My Work

Go to pictures of me recabling the EMC.

The official BaBar webpage.

I'll explain what I do in everyday language:

I'm doing a PhD in Particle Physics. I analyse data produced by the BaBar detector, which you can see in the photo. The BaBar detector is at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, which is why I'm here now. The accelerator fires particles (electrons and positrons) together very fast. When they collide they smash into thousands of other particles which are detected by BaBar. This means that BaBar records billions of pieces of data every second.

So I sit in an office on a computer and write computer programs which process this information into something useful.

At the moment I'm trying to reduce the systematic uncertainty on the efficiency with which BaBar detects the pi-zero particle. Its not very glamorous but it should be very useful to lots of other people, (if I can ever get an answer out - its all a bit tricky at the moment!)

My thesis will be measuring how tau leptons decay into a single pion and a single pi-zero meson. I'm only just starting this part so I don't know any more than that yet!



The BaBar detector.

Here is the BaBar detector, which is where all my data comes from. Doesn't it look technical!

My SLAC id.

Here is my SLAC id. It has a dosimeter on it (the bit at the top) which measures how much radiation I'm exposed to (don't worry, it's VERY little)!