Well, the big moment is about to arrive. More than a decade ago, the LSND collaboration shook up the particle physics world by announcing a neutrino (actually, antineutrino) oscillation result whose interpretation requires physics beyond the standard model. As I wrote in a previous entry, I am on MiniBooNE which has been working on a blind analysis to confirm or refute the LSND result for the past ten years. We have been pushing very hard to "open the box" and see what the answer is for quite a while and it has finally happened.
Our box opening procedure was a four step process in which each step was designed to reveal enough information that we could decide if things were working correctly, but not enough information to tell us the answer. Thus blindness was preserved until the final step. Our procedure was designed so that if a problem were to be found in one of the early steps, we could stop the procedure and try to fix the problem, before starting over again. Doing that would be OK as long as we did not reveal any information about the contents of the box.
Today at Fermilab, our first oscillation result will finally be announced, and tomorrow I will give a seminar on the result myself here at Imperial. I can't say what the answer is yet, so you'll have to come to my seminar to find out!
As an interesting side note, we did have to stop the box opening procedure and start over again, so it was a very good thing that we had this procedure. We attempted a box opening in February, over the weekend when I wrote my blind analysis blog entry, and discovered a reason to abort the process and regroup. But a full entry about that will have to wait until the result is announced to the world. Right now, I have to complete my seminar!
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Undergraduate and Postgraduate students, Research Associates and Staff at the Imperial College London High Energy Physics Group. (everyone is invited to add comments!)
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Postings to this blog by HEP group members are being made as individuals and are not intended to be representative of the group as a whole, experimental collaborations, or any other entity.
2 comments:
Now I see why you weren't able to comment on how the blind analysis was going!
I am going to try not to learn the final result after it is announced at Fermilab in a few hours, till you give your seminar tomorrow. So I will not check this blog till after your seminar.
I did just hear that it is snowing in Fermilab today, perhaps that is a hint....
The result is the important thing of course, but it will be really interesting to hear the details of the implementation of the blind analysis. There are physicists who don't accept the need to do blind analyses after all. Looking forward to it!
I thought I should add a comment, not just on the anticipation of the result but also on th snow. Come to think of it with the snow and anticipation its a bit like christmas! As for the result this is pretty exciting for me. It'll be the first time that I will hear a result firsthand rather than through a journal. Though I dont work for the MiniBooNE experiment I share a floor with the group and so know a lot of the people who have been hard at work over the last x number of months to get to this point. With some also working on SciBooNE the hours that have been worked are crazy. As for the snow, I dont know what is going on here in Chicago, a few weeks ago it was in the 70s (fahrenheit) and now it is barely above freezing. I only hope that by the week of the 23rd that we are back to warmer temperatures as SciBooNE is due to be installed then.
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