Tim's home page

This is a simulated event from the BaBar Experiment, showing the decays of a B⁰-meson and its antiparticle. It is one of 568 million BaBar events simulated using the UK Particle Physics Grid, each event taking 5 seconds of processor time to generate. The Grid allows us to use the resources of many sites round the country: for this production we used four sites (the event shown here was generated at the RAL Tier A).

The display shows the two B-mesons' decay products as curved tracks (in red) in the central region of the detector (move your mouse over the image to see a blow-up of the central tracking detectors). Some particles also deposit energy in the calorimeters (green and blue blocks). Particle identification is assisted by measuring the Cherenkov rings, which are also shown. A real event from the detector would look much the same (as of April 2007, we have recorded 430 million B-meson events).

Particle Physics (introductory)

The ATLAS Experiment
The BaBar Experiment
The Particle Adventure
Particle Physics in the UK
DELPHI event detective
Some amazing facts about a LEP detector (This is for the L3 detector, but many also apply to DELPHI.)

And here's some stuff that I've had a hand in.

Interactive Event Display demo (uses the WIRED Java Applet, customised for the Particle Physics exhibits of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Open Days). I designed the pages and wrote the program for abstracting the event descriptions from the DELPHI DST.
100 Years of Electrons
Introduction to Particle Physics

OK, that's the interesting stuff out of the way. Now on to some...

Things I am working on

A few talks I have given

ATLAS

Inner Detector RTT (run-time tester)
Inner Detector tracking validation [restricted to ATLAS members]
Higgs Working Group [restricted to ATLAS members]

BaBar

some...

Useful stuff (maybe)

Various software, including...

RooUnfold — ROOT unfolding framework and algorithms
palm2ical — Palm Datebook/Calendar export to iCalendar
Information on my gifconv program and xv-psnewstyle patch to xv, for creating Postscript images. The Postscript output can be much more compact than that produced by other programs (eg. standard xv).
Anti-spam e-mail obfuscator
my thesis: A Study of J/psi Production at the LEP e⁺e^- Collider; and the Implementation of the DELPHI Slow Controls System.

and...

Old stuff (that might have been useful at some point)

not forgetting...

Some cool organisations (that are spending your money to descover how the universe works)

ATLAS Experiment home, public, and ATLAS RAL Group pages.
LHCb Experiment
BaBar experiment: home, BaBar UK, and public pages.
DELPHI experiment: home, online, detector/LEP statuses, and offline pages.
RAL PPD home page and internal page.
RAL (STFC) home page and Staff Intranet (internal).
Oxford University, Oxford Particle Physics, and Oxford DELPHI.
Particle Physics within the United Kingdom
CERN home and public pages.
SLAC home and staff pages.

Other good stuff (that deserve a plug from me, for the infinitessimal good it may do them)

Giving What We Can, doing as much good as we can, as effectively as we can.
I maintain some Science Fiction material from the OU SF Group including Sfinx (fiction), and The Bloomsbury Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Abbey Antiquarian Books (my cyber-parents).

Copied Stuff

I have made local copies of some material that I have found useful but slow to access from its original site. This material could be out of date, so it's best to check with the original site. Depending on your location, you may also find that quicker.

Index DOT Html (and Css) reference - the most complete and informative of the many HTML resources I've seen [copied on 1st October 2003 from Blooberry]. This is an official mirror, so should be reasonably up to date.
Old-style Index DOT Html reference (not up to date) [copied 7th July 1997 from Blooberry].
Java Tutorial [copied from Sun].
Java API Documentation [copied from Sun].
JavaScript 1.1 Guide (Netscape 3.0), What's New in JavaScript 1.2 (Netscape 4.0) [copied on 10 Sep 1997], JavaScript 1.0 Guide (Netscape 2.0), and JavaScript 1.1 Language Specification (PostScript version - fixed) [rest copied on 2 Apr 1997 from Netscape].
Tcl/Tk 8.0 Manual [copied 26 Jan 1999 from The Entropy Liberation Front and Scriptics Corporation]

Copyright notes.

Background

This web page has evolved over time. If you are interested in such things, you can read about what I've been up to (who knows, perhaps you will find that I'm your long-lost mother).

Welcome to Tim's home page