I am not too worried by having to prepare my slides, since the subject of my talk is quite a familiar one. I will read the few most recent papers on the subject, then collect the most recent results from the two Collaborations I am representing, and put the latter together in a logical sequence. However, this talk puts quite some pressure on my schedule for the next few weeks. In fact, it would be quite nice if I could include in the talk a slide or two with preliminary results from my own search of Z boson decays to b quark pairs: a topic which is very closely connected to the search for the Higgs boson, which may show up in our data in the very same signature (two hadronic jets with b-quark content). I do have results, but they are not approved by CDF yet, and the process of approving even one or two "Public Relations" plots will be quite complex. (I should mention that producing an approved result from the Z search is one of the milestones of the working group I co-lead for March 15th, so the winter conference is nothing but additional motivation for doing what I should be doing anyway!) The process of producing a result in the analysis of experimental data typically starts when one obtains a "raw" result, which has then to be polished to be presentable. Polishing it does not mean manipulating it, but rather to start attacking it from all possible fronts, imagining all sorts of possible effects that might invalidate it, bias it, or fake it. By doing that, one learns all weaknesses of the result, and manages to estimate the size of all systematic uncertainties affecting the measurement. So, starting today, most of my time will go into that business for the next few weeks!
Last Friday the CDF Speakers Committee selected me to represent the CDF and D0 collaborations at Moriond QCD, a winter conference on particle physics focusing on the strong interactions. I will be giving a presentation there on the new results on "Searches for the SM Higgs at the Tevatron" (SM= Standard Model, the current theoretical framework of particle physics), during the week from March 12th to March 19th. I sort of expected that my request for a talk at a winter conference was going to be accepted (I went as far as to include it in my schedule in a recent post here, and to reserve plane tickets for my travel accordingly), since I've not given talks for a while now - if one excludes a annual Italian symposium called IFAE (Incontri sulla Fisica delle Alte Energie == Meetings on High Energy Physics) where contributions are not distributed by the CDF Speakers Committee. However, I am quite pleased, since the conference will be held in a very nice ski resort in La Thuile (see photo above), a small mountain village close to the border between Italy and Switzerland.
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