Here you will find a summary of my coursework (topics in Physics, Math, and CS) up to date (undergrad and grad courses)

This was a project to study the behavior and to improve the performance of the Pre-stabilized laser for the 40-meter prototype for the advanced LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory). It included designing and running a simulation of the optical table, as well as performing the measurements on the physical setup. Here's the final report.

• A Mathematica-based simulation of a replacement option for BaBar detector's IFR (Instrumental Flux Return). I wrote and ran a simulation program that optimized the shape of a scintillator bar to maximize light collection. Here's the final report.
• I was also a part of our group's effort to develop a Liquid Xenon calorimeter for possible super-BaBar upgrade. Here's a talk I gave at one of our group meetings to summarize my main contributions.
• I worked with one of our postdocs on B->D_(s)*D* analysis done with BaBar's Runs 1-4 data. I presented some results that came out of this analysis in April 2005 at an APS conference: CP Violation in D^(*)D^(*)
• In the summer of 2004, I was a part of the effort to install and commission the Xray beam size monitor in the PEP storage ring at SLAC. This project uses a pinhole camera design for imaging synchrotron light radiation that results from the charged particles being accelerated while going around the ring.
• At the October 19, 2004 group meeting at Caltech, I presented some of my thoughts/ideas about graduate school in High Energy Physics. After the presentation, I decided to start writing several introductory tutorials that cover the basics of what a particle experimentalist needs to know. The only one I ended up doing is:
  • A Very Basic Introduction to Statistics (you better view this with Firefox!)
    • If you want to learn much more about statistical methods (classification, regression, data mining ...) visit this site for a large number of great tutorials. Plus, recently en enormous amount of all kinds of scientific information started to make its way on to Wikipedia. Wolfram Alpha is a new search engine that works great for scientific data.
• I gave a talk on Shape Function measurements in B &rarr X_s&gamma radiative penguin decays at BaBar at the Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum conference in Ponta Delgada, Azores, Portugal on September 6th 2006. The paper submitted can be found here (or here) and the talk itself is here. You can also browse the conference proceedings.
• My thesis project was the search for radiative decays of the B meson to a ρ or an ω meson and a photon (B &rarr (&rho^±/0/&omega) &gamma). This is a rare decay, which proceeds via a 1-loop (Penguin) Feynman diagram, in which the b quark changes to a d quark, emitting a photon. I was a part of the team that published the BaBar Runs 1-5 results in Physical Review Letters, and the updated Runs 1-6 result, which used a different approach to separating signal from background using bootstrapped decision trees, become my thesis.