It is over, but it was frantic. Luca, the Ph.D. student who works with me at the analysis of CMS data (the one which has brought us to the approval of a first signal of the phi meson) summarized it best on Tuesday evening, at the party thrown by our big boss Dario. Holding a glass of good wine in his right hand, and a platter of assorted appetizers in the other, he said: "It is a delirium to work with you: your activity profile is a succession of Dirac deltas".

Quite true: usually the share of working time I am capable of devoting to data analysis is reduced to zero by a succession of errands of all kind that demand my attention: meetings, students questions, papers to review, organizational issues, exams, courses, this blog, other papers to review. The problem is not so much the total time these activities require, but the fact that the windows of continuous attention I can devote to hard thinking, coding, and running analysis jobs are too short. Broken in tiny bits, the periods of concentration barely allow me to fit in them the visit of a news web page, or a glance at facebook. However, there are antidots to this situation of "continued emergency": when data analysis becomes important and urgent, it dutifully wipes everything else off the table, and I am finally able to concentrate. These are the "Dirac deltas": peaks of activity. And during these peaks, I usually become a nasty advisor, demanding just as much effort from everybody around me, or more.

(It is quite possible that you do not know what a Dirac delta function is. In that case, my best advice is a visit to Wikipedia. Plotting a Dirac delta function is virtually impossible: it is zero everywhere, except from x=0, where it is infinite!)

Last Tuesday morning I got precisely into that "peak" mode, as I realized that the new phi signal our group has produced has a chance to be included in an early publication of CMS 900 GeV data, and that a necessary step to make this possible consists in producing an internal CMS note documenting in detail our analysis. At noon I set out to write a document, and by 4PM I had a pretty good 12-page first draft ready, inclusive of preliminary figures, tables, and even references. Of course this would not have been possible without the help of Luca, whom I kept bugging for a number, a dataset name, a data transfer from CERN to our local disk to check yet another distribution, etcetera in an endless string of impatient requests. That is what he alluded to as "delirium" in the evening.

So, since Tuesday I have worked in peak mode, but fortunately Christmas was coming. Today I am not working, and neither is any of my colleagues: so the need to finish the note by yesterday evening made a convergence to a publishable document easier and more certain. However, it also implied we had to work doubly as hard. We did, and now I can really relax. But it was sort of an accumulation point.

It is quite unfortunate that internal documents are, well, internal, and their contents cannot be shared outside the collaboration. Yet two of the figures it contains will be approved soon, and I will be posting them here as an update of this post, in the spirit of this blog being, among several other things, a sort of "repository" of significant physics results of its owner.