“I came to Aspen because I heard it was a very unusual but beneficial experience. It definitely took me a few days to 'get it', but after I did, I really appreciated what it had to offer. I just never had been to a workshop with so much free time. One of my best ideas came from a long walk with a colleague - this may have been my first long walk with a colleague... ever.”

2014 Publications Acknowledging the Aspen Center for Physics



Matthew Buckley has three publications on the above lists. He describes here how the Aspen Center contributed to his papers:

The Aspen Winter Conferences provided a unique and ideal setting for the collaboration with Tilman Plehn which has resulted in three papers to date on LHC top phenomenology. After several days of intense and interesting talks during the 2012 Winter Conference, during our afternoon break, Tilman and I found ourselves on the same chairlift going up Snowmass Mountain. Discussing the day's presentations, and our current projects, we realized the intersection of our present work led us in a new direction. Drawing in several of Tilman's collaborators, we used this inspiration to construct new techniques for top-tagging in the difficult low-p_T regime, and demonstrated that such techniques can be useful in searches for new physics at the LHC.

One of these papers ended up merging with another long-time collaboration I have built up with Michael Ramsey-Musolf, who I met at a Summer Aspen workshop when we were assigned the same office. As our main research focuses are fairly distinct, it is unlikely we would have met otherwise, yet it is precisely the breadth of our interests that have led to a useful collaboration.

The ACP's combination of high quality scientific discussions with an atmosphere that allows for periods of relaxed conversation with a wide variety of physicists have been invaluable to me for my research. Every time I have attended a summer or winter conference at Aspen, I leave having found new and interesting directions to take my work, and often with a new collaborator as well.