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Occasionally, I check the preprint server to see how many citations my paper has had. Although there are close to twenty professional publications where I am listed as an author, this particular paper is the one that I count as mine, since I both wrote the paper and performed the analysis. Basically, my paper is the one that presents the results of my dissertation analysis. I am quite proud of it, partially because it is my dissertation analysis and partially because I am the first author on a paper by a large (~120 member) collaboration published in the most respected physics journal (Physical Review Letters).
Anyway, since the paper was released to the preprint server in September 2002 (publication in PRL did not happen until February 2003), I have noticed that the number of citations it has received has averaged about one per month. The past half-year has been busy and, as such, I have not checked on it in some time. Checking yesterday, I see that there are at least six new citations, for a total of fifty-six in a total of forty-four months. That's an average of 1.27 citations per month. Not too shabby. I haven't discovered neutrino oscillation, or anything exciting like that, but still quite respectable!
The reason that I thought to check on the citations yesterday is that I was speaking to a professor here at Oxford who heard me present my results at the 28th International Cosmic Ray Conference in Japan, back in 2003. He and I actually had a bit of a conversation after my talk, as he is interested in the low energy atmospheric neutrinos that made up the irreducible background for my supernova relic neutrino (SRN) search.
To be honest, I haven't thought about the SRN in anything other than the most general terms for quite a number of months. Maybe longer. Then, this evening, I receive an e-mail (sent to both my FNAL and Oxford addresses -- so it must be serious) from a well known neutrino theorist. She is working to reproduce the results presented in my thesis and is asking me for numerical files corresponding to some of the figures in my dissertation. How's that for coincidence? So it looks like I'm going to need to track down and dig through some old work to find what she is looking for. That's the "Past" part of this post.
The "Present" part is slightly cheating -- it is actually the recent past. While on Auger, I worked extensively on the construction, calibration, maintenance, and operation of a Central Laser Facility (CLF). Before leaving Fermilab, I drafted a technical paper about the CLF, which is currently circulating amongst internal reviewers in the collaboration will hopefully soon be submitted to a refereed journal for publication. I spent nearly an entire day last week implementing comments and suggestions from two collaborators and I before I go home tonight, I need to poke LRW and remind him to re-make Figure 6 for the paper.
[Addendum: Less then two hours after writing this, I got an e-mail from the chair of the Auger Publications Committee regarding the CLF paper and the road to journal submission.]
And the "Future", of course, is here at Oxford, working on the CRESST experiment in the cryodetector group. Technically, this is the present but, as I have only been here for a little over a month, I still have a long way to go before I am able to contribute effectively. Lately, with our supply of liquid helium currently depleted (and the department's liquefier currently non-operational), I have been reading like it was going out of style. I am concurrently reading a CRESST dissertation, a textbook on low temperature physics, a safety manual, and the manual for ROOT (a powerful physics analysis tool). Speaking of CRESST, here is an short-but-interesting recent article from New Scientist about the experiment.
So, interestingly enough, Past and Present and Future have all collided. I now have tasks to do related to Super-Kamiokande, the Pierre Auger Observatory, and the CRESST experiment. I guess these multi-experiment demands are some sort of indication that I am coming into maturity as a physicist. Of course, that doesn't even count the time I am spending reading about the D-Zero experiment, for I am also editing![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gyades's dissertation.
Hopefully this post will satisfy those folks who were asking for more physics content in this space.
Anyway, since the paper was released to the preprint server in September 2002 (publication in PRL did not happen until February 2003), I have noticed that the number of citations it has received has averaged about one per month. The past half-year has been busy and, as such, I have not checked on it in some time. Checking yesterday, I see that there are at least six new citations, for a total of fifty-six in a total of forty-four months. That's an average of 1.27 citations per month. Not too shabby. I haven't discovered neutrino oscillation, or anything exciting like that, but still quite respectable!
The reason that I thought to check on the citations yesterday is that I was speaking to a professor here at Oxford who heard me present my results at the 28th International Cosmic Ray Conference in Japan, back in 2003. He and I actually had a bit of a conversation after my talk, as he is interested in the low energy atmospheric neutrinos that made up the irreducible background for my supernova relic neutrino (SRN) search.
To be honest, I haven't thought about the SRN in anything other than the most general terms for quite a number of months. Maybe longer. Then, this evening, I receive an e-mail (sent to both my FNAL and Oxford addresses -- so it must be serious) from a well known neutrino theorist. She is working to reproduce the results presented in my thesis and is asking me for numerical files corresponding to some of the figures in my dissertation. How's that for coincidence? So it looks like I'm going to need to track down and dig through some old work to find what she is looking for. That's the "Past" part of this post.
The "Present" part is slightly cheating -- it is actually the recent past. While on Auger, I worked extensively on the construction, calibration, maintenance, and operation of a Central Laser Facility (CLF). Before leaving Fermilab, I drafted a technical paper about the CLF, which is currently circulating amongst internal reviewers in the collaboration will hopefully soon be submitted to a refereed journal for publication. I spent nearly an entire day last week implementing comments and suggestions from two collaborators and I before I go home tonight, I need to poke LRW and remind him to re-make Figure 6 for the paper.
[Addendum: Less then two hours after writing this, I got an e-mail from the chair of the Auger Publications Committee regarding the CLF paper and the road to journal submission.]
And the "Future", of course, is here at Oxford, working on the CRESST experiment in the cryodetector group. Technically, this is the present but, as I have only been here for a little over a month, I still have a long way to go before I am able to contribute effectively. Lately, with our supply of liquid helium currently depleted (and the department's liquefier currently non-operational), I have been reading like it was going out of style. I am concurrently reading a CRESST dissertation, a textbook on low temperature physics, a safety manual, and the manual for ROOT (a powerful physics analysis tool). Speaking of CRESST, here is an short-but-interesting recent article from New Scientist about the experiment.
So, interestingly enough, Past and Present and Future have all collided. I now have tasks to do related to Super-Kamiokande, the Pierre Auger Observatory, and the CRESST experiment. I guess these multi-experiment demands are some sort of indication that I am coming into maturity as a physicist. Of course, that doesn't even count the time I am spending reading about the D-Zero experiment, for I am also editing
gyades's dissertation.Hopefully this post will satisfy those folks who were asking for more physics content in this space.
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