Notes from Chicago

Posted on 30/08/2010 by lilyasquith

Now at The Guardian.

I am Lily, a new postdoc at Argonne National Lab.  I’m the one who thinks she can find the Higgs boson by listening to it. Thanks Jon for letting me play on your blog.

It’s a walk in the park.

I moved here just over a week ago to work on ATLAS physics analysis.  So far the closest I have got to doing any physics is talking about ways to limit the shock a colleague gets from the carpet-humidity-doorknob setup in his office here. But that’s a start.

Argonne have excellent childcare facilities

I’m loving it here so far. It was a tricky one deciding whether to move 4000 miles from London with an 11-year-old child and no driving license. I’m glad we did.

Argonne is full of smart people doing interesting physics. My PhD was on the search for the Higgs boson, which is one of the few areas the people at Argonne aren’t actively involved in. I’m giving a seminar about my research in the next couple of weeks which will either draw them in or put them off for life, or most likely a mixture of the two.

I have done no physics whatsoever in the last week, so here is an edited summary of our experiences so far, to be filed under “non-physics”.

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Europe by Physics and Train

Posted on 28/08/2010 by Jon Butterworth

This post is now also on The Guardian. See also Chapter 3.5 of Smashing Physics.

Back in Geneva after the SUSY meeting in Bonn and a day in the mountains.

In the mountains

One of us is not talking physics

The return journey wasn’t as pleasant as the outward one. The train didn’t turn up at Bonn Hauptbahnhof so we were taxied across town. This meant a 30min delay and I missed both the next connections. However, via Mannheim, Basel and Bern, I made it in the end*.

The SUSY meeting made it on to German TV in a report starring Herbi Dreiner but briefly featuring me listening to my own talk, thanks to some nifty editing**. As far as I can tell with my poor German language skills the report looks fun & informative – good when physics is news. Herbi is a bit of a “science in public” star anyway, having won the European Physical Society prize last year for his physics show, something I hope he gets to perform in the UK soon.

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Supersymmetry: The Higgs boson’s flexible friend

Posted on 21/08/2010 by Jon Butterworth

This post is also on The Guardian. See also Chapter 3.5 of Smashing Physics.

Next week I am giving a talk a the SUSY 2010 conference in Bonn.

It is a bit weird that there have been seventeen of these annual SUSY (for “SUperSYmmetry”), meetings, even though there is as yet no experimental evidence for SUSY. Perhaps it’s excusable. SUSY is still the best way I’m aware of to improve the Standard Model of particle physics.

To me the three biggest arguments in its favour are: One, it plugs an important hole in the theory. Two, it sort-of-predicts Dark Matter. Three, it looks nice.

Something looking nice in Bonn.

The first is to do with why the Higgs boson is not millions of times heavier than it is. Given we don’t know whether there is a Higgs yet, that’s a pretty forward-looking concern, but it is a real worry for the credibility of the theory. Basically without it, the Standard Model looks like a coincidence on the level of one in ten-thousand-million-million (1016). This is 100 times less likely than winning the lottery jackpot two weeks running if you buy a single ticket each week. SUSY introduces some quantum cancellations which make the Higgs mass much more stable, and therefore plausible. Still, maybe the universe got lucky. Some string theorists might say we should be glad it’s not one in 10500.

The second is the most compelling to me, since astronomical observations tell us there is probably some Dark Matter out there (or else we really do not understand gravity) and many SUSY models predict a particle which would be an ideal candidate for Dark Matter. It may be right behind you. When two different branches of science have problems which seem to converge on the same solution, look out for progress.

The third point is arguable and I may argue it later, but not now.

Another feature of SUSY is its flexibility. It can appear in many different guises in an experiment, to the extent that almost any weird event we see could (and will, I bet you) be interpreted as a “hint of SUSY”.

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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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Posted in Politics, Science Policy | Tagged | 1 Comment