Physics

One of the more fashionable ways to compare measurements is to show vertically aligned box and whisker plots with world average bands in the background. This script allows you to easily make a very slick looking plot to compare different measurements.

What real decays could be faking this resonance peak?

An estimation of semileptonic decays rates of mesons, assuming a simple phase space model, compared to the PDG.

When writing my thesis I decided that I needed some way to display the mesons and baryons in an attractive way. So I wrote these scripts.

This is my thesis, "Measurements of B(D_s→lν_l) and f_Ds using data collected from the BaBar experiment."

Abstract:

This thesis presents measurements of the branching fractions B(D_s→lν_l) and measurements of the pseudoscalar decay constant, f_Ds , using all the data acquired at the BaBar detector at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which were collected from September 1999 to April 2007, and comprised 531 fb^-1 . The following measurements are made: B(D_s→μν_μ ) = (6.11 ± 0.38 ± 0.33) × 10^-3, B(D_s→τν_τ) = (5.06 ± 0.34 ± 0.50) × 10^-2, and a limit B(D_s→eν_e) < 1.46 × 10^-4 is obtained. Using these measurements a value of f_Ds = (252 ± 6 ± 7 ± 1 ) MeV is obtained, where the first uncertainties account for the statistical limitations of the data, the second uncertainties account for the systematic uncertainties, and the third uncertainties account for uncertainties associated with other physical constants (dominated by the lifetime of the D_s meson).

In October 2010 I was invited to the Charm 2010 conference to present my work on the study of leptonic decays of the D_s meson. Here are the slides.