I’ve been interviewing candidates for postdoc and PhD positions in particle physics at UCL. This against a backdrop of the start of high energy physics at the LHC, ongoing STFC cuts and government responses to them, and a general election in which science and higher education are at least occasionally noticed, now we realise we can’t rely entirely on the City of London to keep the UK economy in the top ten.
I have been alternately uplifted and depressed.
A quick post to explain something about this, the first ATLAS physics results from LHC collisions at 7000 GeV.
The measurement is a repeat of the ATLAS minimum bias measurement at 900 GeV, except these protons hit each other at 7000 GeV, an energy 3.5 times higher than we ever managed before in an accelerator. (That link hopefully explains what “minimum bias” means.)
This is not a journal publication, it’s a “preliminary” measurement, to be presented at conferences. Hence the 1.5 in my title – we are working on 2.0, which is intended for a paper. But it is public, and it is useful to put it out there so it can be discussed by physicists who are not on ATLAS. And it does tell us something new.
See also Chapter 3.2 of Smashing Physics.
I haven’t been paying as much attention as I should to science policy in the election. Guilty, will re-engage. I have a good excuse, of course. Even after STFC cuts we’re still members of CERN, the LHC is running, and (volcanoes permitting) I am traveling, working and basically doing physics. And it’s exciting and absorbing.
The wires of the ZEUS tracking chamber (credit T.J.Fraser)
Typical scientist. We just get the data and get happy. In STFC related politicking, I’ve heard our big mistake was that in economic good times, when science was getting roughly its share of the growth (and particle physics was getting somewhat less, but not being cut), we just shut up and got on with science.
It’s fair to say we should have said thanks (Thanks!), but this argument was that we should have been aggressively pushing for more & more cash, just so there was more fat to cut when bad times came. This shows a gulf in understanding between the worlds of science and politics, sadly.
See also Chapter 3.6 of Smashing Physics.
Last week, on the day we got our first 7 TeV collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, quite by chance we also had the conference dinner of the annual meeting of the Institute of Physics High Energy Particle Physics and Astroparticle Physics groups. After years of financial body-blows to the fields (both principally funded by the STFC in the UK), the LHC news made it a pretty cheerful meeting in the circumstances.
The man who headed the UCL high energy physics group when I was appointed to the faculty, Tegid Jones, gave a wonderful after dinner speech. He went through the true and sometimes un
told stories around the start up of several big experiments he has been involved in. These included a water-filled proton decay detector in a salt mine (IMB) which initially leaked (dissolving quite a lot of the mine and almost drowning the thesis of a future congressman), then achieved a 300m 490m siphon effect with a cesspit on the surface (bad for optical purity of the water). After the third filling, they failing to find proton decay. However, they did observe neutrinos from Supernova 1987a – still the only observation of neutrinos from outside the solar system, at least until maybe ANITA spots one. It also developed a lot of the techniques taken forward by the experiments which eventually found neutrino oscillations.
I’m lucky to have been involved in the start of two major particle physics colliders. I was a student on the ZEUS experiment, on the HERA collider in DESY, Hamburg, when it began operation.
Life and Physics 