New plots
Well, I waited at home all day today for my new mouse to arrive, since I would have to sign for it. This didn’t mean that the day was completely wasted, however, as I was able to do a fair bit of work from here. Partly in making my plots prettier, but chiefly in making sure I’ve got all the backgrounds included in my considerations. So I’ve ended up with pretty-looking plots like this one:
It’s a plot of the number of events with a given amount of missing mass in them, or rather, the missing mass squared, calculated as the square of the missing energy minus the square of the missing momentum. If there is in fact a neutrino in the event (like there is for my signal), then there should be zero missing mass, since neutrinos have zero mass. Hence the large red peak at zero.
Anyway, that’s enough about my work. I just wanted to show a pretty picture and indicate that real actual work is taking place on my thesis. I’m not just pretending.
Oh, and the mouse did eventually arrive, so I’m now using it. All very exciting. I am actually kind of excited to go to work tomorrow so I can try out the whole setup with the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse combination 
Ooooh, pretty. Very colorful.
So, lemme get this straight . . . you detect neutrinos by measuring the fact that they don’t have any mass? Does that trick work for detecting invisible unicorns, too?
Well, we know how much energy and momentum there should be in the event. So we tally up how much we see and discover that there’s a fair bit missing. Neutrinos carry off missing energy and momentum, but no mass. So we detect them by the fact that there’s energy and momentum missing consistent with zero missing mass.
This would only work for massless invisible unicorns