A Quantum Diaries Survivor

Following my strong belief that science dissemination, and open borders science, is too important to pursue as a goal to constrain it by fears of being stripped of good ideas and scooped by fast competitors, I am offering here some ideas on a reserch plan I am going to follow in the coming months.The benefits of sharing thoughts early on is evident: you may, by reading about them below, be struck with a good idea which may further improve my plan, and decide to share it with me; you might become a collaborator - which would add to the personpower devoted to the research. You might point out problems, issues to address, or mention that some or all of the research has already been done by somebody else, and published - which would save me a lot of time!

After over one year of forced confinement, due to the still ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, academics around the world seem to have settled down on the idea that after all, we can still do our job via videoconferencing. We had to adapt to the situation as everybody else, of course, and in a general sense we are a privileged minority - other human occupations which are only possible in person suffered way more.

One of the reasons why I love my job as a researcher in experimental physics is that every day brings along a new problem to solve, and through decades of practice I have become quick at solving them, so I typically enjoy doing it. And it does not matter whether the problem at hand is an entirely new, challenging one or a textbook thing that has been solved a million times before. It is your problem, and it deserves your attention and dedication.

In the previous post I mentioned a research project that I was about to conclude, centered on the detection of anomalies in multidimensional data. Here I would like to give some more detail of that research, as the article I wrote on the subject is now publically accessible in the Cornell preprint arXiv (and is being sent to a refereed journal).

Usually, when we talk about our research we discuss things we have recently published, highlighting the importance or novelty of their contribution to the advancement of human understanding or knowledge of the specific field of Science we work on. So it is only normal for me to try and go against that particular cliché here, and talk about things I will publish in the future. Admittedly, it is a bit of a mine field (it is never easy to be an anticonformist), but I will try to avoid stepping on the most obvious triggers (violations of confidentiality, scooping risks, impossible promises).1. A new tool for anomaly detection

The CMS Collaboration submitted for publication last week a nice new result, where proton-proton collisions data collected by the experiment during the past run of the Large Hadron Collider were scanned in search of very peculiar events featuring a weak boson (W or Z) along with two energetic photons. The rate of these rare processes was measured and found in good agreement with predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics.

The title of this post coincides with the one of a scientific report which was submitted for publication in Reviews in Physics last Sunday; and it is also the meaning of the acronym "AMVA4NewPhysics", the name of an European Union-funded Innovative Training Network I directed as scientific coordinator from 2015 to 2019. 

Quantum Mechanics (QM), the theory that describes the behaviour of matter at microscopic distance scales apparently unfathomable by our senses, is very hard to understand and make sense of. And indeed to this day, 100 years after its first formulation, there are thick debates among theorists on the very meaning and interpretation of the wave function, which is the mathematical description of a quantum system. Yet we deeply rely on QM to figure out the organization of matter at molecular, atomic, and subatomic level. It works, despite the open questions. And today we deeply rely on QM for our technology.

While exchanging ideas with a dear colleague of mine on possible applications of differentiable programming to the optimization of the design of detection instruments, I came about an interesting, crazy idea which, since I do not have enough time to investigate at the moment, is only suitable for this blog. The rationale is that if it is a viable, patentable idea worth something, once it is published here it becomes of public knowledge and hence non-patentable anymore... Which in turn means nobody owns it, and it can be exploited without problem, like the Salk vaccine.

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Katrin Link for APPEC, the Astro-Particle Physics European Consortium. APPEC is a consortium of 19 funding agencies, national government institutions, and institutes from 17 European countries, which is responsible for coordinating and funding national research efforts in astroparticle physics. The interview stems from the help that the JENAA group (a joint effort of APPEC, NuPECC and ECFA) is trying to offer to the research plan of the MODE collaboration, a group of physicists and computer scientists for which I am serving as the scientific coordinator.

Design and purpose are definitely not two things that scientists consider as their guiding ideas in trying to decypher the fabric of our Universe, or of natural phenomena in general. So teleology should not belong to this blog, I agree.

Today the University of Padova has issued a call for Ph. D. positions to start in October 2021, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy has 23 new openings. The English version of the call page is here.