The marching band came down along Main Street
The soldier blues fell in behind
O it was sad enough, weak enough, mad enough,
Light in their loving as soldiers can be.
First to risk choosing them, leave alone losing them
Now, in far battle, beyond the South Sea!
This was a labour of love… (arXiv)
ATLAS measurement, in 13TeV proton-proton collisions, of the differential cross section as a function of the four-lepton mass
I wrote about an earlier version of this measurement here. We have now measured the distribution with the full data set from the highest energy (13TeV) collisions that we have so far. There was also quite a lot of work involved in making the measurement (even) more model-independent, and testing the statistical treatment of the various way in which it can be (re)interpreted.
Early this evening, when I had finished an afternoon of interviewing PhD candidates over zoom, I set off to meet my wife, who had, for her approved exercise, gone walking over Hampstead Heath. I phoned her to check the route she was on, and also shared my location on google maps.
For some reason the latter didn’t work, or at least, my sharing did but hers didn’t. In any case we successfully rendezvoused near Parliament Hill and had a pleasant walk back together by the ponds. Even though some of it is by now a sea of muddy footprints, the heath is a lifesaver.
A few minutes after we got home, the new landline phone I bought a couple of days ago rang, with a waiting message. Picking it up, I heard a deadpan, strangely menacing robotic voice say
“I can see you, but you can’t see me.”
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Life and Physics 