Jim Pivarski (Born James Adam McCann, my name is now James McCann Pivarski.)

gmail@jpivarski.com (Take that, ye spammers!)

Who am I and What do I do?

I am an experimental particle physicist (postdoc) at Texas A&M University, preparing to search for Z prime bosons at the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN. I am also studying the alignment of the muon chambers as a means of improving the precision of the Z prime search.

Z primes are hypothetical particles with the properties of photons (light), except that they are at least 1000 times heavier than protons (matter). A similar particle called the Z boson (no prime), a mere 90 times heavier than the proton, was discovered in 1983. Of all the theorized particles one could search for at CMS, I like Z primes because a very broad range of theories predict such a creature, from gauge unification to extra dimemsions to Little Higgs. This makes the search for Z prime bosons, or anything that looks like a Z prime (e.g. a KK graviton), model-independent. Another way to say this is that self-adjoint particles are very generic: the photon, neutral pion, J/ψ, Upsilon, and Z boson all play major roles in particle physics. So would a Z prime, if it exists.

My wife, Melanie Pivarski, is a mathematician studying analysis, (very advanced calculus). My brother, Sean McCann, is a fine-art photographer; you can find samples of his work on his website. Our cats, Galen and Paszenko, are anthropologists.

Publications

• My Ph.D. thesis from Cornell University on the CLEO experiment. I measured the nuclear binding strength between a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark (it's 14 tons!), through the decay rate of bottom/anti-bottom bound states (Upsilon(1S), Upsilon(2S), and Upsilon(3S)) into electron/positron pairs. This quantity is sometimes known as the di-electron width, or Γ_ee .
  • We (the CLEO collaboration) published this result in Physical Review Letters, 96, 092003 (also available from the preprint archive, 9 pages).
  • I presented my dissertation (160 pages) in February, 2006.
  
  
• I was part of a small group of experimentalists and theorists who got together to determine how sensitive a future high-energy electron/positron collider (the International Linear Collider) would be to a particular variant of supersymmetry (the "Focus Point" of mSUGRA under WMAP constraints).
  • Measuring Mass and Cross Section Parameters at a Focus Point Region, hep-ex/0507008

Software for Physics and Mathematics

• SVGFig is a module for the Python programming language that creates mathematical figures.
  • A small set of powerful tools, rather than a long list of features.
  • Brief syntax.
  • Completely general coordinate systems (including ).
  • Edit any aspect of the image output as a navigatable SVG data structure or in a graphics program.

  SVGFig (a corruption of the Icelandic or Norwegian Sigurðr) was once called Plothon the Barbarion.
  
  

• PyMinuit is a Python interface to Minuit which allows users to numerically minimize arbitrary Python functions. Minuit is usually invoked in the background for fitting theoretical curves to experimental data, but it is often helpful to have direct access to minimization for more advanced fitting applications.
  
  
• CMSSW-Mode for Emacs makes it easier for Emacs users to write configuration files for CMSSW (software for the CMS experiment) by adding syntax coloring, tab stops, and the ability to open included files with a single click or keystroke. CMSSW-Mode is now included in the standard CMSSW code repository.
  
  
• PAW-mode for Emacs will probably never again find much use. PAW was a Personal Analysis Workstation for physics studies, long since supplanted by ROOT. (sigh...)
  
  
• Mathematica-Mode makes Emacs act like a Mathematica notebook, with the same model of building up scripts from interactive commands. This is primarily for people who find Emacs's keystrokes and parenthesis-handling easy to use and Mathematica's keystrokes and parenthesis-handling hard to use.

Miscellaneous

• The Everything Seminar

  I have written several article-style postings on this blog for mathematicians. They're a lot of fun to write, but time consuming, because they involve some research and computation.

  • The Origin of Mass? July 25, 2007
  • Why Stuff is Hard August 8, 2007
  • Why Everything is Hard August 11, 2007
• Fables and Denouement

  I like to write fiction and essays, so I created this Wordpress site to present them. As a blog, it has an extremely slow posting rate.

• My Manifesto

  A summary of my philosphical and religious beliefs, written in 10 pages.

• My Academic Geneology

  I was astonished to discover that others have done enough research for me to trace my geneology, through my academic advisor and my advisor's advisor, seventeen generations!

• Photography on Picasa

  Why I love FermiLab

  (2006)

  On a month-long business trip to FermiLab, I started taking photographs of landscapes I thought were evocative, and enjoyed compiling them into the photo-essay pictured on the right. But from now on, I'm going to use Picasa.

• Animations on YouTube

  I created an animation from still photos on a digital camera, and created a YouTube account to present it. I might make more.

• My Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons user pages

  I absolutely needed to edit a page on error analysis, so I acquired a Wikipedia account, too. I later made a nice visualization of the Big Bang as a manifold and made it available on Wikimedia Commons.