Done with teaching

Well I’ve just finished grading the final for the class I’ve been a lab TA for, so this officially finishes my responsibilities for that class. I had to do some lab makeups this weekend, which were less than entirely fun, but at least now it’s all over and on the whole I don’t really think I’m in a position to complain much about it.

I still haven’t really decided whether I’m going to do it again next semester, in part because I’m going to be doing some more conferences and things which might make it a little more difficult, but also just because I want to be able to focus more on my thesis and stuff and even though it doesn’t really take very much time away from that, it might be a little distracting to be teaching lab every now and then. I guess it’s something I’ll have to think about and decide over the ‘break’, as my undergraduate friends are calling it. I can’t really say that I’m going to be having too much of a break, since I’m currently at a pretty critical stage in my thesis research and thus need to be getting a lot of work done. Any time I’m not actually working on making plots and things, I should probably be working on putting together a draft of an outline for the paper, or at least something resembling that. Or else I should be thinking about beginning to write my thesis.

Oh, and while I can’t yet really show any plots with numbers on them, I do think it’s safe to show this thing, showing overlayed data and monte carlo. The different colors represent different types of background that I expect to contribute, along with the signal (in red). The background that one person expected would make my analysis impossible is the light brown. See if you can spot it in the signal region, which is essentially just the bin that has the peak of the signal in it It was very satisfying to show these plots and demonstrate that I was able to completely eliminate those backgrounds.

When I reconstruct the event, I have a candidate muon and a neutrino, which I reconstruct by finding what is not there, and knowing the total energy and momentum of what should be there. The plot shows the total energy of the neutrino and the muon (which is equal to the energy of the D meson they are the decay products of) minus the energy of the incoming beam (which the D meson must have an energy equal to). The signal will peak very strongly at zero and the backgrounds will not.

The extremely good agreement between data and Monte Carlo is very encouraging because it means that we’re modeling things very well and understand what’s going on extremely well. Basically, things are going well and a result shouldn’t be too far off. Now I just have to figure out what all the systematic uncertainties on this are. Which will take quite a long time, of course…