The regulars here will have already noticed by now that my posting rate has fallen this week. I have been busy with three different physics analyses, trying to make some progress in each.
The first project is the calibration of the momentum scale in CMS. I have discussed the issue elsewhere a couple of times; I am slowly converging to an understanding of how to treat the Z boson lineshape -which receives contributions from a number of different sources and effects: parton distribution functions in the projectiles, electromagnetic and weak radiation effects, interaction of the final state products of Z decay with the material of the tracker. All this must be dealt with in a coherent fashion to extract the most information possible from the Z decays we will reconstruct in CMS. We have a small but focused group working at the momentum scale calibration, including worthy physicists from Torino University, plus Marco and me. This week, I have tried to determine the effect of parton distribution functions alone, to insert it in our algorithm, but something still escapes me, and I want to do things as well as I can -which sometimes take little extra effort from a mediocre result, but in this case seems to be requiring a lot more care.
The second is the search for Higgs boson decays in the final state arising when H decays to two Z bosons, and one of the Z decays to a lepton pair, while the other decays to a pair of jets. Usually this final state, which is very hard to exploit at low Higgs masses due to the large backgrounds, is used for high-mass searches only (above 200 GeV). We want to extend it to lower masses, where the Higgs is more likely to be, using the 
The third topic is the evaluation of the chances of CMS to detect a similar signature of multi-muon events that CDF has seen in its data. The CDF signal is probably just a not well understood background, but it makes sense to size up the capability of CMS to detect a similar signature with early data. This requires understanding muon sources without using real data, and it is a bit far-fetched, but it is perfectly sound as a masters’ thesis topic, one on which Franco and I in fact have a student working. I have not worked much on this topic this week, but it still has absorbed a little of CPU.
I have a thick agenda of pending things to do, which has grown longer in the last few days. One thing is to post more commentaries on the multi-muon analysis by CDF here. Another is to progress with a document I am writing. A third is to review a 40-pages long CDF paper draft for the Spokespersons Reading Group, to which I proudly belong. A fourth is to organize the upcoming meeting of the CMS-Padova software-analysis group, which will convene in ten days. A fifth is to prepare my next trip to CERN, which will be from next Monday to next Friday. I do hope that I will be able to post more in the next few days… if I survive.
