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light to turn green but it made me very happy to see a local physics celebrity and durham transplant in fact it was prof johnson who first brought my attention to the tudor house while i was still getting acclimated to cambridge in 06 filed under just for fun 6 comments collider physics for theory students 13sep08 this is another post on my farewell tour which will last until i can properly say farewell i thought it was important to write one more literature guide since my qft and susy guides seemed reasonably popular for the first time since the deep inelastic experiments of the 60s the high energy physics community is approaching an energy frontier where we can expect the unexpected the hep ph community is shifting back to focusing on experiment driven interpretation of collider data as we approach the era of the lhc this is all very exciting but thirty years of top down model building has left the community somewhat ill prepared to teach its graduate students how to connect with experiments consider for example the large number of susy books reviews out there versus the number collider physics books reviews it s even harder to find reviews targeted to theory students rather than our experimental colleagues as a side project i ve started typing up a set of collider physics for theorists notes for the local hep ph group along the way i ve found a few nice sets of references that i think would be useful for any beginning graduate student with an eye on the lhc pre requisites as a properly trained theory student you probably have more than enough technical background to navigate the literature the main adjustment is learning to speak the same language as experimentalists before you start however you should make sure that you have a solid understanding of quantum field theory in particular perturbative qcd you should be familiar with the parton model and deep inelastic scattering at the level of peskin s book though more basic books like halzen and martin might be enough to get caught up in a pinch canonical resources prof han s collider physics review hep ph 0507097 updated version here this has been the main review for phenomenologists for some time now it hits all the right topics and is at the right level for hep ph students start here and fill in the details as you need them prof wittich s tasi08 lecture colliders for theorists unfortunately the tasi08 audiovisual link appears to be broken at the moment so you might have to wait for the proceedings to come out prof arkani hamed s pitp lhc crash course an excellent talk with excellent recording quality on why we re excited about the lhc a similar talk with awful recording quality can be found at the kitp green high pt physics at hadron colliders we ve set up a local journal club for hep ph students who want to learn about collider physics and are roughly following a similar strategy as green s text do not confuse it with his experimentalist oriented physics of particle detectors text this text was recommended to me by a string theory trained postdoc at the ictp who has been getting his hands dirty with collider physics it integrates event generators into the text which i think is very important since some computational saavy is required to really do work in collider physics green uses comphep though our local journal club uses madgraph background reading for some undergraduate level background reading i suggest the relevant chapters in the usual particle physics texts the latest edition of perkin s introduction to high energy physics has a nice chapter on colliders one might also look at halzen and martin or martin and shaw for basic references on qcd and kinematics you should review rapidity in special relativity collider physicists use a quantity called pseudorapidity which is the rapidity in the massless limit which you should be comfortable working with other kinematic quantities which experimentalists use are things like transverse momentum energy mass it s worth spending an afternoon working through all of the definitions and learning how to play with these quantities stepping it up to more technical presentations i recommend the following textbooks barger and phillips collider physics it s not immediately obvious that this book is useful since it doesn t really have the flavor of a text that you can just read cover to cover with well defined goals in each chapter rather the book is more helpful as a reference when considering particular processes i found their presentation of and deep inelastic scattering very nice though you should be prepared to fill in a lot of the calculations as exercises throughout the text ellis stirling webber collider qcd this book is close to my heart since it was written by englishmen from cern durham an cambridge though stirling recently moved to cambridge it is a text for getting your hands dirty with qcd at hadron colliders perhaps a little bit overkill for theorists who lean towards beyond the standard model building but it s a fantastic resource leo techniques for nuclear and particle physics experiments this is my preferred reference for experimental nitty gritty when it s necessary for example how do calorimeters work and why do muons pass right through them even though at high energies they re practically indistinguishable from electrons references these are important you ll want to have these handy particle data book more important than the actual data on particles are the reviews on collider physics you ll also want to have useful information at your fingertips about the detectors on the main stage the best way to do this is to have the detector s technical design reports on your hard drive wikipedia works in a pinch as well cdf http www cdf fnal gov upgrades tdr tdr html d0 http www d0 fnal gov hardware cal intro tdr tdrformat htm cms http cmsdoc cern ch cms cpt tdr atlas http atlas web cern ch atlas groups physics tdr access html additionally the journal of instrumentation has a comprehensive all you would care to know about the lhc issue http www iop org ej journal page extra lhc jinst continue reading collider physics for theory students filed under physics 4 comments brief thoughts on blogging 13sep08 soon i ll be off the blogosphere will i be back a question relevant to all of maybe two or three people i have mixed feelings about whether it is wise for a phd student to moonlight as a blogger on the one hand it s a great way to connect with the physics community the way that physics bloggers have been able to share news advice and commentary has already changed in a largely positive way how this generation of physicists approach their craft on a personal level blogging has been a tool to help me codify my thoughts many of my physics related posts were exercises in how to present topics effectively and later made their way into my presentations and write ups once in a while someone will comment on something they think is neat and that always makes me happy on the other hand a prominent blogger once offered the advice that it s dangerous to blog without tenure there is a caricatured image of grad students as working 200 of the time while this is clearly not true in practice it still doesn t look great when you hit a rough patch in your research but you still manages to make regular blog posts further no matter how many insightful posts you write you re always a single bone headed statement away from offending someone senior with a lot of power over your future so when the grown ups are having blogo wars with one another junior would be wise enough to stay out of it i will note however that i ve heard a few people say that blogging has helped their early careers i haven t complete closed the door to future blogging maybe somewhere down the line i d be interested in joining a group blog of young scientists but this very hypothetical situation wouldn t happen in the near future and would only occur after a long talk with my adviser thank you however to all of the kind comments people have left regarding keeping up blogging i strongly encourage everyone especially all of my grad student colleagues to maintian sidney coleman s fratelli fisici a big part of being a physicist is collaboration we are privileged to live in a time when this can occur at a much earlier stage through resource and information sharing over media such as web forums wikis and blogs so keep an eye on the big picture and look out for each other filed under opinion 4 comments arrival in cambridge 13sep08 this unfinished draft has been sitting in my blog directory for almost two years now i think i ll just leave it as is and share it as a memory of my first week in the uk i have similar scraps of paper recounting thoughts while i was on the plane to london on the train from cambridge to durham and on the plane home after a weeklong whirlwind of an orientation for the marshall scholarship i ve finally plugged in my ethernet cable into a cozy dormitory in burrel s field of trinity college cambridge university if you don t understand what trinity college means relative to cambridge university don t worry i ll explain that in a later blog post along with my reflections on the marshall orientation in the meanwhile at the expense of writting about the past week s events out of order i d like to reflect on my arrival in the uk s second oldest university to set the stage it is raining in london imagine feeling a little sad a little anxious and a little wet you re sad because you just spent a week with 44 of the most amazing people you ve met and now it s time to go your separate ways you re anxious because you re heading to a new school a new home and a new country presently dismissing london as an international city you re wet because well it s raining in london epilogue i left the above text completely unchanged since i first wrote it in 2006 i have other bits of paper with hand written thoughts of durham the uk etc but these are unfortunately tucked away in a scrapbook in la on the day that i left cambridge however i remember writing about how the city looked as i took the cab to the train station it had rained the night before but the sky was clear the morning light reflected off of the grass and the colleges have never looked as stately as when they are enveloped in a bit of mist and dew this is how i will always remember cambridge sparkling filed under expatriate life closed totally random bits before i go 13sep08 here are a few totally random snippits that i had hoped to incorporate in some posts enjoy anybody who has not already done so should play with arxiv structure it s not perfect but it does a very good job of creating a web of interconnections between papers it s a great tool for skimming the literature for a given topic and finding review articles there s been a lot of blogosphere buzz about people s bets for new physics at the lhc all of these bets usually involve some nominal sum of money and are made by people more knowledgeable than me and most of my grad student colleagues as beyond the standard model grad students however our choice of projects constitutes a sort of bet about what direction the lhc will take our field instead of money however we re wagering our academic futures new math songs i recently found tom lehrer s song making fun of the 1960s new math movement i was completely in stitches however after i found bo burnham s much more risque new math song i had to listen to it a few times to catch everything unlike other math songs e g the klein four group burnham s song is not politically correct by any stretch of the imagination but it certainly had its clever moments for something a little more physics based i recently bought a copy of peter dong s les phys cd of his harvard undergraduate math physics honors thesis a sample song can be found on professor georgi s webpage unfortunately the lyrics to the other songs on the cd are a bit more difficult to hear for those who are interested the cd can be purchased form jeff moran s site californians especially those from san francisco or la like to think of themselves as very worldly people this is true in the sense of having diverse backgrounds though most californians my age thoroughly speak and think in much the same way despite looking very different from each other at cambridge however it was refreshing to have friends from all over europe with their own national cultures and perspectives in durham the group of postgraduate students included a much wider range of students from across the european and asian continents the ictp however was a thoroughly refreshing experience full of a cacophony of languages and researchers from all over the world the marshall scholar farewell dinner in london last may drove home one piece of advice that has characterized my marshall experience surround yourself with amazing people it will inspire and motivate you in ways that you cannot before hand imagine this certainly holds true of all of my marshall cambridge and durham colleagues and friends i sincerely and deepy thank all of them for sharing their passion and vivacity in a stroke of unexpected synchronity i was able to meet up in new york city with a group theoretical physics friends from my undergrad years in stanford and simultaneously theoretical physics friends from my part iii year in cambridge this was a really really special event since we are all theorists from hep ph hep th astro ph unfortunately steffen couldn t make it so no gr qc of the same year the concentration of talent in our group was very impressive i wish i could have taken a group photo before we all went our separate ways another thing that my years abroad have taught me is that a large part of doing physics is maintaining a network of friends and collaborators and i really hope that our group will stay close as we inevitably bump into each other several times in our academic careers england seems to have a growing problem with knife violence and asbo thugs beating up people urban cities in the us have much less of a problem with this for what appears to be the plain fact that guns are legal don t misinterpret me gun violence is a big problem in the us and i m not condoning guns at all i will offer however that the underlying problem in both places appears to not only be the implements of violence but the culture of violence itself even though a place can initially seem very different or even uncomfortable people have a tremendous ability to not only adapt but to enjoy it i wonder however how much my experience was colored by my knowledge that it was temporary i knew that i had a phd position back in the us and could afford to take the attitude of holding my breath till i get home if i ever felt homesick i m not an adventurer travelling to a distant foreign land britain is about the most us friendly place one can go outside of north america if you want to make new friends be bold and leave the comfort zone of your old...