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High energy physicist
Eli Rosenberg isn't content just to be a faculty member and department
chair.
Two days last spring, Eli Rosenberg found himself at the U.S. Capitol
in Washington, D.C., working his way from one 15-minute meeting to another.
It's the last place in the world that Rosenberg, professor and chair of
the Department of Physics and Astronomy, would normally imagine himself.
Instead of the hallways of Congress, Rosenberg is much more at home working
with the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) in
California or at his Physics Hall office.
But as chair of the SLAC Users Organization (SLUO), Rosenberg went to
Washington to meet with Iowa's Congressional delegation, including Congressman
Tom Latham and the staffs of Senators Tom Harkin and Charles Grassley.
SLUO is comprised of 1,500 theorists, experimentalists, and accelerator
physicists who utilize the research facilities at SLAC.
"I had never lobbied before," Rosenberg said. "We did have
a session and learned the ropes a little bit before we started going from
office to office."
Rosenberg and other members of SLUO spent the days in Washington raising
awareness for funding for the physical sciences and the Department of
Energy's Office of Science in particular. He says that in recent years,
this type of funding has "fallen way behind." High-energy physics
has been especially hard hit.
"That's a different world," he said. "You typically only
have 15 to 30 minutes to get your points across. You have some talking
points and leave something behind for them to review."
The world Rosenberg is most comfortable in is the world of high-energy
physics and particularly the BaBar experiment. He has also participated
in the DELPHI experiment and is currently also active in the ATLAS experiment,
both at CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.
But it is the BaBar detector collaboration at Stanford University that
is Rosenberg's main focus. The detector records subtle distinctions between
decays of B mesons and those of their antimatter counterparts, called
anti-B mesons. Both are more than five times heavier than protons and
survive just over a trillionth of a second.
By studying these distinctions, Rosenberg and his collaborators hope to
shed light on how the universe evolved to its present state where ordinary
matter is common and antimatter is rare.
In addition to chairing SLUO, Rosenberg was the resident run coordinator
for BaBar from February through August 2001. He was responsible for the
day-to-day operation of the experiment, ensuring that the data collection
went smoothly and that the utility of the collected data was maximized.
"That was a 24/7 job with an 8 a.m. meeting seven days a week,"
Rosenberg remembered. "You get called at all hours of the day and
night to make sure that the data is being taken efficiently."
During Rosenberg's tenure as run coordinator, the number of people on
shift in the BaBar control room was reduced from three to two, yet operational
efficiency increased so that the experiment typically took data 96-98
percent of the time beams were in collision.
The work on the BaBar experiment is part of a program of high-energy physics
in the Department of Physics and Astronomy funded by the U.S. Department
of Energy at over $1 million annually. Rosenberg is the principal investigator
of this grant.
Rosenberg also has other roles at Stanford, including working with SLUO's
speaker's bureau and serving on internal review committees.
That's in addition to his current duties as chair of the Department of
Physics and Astronomy, a job he accepted soon after arriving back on campus
from serving as the BaBar run coordinator.
All those duties make Eli Rosenberg a high-energy physicist in more ways
than one.
Around LAS
October 6-19, 2003
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