A grad student got LHC data to play nice with quantum interference

arstechnica.com

18 pointskurthr3 comments

> six-year quest to convince the collaboration of the value of the new technique

The technical achievement is really impressive, but as someone who was on ATLAS this is the most impressive part. The amount of work it takes to convince the collaboration to change the way they do things can really be enormous.

Nonetheless, this will be really impactful for all kinds of analyses. The analysis I was on for my thesis ran into a interference issue that cost us a couple of months of work, and a better understanding of how to deal with interference would have been helpful.

Exactly, the level of commitment required to get the data and run the simulations to convince hundreds of interested and highly capable people to agree that your analysis method is better than what they had previously considered. Just amazing!

Of course he'll be on a lot of papers now :-)

> hundreds of interested and highly capable people to agree

That's a polite way of putting it, but 100% the grit required to push this through is admirable.

> Of course he'll be on a lot of papers now :-)

Well, everyone in ATLAS is on all the papers anyway, but he's ATLAS famous now, which gets you places.

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