Me, in front of the ATLAS detector (with my horns up).
I’m Doug Davis, a Ph.D. student in Experimental Elementary Particle Physics at Duke University. In the Physics Department I work in the ATLAS group. Before starting at Duke, I studied some neutrino physics at The University of Texas at Austinš¤. My favorite parts of experimental particle physics are writing software and analyzing data. My blog posts are (mostly) born from technical things I’m encountering during my graduate research in the field… and Emacs. I care a lot about quality software, so I spend a lot of time not only doing actual data analysis, but also writing software to help in performing analyses.
My thesis analysis involves studying the production of a couple of elementary particles in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider: a top quark in association with a W boson. I also served as deputy coordinator in the transition radiation tracker (TRT) software group from September 2017 to September 2018. The TRT is one of the ATLAS subdetectors which tracks charged particles and attempts to identify their type.
Me, in front of the ATLAS detector (with my horns up).