Fermilab, United States
I remember a famous musician, Paul Simon, once saying something along the lines of, ‘When I’m running, mostly what I think about is how much further I have to go, and when can I stop.’ Of course, in my case, running is an exaggeration. I’m not fast enough to call it running. Although this year, my wife signed me up for a half-marathon, so I’m training. 50/50 odds I’ll die before I finish. For DUNE, I am working on simulation of the beamline. My long-term goal is to try to have a better knowledge of the beam of the neutrinos coming into the experiment than we had in the previous generations of beamlines. So, you pretend – simulate – some particle is going through. For every little bit that it moves, there’s a certain chance it’ll maybe knock off a bunch of electrons, there’s a certain chance it’ll lose this or that much energy. By the end, it has some amount of energy and it’s going in such and such direction. And so you simulate it again and again and get some distribution probability that it exits with some energy in a certain direction. This is not the first neutrino beamline we’ve built, but I say each new one should be better than the last one.