T2K's First Ever Publication!

As avid followers of this blog will be aware, a group of us here at Imperial HEP have been working on the T2K Experiment over the past several years. Personally it has been seven years since I got started on T2K, although it certainly feels like much more!

All these years of toil, and we had nothing to show for it (especially in the "metric-based" world we live in today), so I am happy to say that we have just had our first paper accepted.

It isn't a paper on a physics result though, but what we call a "NIM paper", because it is being published in the journal Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics. This is where physicists describe the novel setups and techniques they are using to conduct experiments.

Often this sort of paper takes ages to get out because physicists tend to prefer to spend their time running and maintaining their detectors rather than writing about them, but somehow the T2K Collaboration has managed to get its act together and describe the experiment over 33 highly entertaining pages, before we have any physics results out!

Particle physicists invented the World Wide Web to help us exchange information freely, and in that spirit, anyone can access the paper for free on the arXiv site: http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.1238

Three of the pictures in the paper are mine, including the "Exploded ND280 Detector" picture that I made four years ago, shown above. I'd be the first one to admit that it isn't a work of art, but it seems to do the job!

So, we've described the experiment in detail in this paper, but the question is, where are the physics results?

Well, it takes time to collect enough data for an experiment to be able to start discerning new things about Nature, and it also takes time for physicists to interpret that data -- so it may be a while, but I can guarantee that we are working very hard indeed on it!