I goofed.

I’ve been so busy I completely forgot to write a blog post about my visit to Berkeley Lab (LBL) this week! You might have noticed if you pay very close attention to my Twitter stream, but really, who does that? So instead of an announcement of the trip, here’s a wrap-up report, from the day before I leave.

My reason for being out here in the first place is the research project I’ve been working on, with my adviser and another professor, for the last several months. Since we’re making a prediction for the LHC’s proton-ion collision run, which is going on now and ends next month, we have to rush to get some results and share them out to the physics community before the LHC experiments publish their data. So the professor I’m working with, who is spending a month at Berkeley, invited me out to work on the project and give a talk about it to the nuclear theory group at the lab. (My first invited talk, yay!) The talk itself went okay, not great, but that’s really my own fault because I had to stay awake the entire night before to work on it. Plus, the program that generated the results finished running about a half hour before I was scheduled to start speaking.

For the record, I suggest always preparing presentations ahead of time.

Besides the talk, though, it’s been a pretty great trip. I got to hang out with some college friends who I haven’t seen in too long (hi Alex, Sam, and Mia!). I also get to spend the week enjoying lovely views of the San Francisco Bay and surrounding area, thanks to the lab being about a thousand feet above the city. My room at the guest house (actually more of a hotel) even looks out on the city and SF Bay!

Even better, there’s a lot of physics history wrapped up in this town. The first cyclotron — a distant technological ancestor of the LHC — was built in Berkeley, and the precursor to LBL was at the forefront of experimental particle physics throughout the 1930s. The magnet from one of the early Berkeley cyclotrons is still around, on display outside the Lawrence Museum of Science. Unfortunately I only got out to see it at night, hence the low-quality picture at left… but still, pretty cool :-) Since then, LBL and UC Berkeley have remained heavily involved in nuclear and particle physics research. A staggering number of famous physicists (including many Nobel Prize winners) have passed through this lab over the past 80 years — maybe even through the same room I’m staying in now!

But all that is over now. I’m heading back home tomorrow, so no more mild California weather… but on the bright side, hopefully I can finish up this research project soon, and then back to regular physics blogging!