A Quantum Diaries Survivor

Well, it looks like I am going to follow a few talks at  PASCOS 2007 (PArticles, Strings, and COSmology) this year. The conference will be held at the Imperial College in London from July 2nd to 9th. London again, after another conference in cosmology in March! And Pascos for the second time, after Boston in 1998 (the conference was held at Norteastern University back then).

The list of invited speakers is yummy. Albrecht, Bond, Buchmuller, Buescher, Copeland, Cvetic, Efstathiou, Ellis, Feng, Ferrara, Frenk, Giddins, Hawking, Horgan, Hough, Kachru, Kallosh, Kaplunovsky, Linde, Matthiae, McLerran, Nakada, Ross, Seljak, Silk, Smith, Son, ‘t Hooft, Turok, Tye, Virdee, Wark.

I did not plan to submit my candidacy for any talk to represent the CDF collaboration this summer, but the chair of our Speakers Committee had the nice idea to notify us that the conference organizers had told him they were willing to consider post-deadline submissions of abstracts from our experiment, not having received any! Since my current interest for cosmology is high, I decided why the hell not… And I did. 

Here is the abstract I submitted:

“Precision Standard Model Tests at the Tevatron“

The CDF and D0 experiments have recently produced exquisite new measurements in several key quantities constraining the physics of the Standard Model, with datasets in excess of one inverse femtobarn of proton-antiproton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV. New results include a 1% determination of the top quark mass, the most precise determination of the W boson mass, the first observation of WZ production, the first evidence for associated ZZ production at a hadron collider, and much more, including improved searches for the SM Higgs boson.
The talk will discuss these results as well as the general picture of our current knowledge of the Standard Model.

Of course the abstract was accepted… CDF has been producing such a string of five-star results lately that everybody wants to hear about it. And representing CDF is really a honor I feel today as much as I did ten talks ago.

So I hope I will be able to post a few notes on the interesting talks I will hear in London. Unfortunately, this trip will only be partly funded - I need to pay for my own stay, because our CDF group has no money for me any more this year. I thus decided I will only be in London for three days.  That will allow me to give my talk, hear a few more, give a look at the Courtauld, and be back before my wife gets really pissed off (I have been around a bit too much lately!).

“When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.“ 
 

Steve Hoflich