Physics

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…

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,…

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. First of all, the sources. The first one is a Fe-55 emitter that produces very soft x-rays from electron capture - basically, the electron is captured by the nucleus, whereby a proton turns into a neutron with the emission of an…

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…

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.The student, now Ph.D. graduate Viktor Ananiev, was defending a thesis based on work he had done with Alex Read on a statistical issue that arises quite often in data analysis  in experimental particle physics: the correct assessment of the statistical…

Yesterday I gladly attended a symposium in honor of Giorgio Bellettini, who just turned 90. The italian physicist, who had a very big impact in particle physics in his long and illustrious career, is still very active -e.g. he makes all the hard questions at the conferences he attends, as he has always done. The symposium included recollections of Giorgio's career and achievements by colleagues who collaborated with him and/or shared a part of his path. Among them there were talks by Samuel Ting, Paul Grannis, Michelangelo Mangano, Hans Grasmann, Mario Greco.I also was allowed to give a short…

... if you are a researcher in physics or astrophysics and you are working with machine learning, that is. Between September 23 and 25 - just when summer is over - we will meet in Valencia, Spain, to discuss the latest developments in deep learning applications to optimization of experiments in fundamental science. This is the fourth workshop of the MODE Collaboration, which focuses on a new frontier of application of deep learning: co-design and high-level optimization, and the tools to pull it off. If you have been doing research in fundamental science for less than a decade or so, you may…

By and large, particle physicists confronted with the need to awe and enthuse an audience of laypersons will have no hesitation in choosing to speak about the Higgs boson and its mysteries - undoubtedly a fascinating story that requires one to start with the 1960ies and the intuition of a handful of theoretical physicists, and then grows epic in a crescendo of colliders that sought and missed the Higgs boson, and then the LHC which finally found the elusive signal of production and decay of that particle.However, there are heaps of other small beautiful pearls waiting to be dug out in the…

Last week I was in Amsterdam, where I attended the first European AI for Fundamental Physics conference (EUCAIF). Unfortunately I could not properly follow the works there, as in the midst of it I got grounded by a very nasty bronchial bug. Then over the weekend I was able to drag myself back home, and today, still struggling with the after-effects, am traveling to Rome for another relevant event. The meeting is called ESPP and it is an INFN effort to gather input from its community on the next European strategy update for particle physics. On Tuesday I will give there a short talk on AI…

From April 30 to May 3 more than 300 researchers in fundamental physics will gather in Amsterdam for the first edition of the EUCAIF conference, an initiative supported by the APPEC, NuPecc and ECFA consortia, which is meant to structure future European research activities in fundamental physics with Artificial Intelligence technologies. Our group, led by Sascha Caron and Christoph Weniger from the University of Amsterdam, sees the participation of several leading scientists who operate in the fields of theoretical physics, experimental physics at particle colliders, gravitational wave…