Comments on: On Competition

By: Life as a Physicist » More On Competition

Life as a Physicist » More On Competition — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 05:16:24 +0000

[...] Tommaso's and my posts on the Bs rivalry got picked up by the Cosmic Variance blog in, ironically, a post talking about sociology (I have got to update the look on my blog; ugly compared to everyone else!). One of the things both Tommaso and I discussed is what it takes to get a result out of a large experimental collaboration. The comments to the Cosmic Variance post picked up on some of this. In particular, there were several comments that could be summed up by this one by Scott O: The SNO collaboration goes a step further still. It is collaboration policy not to show any result in public unless it has both gone through extensive internal review and has been submitted for publication to a refereed journal. In other words, there is no such thing as a “SNO preliminary result”. The attitude is that if it’s not ready to submit for publication, it’s not ready to show in public either. Obviously this slows down the publication process, but personally I think there’s a lot of be said for it as well. [...]

By: Life as a Physicist » Blog Archive » CDF Nails It!

Life as a Physicist » Blog Archive » CDF Nails It! — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 05:32:30 +0000

[...] Along the x axis is the difference in mass between a Bs meson (a B meson containing a b and a s quark) and its anti-matter partner, the anti-Bs meson. The y-axis is the amplitude, but for sake of brevity, I'll call it the probability (I'm being very sloppy here!). Tommaso goes into a good deal of detail in his post, so I won't repeat it here. You can see how CDF's data resolves the high-probability peak much (at 17.25 ps-1) much better than D0 does (at 19 ps-1). That is for all the reasons we previously talked about both on this blog and on Tommaso's blog. [...]

By: Experimental sociology | Cosmic Variance

Experimental sociology | Cosmic Variance — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 15:09:56 +0000

[...] A little late, but I didn’t want to let slip this interesting discussion about the agonizing process of making experimental particle physics results ready for public consumption from Tomaso Dorrigo and Gordon Watts. You’ll recall that we mentioned a couple of weeks ago the new results from Fermilab’s Tevatron on B-mixing, a measurement that puts interesting new constraints on the possibilities for physics beyond the Standard Model. The first announcement was from the D0 (”D-Zero”) experiment; as Collin pointed out in the comments, the CDF experiment followed with their own results soon thereafter. [...]