Travel, travel and travel

    I can't think of a best title to describe my recent life that is both exciting and exhausting. But after revisiting my older blog posts about the hectic time period I went through as a senior in Kyoto University, what I am experiencing now is not something completely new. 

Part of the reasons why I have been traveling so frequent is because I am a postdoc at the University of Washington, Seattle and also an analysis coordinator for the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab, Batavia. As a result I need to coordinate and supervise analysis efforts of students and postdocs at both locations and hence there is a need to split my time 50:50 between these two locations. This is still fine. Just over two weeks ago, I was invited to participate and give a talk at an analysis workshop organized by my collaborators at the University of Kentucky, Lexington and was also invited to give a seminar talk at the Yale University in New Haven. To make sure I optimized my travel grant, I combined my Fermilab trip with the Kentucky and Yale trips. As a result, in 2 weeks time, I spent more than 24 hours in addition to commuting time to work in transportation like car and airplane. The best reaction I could give you is to shake my head if you ask me how was my trip.

However, I am pretty satisfied what I got out from the last two weeks. First, I managed to convinced some of the collaborators to give an update in the meeting I host every 1-2 weeks for Muon g-2 data analysis. People were being shy in the first few weeks and I had to work at 200% productivity to keep the ball rolling. I am glad that it paid off. Second, I was glad that I managed to give useful suggestions to the data analysis workshop I attended. I gave a talk regarding using modern data analysis tools like JupyterLab to perform analysis on Muon g-2 data and gave some concrete examples they could use immediately. I also contributed my knowledge on the detector to clear up some misunderstanding in data analysis. Third, I was very glad to have the chance to give an hour long seminar talk at a prestigious place like Yale University. Although there are still rooms for improvement for my talk (I had only about two days to prepare) I can pretty much using it as a template for my future talks. The talk I gave at Indiana was a job talk (focusing mostly on my contributions) so it was not really oriented for a more general physics seminar or colloquium. 

More importantly, 3 important results came out as soon as I came back to Seattle this week. They are

1) Excess of electron-like events in the MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab,

2) Determination of nucleon axial coupling from lattice QCD, and 

3) First dark matter search result from XENON1T.

This weekend is the time for me to relax so I am glad to have a little time to read more about these exciting updates. Hopefully our collaboration can deliver the result in a timely manner next Winter/Summer so that we can confirm the measurement previously done at BNL about 20 years ago.