Discover Your Paper’s Other Side

Posted on 19/08/2010 by Jon Butterworth

Good to see that an STFC employee has come up with some money-saving ideas in response to the government’s appeal.

I’m not qualified to comment on the salary freeze. The point about end-of-year flexibility is so obviously true it is incredible it has been ignored for decades. And whoever wrote it is dead right on the Research Council UK “Shared Services Centre” (SSC).

Anyone who reads my tweets will know that I am not a fan of the  SSC. It looks like an expensive, pointless reorganisation of the kind which seems to appeal to politicians and administrators once they get a certain distance from whatever they are administering. It is supposed to “streamline” and “centralise” procurement and stuff. Yeah, right.

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Into the unknown

Posted on 17/08/2010 by Jon Butterworth

See also Chapter 3.8 of Smashing Physics.

This morning the first LHC paper to really probe for new physics was submitted by ATLAS to the preprint server and to Physical Review Letters.

There has already been one paper (by CMS) on minimum bias results in 7 TeV collisions, which was the first paper from the highest energy collisions ever seen. (For more on minimum bias see here and here). There are also numerous preliminary results from all the LHC experiments. However, this ATLAS paper is the first to be sent for publication which contains results from the highest energy quark and gluon collisions ever. As I explained here, this is really where one becomes sensitive to physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.

What we have done in this paper is set exclusion limits. This means we didn’t see anything unexpected, but we have pushed the boundaries of our knowledge of fundamental physics up a notch in energy. We are really exploring new ground now. More data are still coming in, the measurements are still getting more precise. Another major milestone in the campaign…

Also, four pages of physics, 15 pages of authors and acknowledgments! Imagine if this paper had shattered the Standard Model, or found the Higgs – You see the problem with Nobel prizes? They even missed out Cabibbo for goodness sake!

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Brain Drained

Posted on 16/08/2010 by Jon Butterworth

This post also at the Guardian. See also Chapter 7.5 of Smashing Physics.

On Saturday I went to a leaving party for Lily Asquith of LHCSound fame. Lily was one of our PhD students on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. Having graduated, she is now heading off to a postdoc position (also on ATLAS) at Argonne National Lab in the US.

Whether this is part of a brain drain due to Labour’s STFC cuts followed by coalition doom-and-gloom, or just part of the normal give-and-take of international research, we shall see.

The party reminded me of the almost trance-like state in which I began my first job as a postdoctoral researcher.

Explaining

“You see, this is what it is like in Chicago…”

I’d accepted a position with Penn State University. I had only a vague idea where this was, but that hardly seemed to matter, since they were a good university and wanted to pay me to live in Hamburg and do physics with the ZEUS experiment, which is what I wanted to do.

To get my J1 visa processed, I had to actually go to Penn State, however briefly. I was supposed to fly out a few days after the oral examination for my doctorate. Not wishing to take anything for granted, I had not booked my plane ticket, but was otherwise ready to go. My exam would be on the Thursday and I would fly out to the US the weekend after, assuming I passed.

Unfortunately, the Saturday before, my bag got stolen. In it were some brand-new M&S underpants, a very long scarf I had knitted myself, and my passport, including the J1 visa.

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Scuffling over Prizes

Posted on 05/08/2010 by Jon Butterworth

This post is also available at The Guardian.

I have to say I think this is all a bit pathetic.

I had thought there were three contenders for a Nobel Prize when* the Higgs Boson is finally discovered. Peter Higgs, Brout and Engelert. Apparently there are six. This is a problem because the Nobel can only be shared three ways.

Three…

At ICHEP, the Tevatron Higgs speaker talked about the “BEHHGK” boson (all the relevant initials), since they all very recently received a prize from the American Physical Society. Then there was a storm of emails to the organisers of this workshop I attended because they did not credit Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble. Since two of the three are American (Kibble is British) I guess it’s easy enough to see why some US physicists might be agitated at this apparent failure to respect the verdict of the APS.

Note this argy-bargy sort-of-assumes the Higgs boson will be discovered, and additionally assumes that the prize won’t go to anyone involved in actually discovering it*.

The second of these is a pretty safe bet. Most Nobel prizes in particle physics go to theorists**.

I don’t think this is due to a theory cartel, it’s just that large experiments are enormously collaborative, or they don’t work. In fact there are many other theorists doing key calculations without which the experimental Higgs exclusion plots would not work either. Fortunately it’s possible to make a career in particle physics “simply” by making excellent and unique contributions to a fantastic discovery*. But it’s probably impossible to win a Nobel Prize that way. Continue reading →

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