A Quantum Diaries Survivor

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).

I remember having been flamed, a long time ago, when in this column I ventured to claim that there was an inflation of physics conferences and workshops around, which to me looked both counter-productive (if there are too many such events, they become a distracting factor from research work, and returns are diminishing) and, I went as far as to propose, even unethical in some cases. I do not like being flamed, if only because it is yet another unproductive distraction, so I will not fall in the same mistake again here; rather, I have to observe that these days I am rather on the offending camp, so who am I to cast the first stone?

Each man kills the thing he loves, sang Jeanne Moreau in a beautiful song some thirty years ago. But the sentence is actually a quote from Oscar Wilde - aren't all smart quotes from that amazing writer?Anyway, in some way this rather startling concept applies to every man except researchers in fundamental physics - both male and female, in fact. There, all of us love our Standard Model - it is a theory so wonderful and deep, and so beautifully confirmed by countless experiments, that it wins you over forever once you reach enough understanding of its intricacies. And physicists have tried, unsuccessfully, to kill the Standard Model for over fifty years now. Anomaly! Anomaly!

In the previous post I have described some of the main functionalities of the RadiaCode 103 radiation spectrometer, which the company graciously made available for my tests. Here I want to discuss some additional tests I have done, using radioactive samples from my minerals collection as well as a couple of test sources we have in our Physics department in Padova.

A few days ago I put my hands on a RadiaCode 103, a pocket radiation counter, dosimeter, and spectrometer that has recently appeared on the market. The company that produces it, RadiaCode, is located in Cyprus (see https://radiacode.com). The instrument is a portable device that pairs up with a smartphone or a PC for maximum functionality, but can well operate as a standalone unit to provide quite a bit more functionality than the standard monitoring and dosimeter capabilities of other instruments.Here is the unit as it comes, packaged in a style similar to that of smartphones. The package contains the unit and a USB-C cable, plus a card with a QR-code link to the manuals and software.

Time and again, I play a "good" blitz chess game. In blitz chess you have 5 minutes thinking for the totality of your game. This demands quick reasoning and a certain level of dexterity - with the mouse, if you are playing online as I usually do.My blitz rating on the chess.com site hovers around 2150-2200 elo points, which puts me at the level of a strong candidate master or something like that, which is more or less how I would describe myself. But time is of course running at a slower, but more unforgiving pace in my life, and I know that my sport prowess is going to decline - hell, it has already. So it makes me happy when I see that I can still play a blitz game at a decent level. Today is one of those days.

Yesterday I was in Oslo, where I was invited tro serve as the leading opposer in the Ph.D. defense of a student of Alex Read, who is a particle physicist and a member of the ATLAS collaboration. Although I have served in similar committees several times in the past, this turned out to be a special experience for me for a couple of reasons.