Thursday 21 May 2020

A master list of research seminars

Having previously posted about some online seminar series of interest to nuclear physicists, I have since come across the site https://researchseminars.org/, which contains a big list of research seminars that can be watched live online.  They are hosted by institutes around the world, so you can almost keep watching them 24h a day.  I see that the nuclear reaction seminar series are included there already.  There is a lot of maths and quite a bit of physics, as well as a smaller selection of computer science and biology (at least as I type this post.  Hopefully it will become more inclusive as time goes on).  There's a search and filtering facility, or you can just browse and try something that sounds interesting.  Big mapping class groups fail the Tits alternative, for example.

Not on the list are the UK nuclear physics lockdown seminars, which are perhaps not supposed to be opened to the world community.  I enjoyed hearing about an ex-Surrey undergraduate student's PhD work yesterday when he gave a seminar.  Here's a picture of the seminar just getting ready to start.




Sunday 10 May 2020

David Rowe 1936 – 2020

I learnt from a tweet today from one of his past post-docs that David Rowe died yesterday.  David was a theoretician who worked mainly on nuclear physics, famous for, amongst other things, his application of group theoretical methods in the latter part of his career and on the equations of motion approach to many-body physics earlier on.  I very much enjoyed his first book, covering many-body physics in general and covering in detail the equations of motion approach, and when it came to leaving my office for the last day before lock-down,  I decided that the one book I would fit into my bag would be his book Fundamentals of Nuclear Models, co-written with John Wood. 

David was British-Canadian, with dual nationality, following moving to Canada after study at Cambridge and Oxford, and a research position at the UKAEA with Tony Lane.  He spent the bulk of his career at the University of Toronto and though he retired in 1998, his interest and activities in nuclear theory did not wane.  Indeed, he published a paper in this month's edition of Physical Review C (on a quantized algebraic version of the Bohr-Mottelson Unified Model)

Friday 1 May 2020

Nuclear Physics Meetings in 2021

Here is my annual post of (low-energy, mostly) nuclear physics meetings taking place around the world.  This is for 2021 and includes some meetings postponed from 2020

18/07–23/07: 14th Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions Conference, Whistler BC, Canada
A conference on collisions between nuclei at a wide range of energies, from superheavy-element fusion to quark-gluon plasma.  I have never been to one of these, but I'm certainly interested in this area, particularly in heavy-ion reactions around the fusion barrier.  I dare say Whistler is a nice place to visit. [website]