A Quantum Diaries Survivor

At the IV Workshop in Valencia a student from my group, Emanuele Coradin, presented the results of a novel algorithm for the identification of charged particles in a silicon tracker. The novelty is due to the use of neuromorphic computing, which works by encoding detector hits in the time of arrival of current impulses at neurons, and by letting neurons "learn" the true patterns of hits produced by charged particles from the noise due to random hits.

Last week I got to the part of my course in Subnuclear Physics for Statisticians (yes, there is such a course at the Department of Statistical Sciences in Padova, and I have been giving it since its inception 6 years ago!) where I discuss CP violation in the system of neutral K mesons. In one of the most surprising experiments of modern physics, the group of Cronin and Fitch proved in 1964 that the combination of the two symmetries operations called "charge conjugation" C and "parity inversion" P could in some cases modify the properties of physical systems. 

USERN (Universal Scientific Education and Research Network, https://usern.org) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that supports interdisciplinary science across borders. Founded in 2015 by a distinguished Iranian Immunologist, Prof. Nima Rezaei, USERN has grown to acquire a membership of 26,000 members in 140 countries, from 22 scientific disciplines. From November 2022 I am its President.

Nowadays we study the Universe using a number of probes and techniques. Over the course of the past 100 years we moved from barely using optical telescopes, that give us access to the flux of visible photons from galaxies, supernovae, and other objects of interest, to exploiting photons of any energy - gamma rays, x rays, ultraviolet and infrared radiation, microwaves; and then also using charged cosmic radiation (including protons and light nuclei, electrons and positrons), neutrinos, and lastly, gravitational waves. 

Earlier this year I mentioned here that I would be writing an article on how the utility function of experiments in fundamental science could be specified, as an enabling step toward the formalization of a co-design optimization problem. Now, as the deadline for submission approaches and the clock keeps ticking, I am returning to this topic and am mulling over the matter, so I thought it would be appropriate to dump here a few thoughts on the matter.Co-design

I recently got engaged in a conversation with a famous retired mathematician / cosmologist about the phenomenology of Higgs bosons in the Standard Model of particle physics, and very soon we ended up discussing a graph produced by the CMS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, which details the result of searches of Higgs boson pairs in proton-proton collisions data. The conversation -and in particular the trouble I had in making sense of the graph with my interlocutor- clarified to me that the way we present those graphs, which summarize our results and should speak by themselves, is confusing to say the least. Indeed, one needs to be briefed extensively before one can fully understand what the various elements of the graphs mean.

These days I am in the middle of a collaborative effort to write a roadmap for the organization of infrastructures and methods for applications of Artificial Intelligence in fundamental science research. In so doing I wrote a paragraph concerning benchmarks and standards.

Last week I was in Valencia, to attend the fourth MODE Workshop on Differentiable Programming for Experiment Design. It was a great meeting, with 80 participants eager to discuss their latest results in application of complex deep neural network models and similar concoctions to problems in fundamental science. Of particular significance is the fact that the average age of the participants was somewhere between 25 and 30 years. In my opening speech I made the point that given the downward trend of that number, soon we will be running a kindergarden. But nobody laughed - these kiddos are serious about machine learning, and they showed it with the excellent quality of the material they presented.

The SWGO Collaboration (SWGO stands for Southern Wide-Field Gamma Observatory) met this week in Heidelberg, hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) to discuss progress in the many activities that its members are carrying forward to prepare for the finalization of the design of the observatory and the following construction phase. As a member of the collaboration I could learn of many new developments in detail, but I cannot discuss them here as they are work in progress by my colleagues. What I can do here, however, is to describe the observatory as we would like to build it, and a few other things that have been decided and are now public. 

I will start this brief post with a disclaimer - I am not a nuclear physicist (rather, I am a lesser being, a sub-nuclear physicist). Jokes aside, my understanding and knowledge of the dynamics of high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions and the phases of matter that can exist at those very high densities and temperatures is overall quite poor. 

I am presently in Cairns, sitting in a parallel session of the "Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum" conference, where I am convening a session on Statistical Methods for Physics Analysis in the XXI Century, giving a talk on the optimization of the SWGO experiment, and playing the piano at a concert for the conference, in addition of course to visiting the area. Anyway, all of the above is too much information to you, as this post is about something else.

Last week I traveled from Venice to Tokyo through Zurich, and during the flights I could do some more tests of the RadiaCode 103 - the nice spectrometer for gamma radiation I have been playing with as of late (for a couple of earlier posts and tests see here and here).