed that “the LHC data should be made available to the community.” Currently most particle physics experiments refuse to release some or all of their raw or processed data publicly.

At Belle we make 1/nb of data available on request (Japanese only) for public outreach. Seeing as this corresponds to less than 1/600,000,000 of the total data, it is unlikely that anything will be found that hasn’t already been seen by the collaboration in the full data set, and we don’t really have to worry about other people going off and writing papers on our data.

As far as I’m aware the data consists of the same quantities we use to do physics analyses: 4-vectors of the charged tracks, neutral pions and photons. I assume it also includes PID information on the charged tracks, so you can see the probability of a given track being an electron, muon, pion, kaon or proton.

The data is mainly used by high school students to search for new resonances. For example, they might combine two proton tracks to search for a doubly charged six-quark state. One small problem is that somebody actually found one. Apparently claims for the discovery of violation of conservation of energy or electric charge are quite common as well. Of course, when you consider the possibility of particle misidentification and the limited acceptance of the detector these are easy enough to explain. I think it’s possible for someone to find just about anything they want to look for if they misinterpret the data correctly enough, which would obviously mean that there would be credibility issues with results published by anyone not on the collaboration.

Openly releasing data like this is great for physics outreach, and for getting students interested and involved in the experiment. I don’t think this is what Tao had in mind when he asked for the 4-vectors from the LHC experiments though. I assume he is asking for all the processed data, so that particle physics theorists and others could do their own analyses.

Given the massive amounts of data involved with Belle or LHC though I can’t see how this could possibly work. Surely the only way would be to cut down the number of events by releasing only selected signal events after an analysis has been performed by the collaboration, which would sort of defeat the point. Having the data out there might improve everyone’s confidence in the experiment, but in practice I just can’t see how anyone could possibly sift through all of it on their own and pick up something missed by the rest of the collaboration.

ILC School Update

2006-06-12T17:04:00.000+09:00

More news from the ILC school. There is a nice article about it on the net, with quotes from the organizers and some of the students who took part (I’m not in there though.) It seems like all the students were fairly unanimous on the homework situation, and I think the organizers got the message. Otherwise it sounds like the reception from the students was fairly good. As an aside, we got our homework results back. I made the top half, which I’m pretty happy with. Not bad for my first crack at accelerator physics, but next time a bit more preparation and study might be a good idea.

In other news, between all of us taking part in the school we managed to eat too much at the buffet, and the hotel had to ask us to pay extra for breakfast and dinner each day. How did this happen? This is the first time I’ve heard of anyone eating too much at an all you can eat buffet and being asked to pay extra (although I remember having to pay extra for drinking too much at an all you can drink pub a few years back, but that’s slightly different.) On that note, I thought I’d start an informal poll to get everyone’s opinion:

Q. Why did we eat too much at the buffet?
a) Because we were mainly foreigners.
b) Because we were mainly students.
c) Because we were mainly physicists.
d) All of the above.
e) Other?

I feel a little bad about the stereotypes, but I’m drawing a blank on any other possible reasons. Suggestions welcome.

600/fb Celebration

2006-06-07T21:17:00.000+09:00

Just had the 600/fb party tonight. At a particle collider like KEKB, which produces the B mesons detected by the Belle experiment, the efficiency with which collisions occur is measured by “luminosity,” and depends on how many particles we can smash into a tiny area each second. The total amount of data recorded is called “integrated luminosity,” and is calculated by adding up the luminosity over the lifetime of the experiment.

This integrated luminosity is a direct measure of the number of collisions that have occurred, and is measured in units of /fb (inverse femto barns). For us, 1/fb of integrated luminosity will produce approximately one million B meson pairs, and takes about one day to accumulate. The more integrated luminosity we record, the more rare matter/antimatter decays we can see, and the better we can understand the difference between the behavior of matter and antimatter.

The original goal of KEKB was to produce 100/fb in 3 years, although due to a lot of improvements to the accelerator we’ve ended up taking six times that amount in just twice the time. Good work accelerator team.

(Above photo was taken from the KEKB page)

Couldn't Resist

2006-06-02T23:55:00.000+09:00

I'm trying to stear clear of commenting about Japanese news here, but there are a few stories today that I couldn't resist.

Firstly, the mayor of Bonn has ordered Japanese soccer fans not to jump into the Rhine during the World Cup. After the Hanshin Tigers baseball team won the central division title in 2003, over 5000 fans jumped into the Dotonbori river in Osaka, and one person drowned. When I was in Sydney for New Year's Eve 2000 we were watching the fireworks just after midnight and a handful of Japanese tourists jumped into Sydney Harbour naked and started swimming around as well. The police eventually had to come to get them out. Why do they do this? These Japanese fans are normally well behaved and good about following the rules, what causes them to snap and jump naked into a polluted river?

Secondly, Japan's fertility rate set another record low in 2005. In addition, Japan's population decreased for the first time since World War II. Commentators predictably lashed out at Japan's poor childcare facilities and the cost of having children here, while politicians pretended to be deeply concerned. "We have to take this figure very seriously," Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told reporters. The only news here though is the inability of the government to predicit long term population trends. The 1.25 fertility rate is significantly lower than the the long-term forecast of 1.31 predicted just three years earlier. Otherwise, the general trend towards lower fertility rates has been obvious for decades now, not just in Japan but in many other developed countries as well, as shown in the map below.

The article mentions rates of 1.16 in South Korea, and 1.24 in Singapore, but doesn't point out that the rates are 1.79 in New Zealand, 1.47 in the EU, or 2.09 in the US, all of which are below replacement rate, and all of which are commonly used in Japan as examples of countries with more child-friendly societies. Policies supposed to help improve the fertility rate in certain European countries have produced only moderate increases. It seems that this trend towards lower fertility rates and population decline is inevitable. I don't see why it has to be a problem though. The planet is overpopulated already, can't we just raise the retirement age to offset the economic effects and forget about it? Why is this option almost never brought up?

All Finished

2006-05-28T23:42:00.000+09:00

Just headed back to Osaka tonight after the ILC school. It was a really good experience. Before I went I read through some of the lecture slides on the net, and was a bit worried because I had no idea what they were on about. It was all a bit outside my area of expertise. At the school though, the teachers all did a fantastic job, and the lectures were really well presented. Just reading through the slides probably isn’t the best way to learn.

Overall I picked up a lot more than I thought I would. There were a lot of other students who were also from non-accelerator physics backgrounds, and they all seemed to enjoy the course as well. Hopefully I will get the chance to take part in another of these in a few years time.

KEK Tour

2006-05-26T22:10:00.000+09:00

Second to last day. We left Hayama this morning and came to KEK by bus. After lunch we went for a tour around KEK to see the Photon Factory, KEKB, Superconducting Test Facility (STF), RF Cavity Fabrication and Test Facility, and the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF). I’ve seen KEKB before, but none of the rest. It’s amazing how many different things they’re studying here that I never new about.

The highlight for me was seeing the ATF. This is a 90m linear accelerator and a 1.5GeV damping ring with a circumference of 138m, which is used for various accelerator studies for the ILC. The linac is shown below.

On Belle we are just trying to take as much data as possible, and as long as the accelerator and detector are working properly we don’t usually think about them too much. We normally only go inside once a year during summer maintenance to fiddle round with things and make improvements. The people working on ATF, however, are focused on studying the machine itself, and have much more opportunity to get hands on and play around with it.

It still gives me warm fuzzies inside whenever I get to see one of these machines up close. They’re such amazing creations. I think its a shame that most of the general public never get the chance to see them. Imagine building something like the accelerator in the photo, but 150 times longer. Then put two of these end-to-end and shoot trillions of electrons into each other. Awesome!

Nice Area

2006-05-25T13:34:00.000+09:00

Last day here at Hayama, and then we leave tomorrow morning to go to KEK for a couple of days. The weather today was great, so after lunch I went for a wander around the village again. Very nice area. Great views of the sea, and much larger houses compared to the major Japanese cities. I saw a Lambo and a Ferrari as well. I wonder what kind of people are living here?

Kamakura

2006-05-23T11:34:00.000+09:00

I'm still at the ILC school. Yesterday we only had morning classes, and then after lunch we went into nearby Kamakura to see the sites.

Kamakura was the home of the Minamoto shoguns during the period of the Kamakura shogunate from 1185 to 1333. It was towards the end of this period that the Mongols launched two invasions under Kublai Khan in 1274 and 1281, both of which were largely wiped out by kamikaze (typhoons.) However, the financial strain from supporting the military during this time helped weaken the regime. It was eventually overthrown after Kamakura’s most powerful general, Ashikaga Takauji, sided with the emperor to remove the ruling clan. He then declared himself the first shogun of the new Muromachi shogunate, which was based in Kyoto.

First we went to Kotoku in, to see the statue of the Amida Buddha, and then we headed on to Hachiman-gu, which was built in its present location in 1191. The photos below show prayers written out by people who visited the shrine, including one by Michael from Taiwan, who is studying with me here at the ILC school.

It was a good break from all the study, but we still had homework to do from the morning lectures, so we were all sitting in the lobby studying until after midnight again.

Homework?

2006-05-21T13:40:00.000+09:00

First lessons started yesterday. Physics motivation, introduction to the project, and some of the optimization problems. It looks like it’s going to be a fairly intense eight days. We have to get up at 7:00 for breakfast, study, classes, lunch, classes, and then homework in the evening. It took me about six hours last night after dinner, and I still didn’t get it all finished. Hope the course load doesn't get any tougher.

ILC School

2006-05-19T21:50:00.000+09:00

Just arrived in Hayama for the ILC School. It is an eight daylong meeting to introduce students to the accelerator side of the ILC.

There are about 80 students here in total, probably about three quarters of them from overseas. About half specialize in accelerators, and the rest are a mixture of experimental particle physicists, engineers, theorists etc. For those who are interested, here are links to the ILC School Site and the program with links to the lectures.

Went for a run around the village this afternoon before the welcome party. It’s a resort area where some people have their summer homes. Very nice place, I’ve never seen anything like it in Japan before. The weather today was terrible, so I didn’t take any photos, but I’ll post some soon.

Back Again

2006-05-13T10:10:00.000+09:00

Caught the train up last night. I have on-call shift here again for the next week. The machine condition is not so good, there have been a few computer problems, and the machine luminosity is quite low. Hopefully the KEKB accelerator people and our data guys can get everything sorted soon.

Super-Collider

2006-05-12T23:07:00.000+09:00

Spent Wednesday through Friday taking an intensive course at Osaka. I have to take two of these to get the credits I need to graduate, so I’ll try to nail them both this year.

The talk was about the discovery potential of the LHC, the new 27km circumference super-collider being assembled at the moment at CERN in France/Switzerland.

It was aimed at master’s course and doctor’s course theorists, so some of it was a bit over my head. It was still a worthwhile lecture to take though. I have the ILC school next week, so much of the physics background will come in handy.

Overall the physics was very interesting. If the Higgs boson exists with the properties predicted by the standard model, then we should have conclusive evidence for it by 2010 at the latest. Will be an exciting next few years.

Physical

2006-05-08T22:37:00.000+09:00

Just took the health exam this morning, which was the first of four I have to take every year to be allowed to play with the accelerator and radiation sources. They’re fairly thorough. Nice to know the government cares enough to check if this stuff isn’t killing us, but I think they might be being a bit over cautious. Anyway, clean bill of health, so I should be good for the next three months.

Golden Week

2006-05-07T12:50:00.000+09:00

Well, it's been a fairly good Golden Week holiday. My birthday was last Wednesday, which is a problem most years because it is the first day of GW and if I try to go out anywhere the public transport is completely packed. This year Mrs. Physicist and I decided to take it easy, and just made a picnic lunch and headed down to Kyoto Gosho, the old Imperial Palace. The weather was brilliant, and surprisingly there was hardly anybody there. Later on we headed out to a nice restaurant near Kiyomizu Temple for dinner. There were no crowds anywhere, and it was a good day all around.

On Thursday we went out to Kameoka, about 20 minutes West of Kyoto by train, and then went hiking along the Hozu river and up through the mountain ranges. It was only a few of hours, but the scenery was amazing. Again, it was great weather, and other than a group of four on mountain bikes we didn’t see anyone the whole way.

Unfortunately I left the camera at uni so I didn’t get any photos all weekend. Must remember for next time. Good break, but I have to get back to work again this week. I have meetings to prepare for on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, lectures Wednesday through Friday, then up to the lab for another weeklong on-call shift Friday evening. Should be the last time until after summer I hope.

They’ve Done It

2006-05-06T00:00:00.000+09:00

The government has finally done it. They’ve ordered Telecom to unbundle the local loop, which a lot of the smaller internet companies have been demanding for a couple of years. Hopefully this will mean cheaper broadband in NZ, if not faster. At least with new competition everyone will have a bit of motivation to improve services. We are currently in the bottom third for OECD countries, so there should be plenty of opportunity for improvement.

Field Trip 2

2006-04-25T01:23:00.000+09:00

Oops. I was going to upload this yesterday, but I lost the cable to get the photos off the camera. Better late than never. Just thought I’d post a summary of the stuff we saw on the trip.

We left about midday on Friday to go to SPring-8, which is the world’s highest energy synchrotron light source. They have a high-energy beam of electrons, which they steer around a 1.5km storage ring using magnets. Every time they bend the beam it emits a burst of radiation tangent to the ring. Because the radiation is extremely high energy, higher than X-rays for example, it is useful for materials science and life science. For example, they shoot the radiation through crystals and from the way it is absorbed or scattered they can determine their internal structure.

The following photo was taken at the laser reverse Compton scattering experimental hutch, where Nakano claimed to have found the first evidence for the pentaquark Theta in 2002. The results are still controversial, and haven’t been consistently confirmed by other experiments, so they are setting up a new experiment so they can take more data in the near future.

After we finished the tour of SPring-8 we went to Harima Observatory. It’s one of the major Observatories in Japan, hidden in the mountains in the middle of Hyogo prefecture, about an hour’s drive northwest of Kobe. It was supposed to be dark, but the light pollution from Himeji and Okayama was still pretty bad. On the bright side, the weather was clear and we had a good view through the big telescopes as well as just looking at the stars from outside. It’s not normally possible to see more than a handful of stars in Osaka or Tokyo or Tsukuba. Professor Tsunemi took the following shot of Saturn, although it didn’t come out nearly as good as it looked through the scope.

Field Trip 1

2006-04-22T16:03:00.000+09:00

Absolutely buggered. Just got back to uni from the field trip. The new bachelor’s students had way too much energy, and they were up yapping all night. The other doctor’s course students and I headed off to bed around 4:00, and we were woken at 7:00 for breakfast and then lectures all morning. I took a few photos at SPring-8 and the observatory, which I’ll post tomorrow.

Overall it was good fun. It’s the same trip I did exactly six years ago when I had just started at Osaka, and I can't believe how quickly the time has passed. It felt really odd to be the old guy answering everyone’s questions this time around, as opposed to one of the overenthusiastic new kids. Four years of undergrad should mellow them out a bit.

Home Again

2006-04-20T23:49:00.000+09:00

Just finished on-call shift this afternoon. I had one 5:00 AM wakeup from the guy on the experimental shift, he thought some of the data was funny, but it was nothing to worry about. Also had a bit of excitement when I got called out to fix a computer that wasn’t responding. Eventually a reboot got it going again, but we lost about 30 minutes of valuable data. Overall it wasn’t too bad, especially for just after a restart.

I’m back in Kyoto at the moment, and leave again tomorrow lunchtime to go on a field trip with uni. Every year in April a handful of professors take the first year bachelor’s students on an overnight field trip to SPring-8 (Japan’s highest energy synchrotron radiation facility) and the Harima Observatory. This year they asked the first year doctor’s course students to come along to help, and to talk to the undergrads about our research. Looking forward to it. It will be a nice change of scenery.

Will try and write on Saturday evening after we get back. In the meantime, I’ve got an analysis meeting tomorrow morning before we set off which I have to study for.

Belle Is Back

2006-04-14T09:48:00.000+09:00

Belle is now taking data again after the spring maintenance shutdown. The KEKB accelerator team have spent the last couple of days aligning and checking the condition of the beams, and they started collisions about 6PM yesterday.

The Belle event display can be seen live one the net here, or else it can be reached from the links in the bottom left corner of the Belle webpage.

The picture shows an end view of the detector. The electron and positron beams collide head on in the centre, and the charged particles that result from the collisions are captured as they spread out through the detector. A lot of the data we capture are Bhabha scattering events, where the positron and electron just scatter off each other and stop in the detector, like this:

But occasionally there is an interesting one where they annihilate and create new particles, like this one:

Usually we have a few troubles in the first week or so after we restart taking data, so it's normally a bad time to be on shift, but everything seems to be working well so far. Fingers crossed for the rest of the week.

(Updated photos.)

On-call Shift

2006-04-13T09:23:00.000+09:00

I've spent most of the last week at uni with enrolment and orientation and all the other usual stuff we have to do at the beginning of the school year in April. Just popped up to the lab here in Tsukuba a couple of days ago, and I start the weeklong on-call shift this afternoon. Will write a bit more about the experiment later.

Hanami

2006-04-10T16:23:00.000+09:00

We had our annual hanami (flower viewing) drinks yesterday in Kobe. The weather was good, and there was a really good turnout. Most of the Kiwi students who have come over with Monbusho were there, including the new girl Susan from Napier, who it turns out was on the same flight as me on the way over. Everyone's busy with study and work, so it's been the first time I've seen most of them since last year.

Freyberg

2006-03-31T07:08:00.000+09:00

I popped in to Freyberg, my old high school, for a visit yesterday. The place has changed a bit since I was last there, it's bigger with lots of new classrooms, but it still feels familiar. It was good to see all my old teachers again too.

My chemistry teacher took me into his Year 12 class to introduce me and then asked me to give a little impromptu talk about what I'm doing on the experiment. To begin with I wasn't quite sure how to go about explaining everything, so I sort of stumbled for the first few minutes, but after that the students all started to get involved and asked lots of good questions. It was more of a two-way discussion than a speech, which made it a lot easier to figure out what to talk about. The students all seemed fairly interested, and I managed to keep their attention for about 30 minutes, so it must have gone all right.

It's always difficult trying to explain what you're doing to other people, whether it's other physicists or family. You have to aim the explanation at exactly the right level, otherwise you're wasting everyone's time. Hopefully it's something I'll get better at with a bit more practice.

KIX

2006-03-25T18:31:00.000+09:00

I'm on my way home for a few days for a holiday. It's been over a year since I was last in NZ and I'm really looking forward to seeing the folks and the whanau again. Still getting over last night. Had a really good time, although I left after a couple of hours when everyone else decided to head on to the second bar. Hopefully I can get a bit of sleep on the plane.

The free wireless connection here at Kansai airport is great, but I can only use it to access the internet. I tried to log on to the uni servers to get my mail and got declined.

>ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

Does anybody know how to get around this?

Graduation

2006-03-24T16:19:00.000+09:00

Just finished graduation ceremony.

We get our certificates in a few minutes and then a few of us are going out to celebrate tonight. Out of the 83 physics students who enrolled in 2000, only a handful of us are going on to doctors course, so it will probably be the last time we all get together. Will post photos later.

Spring/Autumn Equinox

2006-03-21T19:35:00.000+09:00

Today is the vernal equinox, or first day of spring on the Japanese calendar, which makes it a national holiday. Actually, I think it's probably the halfway point of spring, but never mind.

The weather is getting warmer, and the days are getting longer. It was still light at 6:40, as opposed to 4:50 a couple of months back. Just about time to start evening soccer games outdoors again.

Anyway, the plum blossoms are out. I took this photo this afternoon at uni here in Osaka. It should only be another couple of weeks until the cherry blossoms are in full bloom and we have flower viewing. Apparently they are out in Tokyo already. The Japan Meteorological Agency says it is seven days earlier than average. I swear it's getting warmer every year.

Blog Motivation

2006-03-14T23:19:00.000+09:00

Until recently there didn't seem to be too many science/physics blogs around, although they seem to be becoming a bit more popular lately. I think part of the reason for this is the success of blogs like Quantum Diaries, Cosmic Variance, and Bad Astronomy. These have all have done a good job of keeping the public up to date with what's happening with physics and science, which I think has encouraged a lot more scientists to jump on the bandwagon.

One problem with scientists writing blogs though is that they don't always seem entirely certain what they're trying to write about. At one extreme they end up becoming a place to rant about politics, no different from any number of other blogs around, and at the other they practically turn into a textbook aimed at graduate student level. My reason for starting is to try to keep friends and family up to date with what I'm doing over here on the experiment, and to use it as a place to discuss what's going on with particle physics and science in general over here in Japan, and also in New Zealand. It will hopefully also provide much needed writing practice.

I'm a bit worried I'll run out of stuff to write about, but I'll have to wait and see. Life as a particle physics grad student is not as exciting and action packed as it might sound. Anyway, I'll try to post a couple of times a week. Let me know if you have any good ideas or topics to write about, or if you have any questions about the experiment that I should try to explain.

Is Palmy that bad?

2006-03-12T01:55:00.000+09:00

Apparently John Cleese wasn't too thrilled with Palmy when he stopped off last year.

Cleese, of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers fame, stayed in
Palmerston North last November as part of his My Life, Time and
Current Medical Problems tour.

Cleese called the city "the suicide capital of New Zealand" and said "if you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick."

Is it really that bad? I always just thought it was a good spot to relax.

Welcome All

2006-03-09T22:48:00.000+09:00

So I should probably introduce myself. I'm a student studying particle physics at Osaka University. I was born and raised in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and after finishing high school I came over to Japan to study physics. I spent my first year here at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies to try to learn a bit of the language, and then switched to Osaka University where I finished my bachelor's degree in 2004.

I've just spent the last two years doing my master's degree on the Belle experiment. The aim of the Belle experiment is to measure some of the differences between matter, which makes up our universe, and antimatter, which is a sort of mirror image of matter. The experiment is situated in Tsukuba, a medium-ish sized town about an hours drive north east of Tokyo. I spend about half my time at the lab here, and the rest at university in Osaka or in Kyoto.

Up until now I've been mainly working on developing part of one of the pieces of software we use for the experiment. Graduation is in another couple of weeks, and then I will begin work on a doctor's degree where I will probably be analysing some of the data from the experiment. In the meantime I should hopefully be able to carry on with the software work, as well as help with some of the research and development for a hardware upgrade we're hoping to carry out in another couple of years.

Other than research I spend time reading, relaxing, getting out to see the sites in Kyoto, and catching up with friends here and overseas. I play soccer and go running occasionally here at the lab, and try to do a bit of travel when time allows.

Train Collision

2006-03-08T23:38:00.000+09:00

Another travel-first. Caught the shinkansen from Kyoto up to the lab this evening. Just as we were pulling out of Nagoya the driver threw the emergency brake. Apparently a passenger came running up to the train a couple of seconds after we took off and launched full speed into the side. We had to wait a few minutes while the station staff checked for dents in the door. Both passenger and train seemed okay, but they refused to let the guy on. He didn't look very happy as we cruised past. Wonder if he'll get a refund?