A Quantum Diaries Survivor

I just finished reading a very nice piece on the Guardian, written by my friend and ex colleague Eleni Petrakou, who collaborated with me in the CMS experiment at CERN and is now a scientific writer. The topic is the disruptive effect that the war in Ukraine has caused to scientific collaboration. I urge you to read it if the matter is of any interest to you.

It rarely happens to play a regular chess game with no clear mistakes. When the game is a blitz one, though, this is exceedingly rare. A blitz game is one where both players have 5 minutes to make all their moves, and the first who runs out of time automatically loses (provided the opponent realizes it).Because of the very short time to make decisions, blitz chess games are an adrenaline-producing, intense brain activity. So much so that when people talk to me during a blitz game I simply do not record the words they speak, for the whole duration of the game; after the end, I often find myself reckoning with a buffer of words that by then have no meaning anymore. 

Another year just started, and this is as good a time as any to line up a few wishes. Not a bucket list, nor a "will do" set of destined-to-fail propositions. It is painful to have to reckon with the failure of our strength of will, so I'd say it is better to avoid that. Rather, it is a good exercise to put together a list of things that we would like to happen, and over which we have little or no control: it is much safer as we won't feel guilty if these wishes do not come true. 

A long while ago (my gosh, 13 years!!) I wrote on this site a two-post piece titled "Five Tips for Particle Physics Ph.D. Wannabes". At 43 years of age, I felt confident that I could look back to some experience gathered while being a Ph.D. myself, and later on while advising others. I believe the few advices I put together there are still mostly valid today. Have a look if you are a grad student in search for tips!

The title of this post is not of my making - it is something you may read in a list of recent ATLAS results, in one of the otherwise dry and business-like web pages of the experiment:Don't get me wrong, I am all for a bit of personality in such web outlets, so the above rather than criticism should be seen as an exhortation to my CMS colleagues (as CMS the experiment I am a member of) to mimic its competitor. I look forward to a listing of "CMS wondrous new results on Higgs physics", e.g. ...

That's the title of a short article I just published (it is online here, but beware - for now you need to access from an institution that can access the journal contents), on Nuclear Instruments and Methods - a renowned journal for particle physics and nuclear physics instrumentation. The contents are nothing very new, in the sense that they are little more than a summary of things that the MODE collaboration published last March here. But for the distracted among you, I will summarize the summary below.

Humanity progresses thanks to the diffusion and sharing of human knowledge. In particular, scientific progress is brought forth by the sharing of ideas, measurements and experimental results among scientists, and the distribution of excellent education. We have grown very good at doing that, but can we improve the sharing of knowledge for the common good? The answer is certainly yes, as the interconnection of the scientific community and the interdisciplinarity of its efforts are hampered by borders, language barriers, cultural differences, political influences, religious hindrances, education system challenges, and also by different conventions, policies, metrics in the different areas of scientific research.

At about this time of the year I find myself teaching my students about the construction of V-A theory, which is a milestone in the construction of the Standard Model of particle physics. And in so doing I rejoice about having a chance to tell them the details of one of the most brilliant experiments of the twentieth century, one performed in 1957 by Maurice Goldhaber with his colleagues Grodzins and Sunjar, and which has become a cornerstone of the physics of weak interactions and of particle physics in general. 

The DeepLearn school series, now reaching the seventh edition, offers insight into artificial intelligence and applications in a week-long course, tightly packing a significant number of high-profile instructors. The present edition, currently being held at the Technical University of Lulea, in the north of Sweden, features the following:- Sean Benson, Netherlands Cancer Institute- Thomas Breuel, Nvidia- Hao Chen, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology- Janlin Chen, University of Missouri- Nadya Chernyavskaya, CERN- Efstratios Gavves, University of Amsterdam- Quanquan Gu, University of California Los Angeles

For some reasons, my personal web page features high in web searches for master thesis offers. I got to learn this by inquiring with a few students who asked me to supervise them remotely on some of the offered topics: where did they get to know about my research activities, and what led them to pick my offers? They all answered that they bumped into my web page section "thesis offers". Well, at least that was no wasted time when I wrote it.

In a recent post in this blog I discussed the idea of exploiting the properties of negative muons for a new kind of imaging technique of unknown volumes of material. The idea is based on the fact that negative muons stopped inside matter have a lifetime that is modified by nuclear interactions, so that a precise detection of their lifetime and point of decay becomes a means of inferring the composition of unknown volumes. Here, I want to offer the results of a quick simulation of the processes, to show that the idea is not so far-fetched.Different techniques for muon tomography

Are you a recently (8 years) appointed Ph.D. graduate in fundamental physics, who wants to work in Italy? This post is for you. The INFN is opening 20 positions for foreigners who would like to join a group of research in one of the INFN sections (there are 25 across Italy). The positions are for one year, renewable, and the salary is competitive, given that it is roughly at the level of a starting associate professor in Italy. Note, also Ph.D. students who plan to graduate before November 1st 2023 can apply! Also, the 8-years limit can be waived if you spent time in maternity, military service, or illness. The winning candidates are expected to start their contract before November 2023.