ProgressReport 11 April 2025

There has been a lot going on! On one hand it feels like not that much at all has been happening and on the other it seems like a lot is coming together; the slow burn paying off. First, habits have all been good, I could use some more meditation.

Lately, I've been putting a lot of effort into process. I've really been ramping up the with AI; Ive re-upped perplexity, signed up for Claude, and started using MCPs to integrate with my obsidian notes. The biggest change however, has been that I've migrated from emacs to Cursor. This has been a big investment that is already starting to pay off; it has agent mode that can translate natural language prompts into action and tab is is very very good.

My social life has continued at a high pace. We tried out a new baby sitter (Maddy) and had a date night. Heather Gray visited for a colloquium. It was genuinely nice to see her, I was not jealous at all; "race against yourself".

Lots of good news. Manfred got the Lazarus Mentoring Award! I was really happy to see this. It was a nice opportunity to tell Manfred what he has meant to me. ATLAS and CMS got the breakthrough prize ! Great to see this non-trivial recognition in the field for the "slow burn" work that we've been doing. I was also asked by Daniela Bortoletto to be an external examiner for an Oxford PhD student doing bbττ; I assume this was a direct result of my LHCP HH talk.

On the prospective student front, Christian Brody-Guinto has accepted! I was pleased that we beat out Wisconsin - one of the strongest groups on CMS. I also surprisingly got a student from the Masters program: Lei Zhao. Not sure why he applied to the masters and not the PhD programs (Sufie things it could have been because of the longer deadline…) Hopefully, I can make it worth it for him. I plan to have him start by looking into making the real synthetic data for boosted events, would also be a good place to plugin with Chance.

Now to actual work… on the 4b side, I have been slowly proceeding on the outflow comparison with Marina. This has been slow going partly because of the shift to Cursor and partly for real problems I've been encountering. The speed should pick up here soon. I did the bootstrapping studies. These were quicker and gave clearer answers than I was expecting. I really should have done this a while ago. I did it both for the synthetic datasets and the mixed data, with good results in both cases. We pushed the L2s for unblinding and got a couple of comments back from Meng. These have now been answered and we are again asking to take the next step.

The SoS results were shown at Moriond QCD ! Only the prompt is pubic for now. We will followup with the displaced in the paper, after we understand the local excess better. (I still don't understand were the 5 sigma local excess is coming from.) I guess this will really get focus in the next days. Wes gave his FNAL practice talk and had his interview. He says it went well. He defends his thesis on Monday !

Finally, also a lot of progress on the HGC side. We've really been cranking out modules. There are lots of personelle moves coming up. Jim accepted and will start May 1. Jonas leaving early May and we already have Ads out to replace him and Josh, who will leave in August. The FNAL trip is happening. I've booked the travel and am starting to put together the slides. I have the feeling that this will be an important talk, It will be worth it to really get it done right. We can now start buying MMTS supplies. I need to follow up with Pritam on this.