A Quantum Diaries Survivor

In the next few days I have a busy schedule with a few lectures gravitating around the use of deep learning technologies for fundamental physics research. This is of course no news, but I thought that my blog is the proper place to list a few pointers, in case some of you is interested in following one or two of these events. After all, deep learning is all the rage these days, and even if fundamental physics is not your bread and butter, you may hopefully find useful inspiration in the kind of use cases that field provides for cutting edge applications of artificial intelligence.

This past Thursday I held a public lecture, together with my long-time friend Ivan Bianchi, on the topic of Art and Artificial Intelligence. The event was organized by the "Galileo Festival" in Padova, for the Week of Innovation.Ivan is a professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Padova. We have known each other since we were two year olds, as our mothers were friends. We took very different career paths but we both ended up in academic and research jobs in Padova, and we have been able to take part together in several events where art and science are at the focus. Giving a lecture together is twice as fun!

I believe oceans of ink were spent, ever since pens were a thing, writing on the mentor-student relationship, its do's and don'ts, and the consequences of deviations from proper practice. And rightly so, as the balancing act required for a proper, effective teaching action is entirely non trivial. The fact that our didactical systems and academia are in constant evolution, that rules and courses formats change over time, and that as humans we tend to forget what has been learnt in the past (on good practice, I mean), require us to keep thinking about the topic, and continue to keep the discussion alive. 

I very much would like to write about the Nobel prize in physics here today, but I realize I cannot really pay a good service to the three winners, nor to my readers, on that topic. The reason is, quite bluntly, that I am not qualified to do that without harming my self-respect. Also, I never knew about the research of two of the winners. As for the third, I do know Giorgio Parisi's research in qualitative terms, and I happen to know him personally; well, at least we are Facebook friends, as maybe 500 of his contacts can also claim - plus, he once invited me to a symposium at the Accademia dei Lincei, of which he his vice-president. And I did write about his scientific accomplishments in the past here, on two occasions.

The Corfu Summer Institute is a well-established institution for higher education, run since the paleolithic by the inexhaustible George Zoupanos, the soul of the whole thing. Generations of physicists have been trained in doctoral schools and conferences there over the past few decades. Of course the beauty of the island, set in the Ionian sea and green from the top of its mountains to the blue sea below, has helped to keep the events there well-attended, and even during the pandemic the events have been run in person.

I used some spare research funds to open a six-months internship to help my research group in Padova, and the call is open for applications at this site (the second in the list right now, the number is #23584). So here I wish to answer a few questions from potential applicants, namely:1) Can I apply? 2) When is the call deadline?3) What is the salary?4) What is the purpose of the position? What can I expect to gain from it?5) What will I be doing if I get selected? Answers:

When you collide particles made up of quarks and gluons, such as the protons accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, you mostly expect particles made of quarks and gluons to emerge. That is because quarks and gluons most of the times interact by the strong interaction, which is itself mediated by the exchange of gluons; and the strong interaction knows nothing about all the other matter and interaction fields.So how do you get energetic electrons, muons, photons, and weak bosons from a LHC collision? Well, the electroweak interaction which may produce these particles does play in, but its contribution is, er, weaker, by definition. Gimme all 'em leptons!

In the ancient past, when a good portion of blog followers were interested in the writers' lives more than in actual content, I used to write a lot more about private issues here. I don't do that so often any more mainly because I think the interest of readers has shifted - or better, the composition of readers has changed. But I am not less keen to discuss private issues today than I was ten years ago. Privacy is not among the priorities of a blogger true to him- or herself anyway, at least from my point of view.So, what am I up to these days? I thought I could give you some update. Maybe in one of my future posts I will also summarize the various research activities I am engaged in as of late, but let's keep this out of today's post. 

Today I am giving the opening speech at a workshop with the same title of this post. The workshop takes place at the Center for Particle Physics and Phenomenology of Université catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, and it is in a mixed formula - we will have 33 in-person attendees and 72 more attending by videolink. The workshop is organized by the MODE collaboration, which I lead. It is a small group of physicists and computer scientists from 10 institutions in Europe and America, who have realized how today's deep learning technology allows us to raise the bar of our optimization tasks - we are now targeting the full optimization of the design of some of the most complex instruments ever built by humankind, particle detectors.

In the third part of this long piece on graphical displays and their interpretation, I wish to discuss some properties of two-dimensional distributions, which are sometimes called "scatterplots" (especially by physicists), or also "temperature plots" (when colour is used to give a sense of the density of data in the two-dimensional plane). In this post we will consistently label "X" the variable on the horizontal axis, and "Y" the variable on the vertical axis, but there is no hierarchy between them - they should be considered equally important.

In a recent post I discussed how even the simplest kind of data display graph - the histogram - can sometimes confuse and be misinterpreted. Which is a total howler, as graphs are supposedly means of clarification and immediate, at-a-glance, interpretation of data summaries.

The discovery of a new exotic hadron, named T_cc+,  was announced by the LHCb Collaboration a little over a week ago. Unlike some previous discoveries of other resonances by the LHC experiments (dozens have been announced since 2010 by LHCb, and to a lesser extent by CMS and ATLAS) the one of the T_cc+ is is very significant and exciting, and it promises to advance our understanding of low-energy QCD, with repercussions across the board.