Makoto Fujiwara

Not exactly a 10 minute man

This is of course about conference talks.

I was at American Physical Society Meeting of Northwest Division last week. As Gordon Watts writes, 10 minute talks are very hard. I had been coaching our student Ryan Bayes on his talk. He did a great job. His talk was well practiced, well organized, and well executed. My talk, on the contrary, gave him an example of how not to give a 10 minute talk! Too much materials, not enough practice, going over time! I'm sure Gordon is talking about me when he writes:

The great thing to do is watch people's expressions when they get the 2 minute warning.

I was barely finishing the introduction when I got the 2 minute warning! Well at least, this time my nose did not bleed few minutes before my talk.

Gordon did give a nice talk. In fact, my colleague Art Olin and I cornered him afterwords to learn more about his decision tree analysis. We would like to invite him to TRIUMF to give a seminar when he has a new result on single top production.

It was nice to meet another Qantum Diarist in person. I hope to meet more of them in the future. By the way, I'm totally impressed that Gordon has written 8 postings since the APS conference! When does he find the time with all other stuff he's doing???

Victoria APS meeting

Tomorrow, I'm leaving for Victoria, BC (see pic below), for American Physical Society meeting of North West section. My colleague Art Olin is giving a TWIST talk in Nuclear Physics session, and our student Ryan Bayes, and I are giving talks on Particle Physics session. Ryan's talking about his search for lepton flavor violating rare decay of muons, and I'm giving a usual antihydrogen talk. It promises to an interesting conference.

It looks like a QDer Gordon Watts is also giving a talk at the meeting. I'm looking forward to seeing him in person. I'll report on our encounter.

Searching for Nature's Right Hand

Our TWIST collaboration (TRIUMF Weak Intearaction Symmetry Test) has recently repored our first physics results. An article just appeared in this month's CERN Courier.  Here is our PR blurb:

      

Elementary particles such as electrons are labeled as either "right-handed" or "left-handed".  A surprising observation is that only left-handed particles seem to feel the weak nuclear force, whereas left- and right-handed particles feel the other fundamental forces equally. This difference, called parity violation, was predicted and observed in the 1950's, and led to a Nobel Prize.  It is now a cornerstone of the modern Standard Model of subatomic physics.  However, there are strong reasons to believe that this Standard Model is incomplete.  "Left-right symmetric" theories explain parity violation by assuming that right-handed particles also respond to the weak force, but we would need to be in a much hotter world - with a temperature well above 10¹⁵ degrees - for this to be obvious. The idea is that in the early Universe, the weak force was left-right symmetric, but in the course of the evolution of the Universe, the right-handed interaction is somehow "frozen".

The TWIST Collaboration is testing these theories with high-precision measurements of the decay of the muon, a particle that appears identical to an electron in all regards except that it is heavier. The Collaboration has just reported the first improvement since 1966 in the measurement of the energy spectrum of positrons produced in muon decay. The result obtained so far agrees with the Standard Model predictions, and sets stringent new constraints to the left-right symmetric theories. The TWIST Collaboration will continue its effort to further scrutinize the Standard Model and its extensions, with yet higher precisions, as we seek to understand the origin of the left-right asymmetry in Nature.

The results are published in:

• J.R. Musser et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 101805 (2005)
• A. Gaponenko et al. Phys. Rev. D 71, 071101(R) (2005)

and they form the basis of two Ph.D. theses for Jim Musser and Andrei Gaponenko.

For more information, see the TWIST Experiment Website.

Dismantling ATHENA, cleaing the way for ALPHA

At CERN, we are dismantling the ATHENA (AntTiHydrogEN Apparatus) experiment, a successful project which produced the first cold atoms of antihydrogen. ATHENA completed the data collection in the end of 2004, and some of us former ATHENA members are development a new experiment, ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus) experiment.

 

During my last visit to CERN, I helped disassemble cables. ATHENA was a small scale experiment, but we still had hundreds of cables running between the experimental apparatus and from the experimental area to the control room. We have to clear all the cables, together with other apparatus, in order to make room for ALPHA. It gave me a bit of sentimental feeling, since one of the first things I did as a new postdoc in ATHENA in 1999 was to install the cables for external annihilation detectors. CERN actually has a department to install cables for the experimenters, but in order to save the money, we did it ourselves. (Physicists are always cheapter than techinicians!) Back then when we were building the experiment, we hadn't faintest ideas whether we could actually succeed in making antihydrogen, let alone be competitive with our competitors, and make the top physics news of Year 2002. It’s a bit pity that we have to dismantle all this. But we must move on, in order to make progress. I hope that, several years from now, I can look back the present time with similar good memories.