NuPECC meeting in Strasbourg

I've spent today in a meeting in Strasbourg as part of the NuPECC (Nuclear Physics European Collaboration Committee) on which I sit as a nominated delegate of the UK.  This is my second such meeting, having been rather recently named on the committee, and the structure was now familiar, with a series of reports on various things to do with nuclear physics research and the general research environemnt in each member country and in a trans-national sense.  As well as those activities per se, it is a chance to network personally and on behalf of the UK community. 

The meeting itself took place in the building of the ESF - the European Science Foundation, which is a typically nice oldish (though not that old by Strasbourg standards) institutional building that was on the site of a monestary which did not survive the revolution.  Here we are in the garden during the first coffee break.  I'm in the back row on the far left.

 

RIP Brian Wilson 1942 - 2025

I just read the news that Brian Wilson has died.  He was, with due deference to the other members, the leading creative force in the Beach Boys.  Aside from their general importance in popular music, the Beach Boys were the first band I really loved.  I got a two volume "Very Best of the Beach Boys" compilation when I was something like 8 or 9 and moved quickly on from liking the surfing hits of volume 1 to the more complex and varied songs on volume 2.  They have remained a favourite band of mine over the last 40+ years, with different parts of their work being important to me at different times of my life.  Dennis Wilson's death in 1983, when I was 9, was the first death that affected me, the first time that someone important in my life died.

In the summer between finishing by BA and starting my DPhil, I went on holiday to Los Angeles.  The fact that the Beach Boys were from there was just a coincidence - my (now dead) aunt lived there and it gave me and a University friend a base to see the sights.  I associate the trip with one of the records I picked up there - a Brian Wilson solo album "I just wasn't made for these times" which tied in with a biopic about him.  Brian had suffered a range of well known mental health, drug and alcohol issues, and I identified with him through such shared troubles that I was already startng to be aware of at that time, and was starting to engage with psychiatric services myself.  A few songs on that album I bought in LA really stood out to me, and I will post one here.  Called "Still I dream of it", this version from the album is a home-recorded solo demo by Brian, and you can really hear his fragility in it.  The studio-recorded version of the song wasn't released when it was orinigally recorded, and though I've heard it now, I still prefer the demo version.  Jimmy Nail has covered it, which brought him up highly in my esteem, and there is a strange AI version you can find in which Frank Sinatra's voice sings it.  Apparently it was written with him in mind. 

RIP Brian, and thanks

 

A viva in Paris

Today I have been in Paris to conduct a PhD viva for a student working in the overlap area between nuclear physics & quantum computing.it was an early start for me, getting to St Pancras station for the 8am train to Paris. The journey went very smoothly and I arrived at orsay-ville station in the south of the city in time for lunch with the rest of the PhD jury. The style of a viva in France is quite different to that of the UK not least because the poor candidate has an audience.

The candidate (Jing Zhang) gave a presentation to the audience, including the examienrs ("jury") and then we took it in turns to ask questions.  I, and one of the other examiners (the "referees") had to also give a kind of overal report orally, to match one that we had already submitted.  

After questioning, the jury retired to decide its verdict.  Fortunately, and as usual, we agreed that Mr Zhang deserved to pass the ordeal and become Dr Zhang.  His family, who had been on a Zoom call watching the whole proceedings dropped out shortly before the verdict, unfortunately, so I hope Jing was able to call them soon afterwards.   Congratulations Dr Zhang!

I took one picture of all the proceedings, which perhaps doesn't capture the new doctor in the best light, but you can see he is thinking seriously.  It also shows the cute "THX" made of quantum gates

 

People named *lton

 It's been a while since I've been moved to post a nuclear physics spot-the-difference, but how could I not when I have never seen Rocket Man Elton John and Knockout Man Wilton Catford in the same room together, despite both people having spent most of their lives at music venues?  Are they, in fact, the same person?

Catford	John

DInosaur Jr @ The Troxy

Last night I went to see the band Dinosaur Jr at the Troxy.  Dinosaur Jr were around when I was a teenager when they released the album of theirs that is still my favourite (Bug, featuring their signature song Freakscene).  They are still going today, and like many bands of that era they tour with special anniversary concerts of particular albums.

Yesterday they played the songs from their 1995 album Without A Sound from start to finish, then went on with another half dozen songs from their catalogue.  That included Freakscene, which I sat listening to with a big grin on my face.  They ended with their stylish take on The Cure's song Just Like Heaven.

The audience was about 50% bearded middle aged men (like me), with the rest made up (roughly in order of number) middle-aged men without beards, women, and teenagers either there with their parents, or apparently there because they are independently into these dinosaurs

I'd never been to the Troxy before.  It's in Limehouse, and was once a cinema serving the local, relatively poor, population.  The area was largely bombed and/or cleared of slums during and after the war, and the cinema audience then dwindled.  After serving a couple of uses of the years, it is now an events venue.  We had seating tickets up on the balcony and while Dinoaur Jr are something of a noisy band to which the audience can gainfully mosh, my 51 year old frame was happy enough with a seat.

 

The 5 elements beginning with H

Without wanting to turn this blog into one about quizzes, I went with a couple of friends to my local pub for their Sunday night quiz only to find that one of the regular rounds was very on-topic.  Round 3 is always a "top 5" round in which there are two parts, each of which asks you for five answers.  Often these are the top 5 in some category, though yesterday they were not quite that, but just categories with only 5 answers and we we were asked to list them all.

Question 1 was on the words use to describe the going on horseracing courses.  We managed to pluck 4 out of the 5 of those.  Question 2 asked "What 5 chemical elements begin with the letter H?"  Should be a write-in for a nuclear physicist, right?  Well, I immediately wrote down Hydrogen and Helium, then Hafnium (named after Copenhagen - Hafn and Hagen are cognate words meaning harbour, like our word haven).  Then it took me a minute to remember the proper name and spelling of the element Ho (it's Holmium, this time named after Stockholm).

The last one was a bit trickier for me.  Part of the problem is that I remember a series of element names that were widely used before international agreement.  I couldn't remember if Hahnium (named after Otto Hahn) was one of these.  In the end, I decided (correctly) that it was, and that the other element beginning with H is actually named after the German state of Hesse, where the GSI laboratory is situated.  I wrote down Hessium but the actual answer is Hassium but the people marking liaised with the questionmaster and they decided this was good enough for the point.  It's called Hassium because of the Latin spelling of the state of Hesse.  

Anyway - quite a hard question, really, with three pretty obscure elements.  Apparently there was a science teacher in one of other teams and he was outed as not having scored 5/5!

Obligatory picture:  The GSI site with the upgraded FAIR project, in the German state of Hesse

 

QLL Charity Quiz win

One highlight of my week was attending the annual charity quiz run by the Quiz Leage of London.  I play in a league team called Pineapple, and we put a squad forward for the charity quiz and ... won!  I think it's fair to say that our captain, Dom, got more questions than the rest of us (possibly put together) but we each contributed some answers that only we knew and without which we would not have won.  

The quiz was written and hosted by Paul Sinha, and here's a picture of him (centre) posing with our winning team - me on the right.  Not the best backdrop, but hey ...

 

Nuclear Physics in Finland

Through one of those more useful email services that send me a list of recent papers I might be intersted in, I came across a history of nuclear physics in Finland in the years from WWII to a decade or two afterwards.   

I'm well aware of the excellent work now taking place at Jyväskylä where, thanks to an accelerator facility, support for theory, a great local group and access to international users, Finland punches well above its weight in nuclear physics.  There's not much nuclear physics elsewhere in Finland, but the paper cited above gives in interesting account of the pre-Jyväskylä days, concentrating on the very few people who were involved in getting some nuclear physics activity established in the country, and setting it in the political context of wartime and post-war Finland.  An interesting read, and of course much easier to read than the typical technical papers I am used to.

 Here's a picture from the (open access) paper showing Lise Meitner (second from left in the front) visiting Finland

 

Halo nuclei at 40

I've had a few emails forwarding the announcement of a conference celebrating the 40th annversary of Halo Nuclei.  The circular is not a very colourful, but I paste the top of the pdf below.

Since the image is not clickable (except to see it at higher resolution), here is the link above if you want to follow it.

I have never worked on halo nuclei – light nuclei in which the last particle (or two or three) are not tighly bound to all the others, but which exist in a very extended halo – but that put me a bit at odds with much of the theory group here at Surrey when I arrived.  They had been using their reaction theory expertise to really become the go-to group in the world for understanding and interpreting the experiments in which these halo nuclei are formed.  If I look up the Google Scholar pages for some of my now-emeritus colleagues like Jeff Tostevin, Jim Al-Khalili, and Ian Thompson, you can see "halo nulei" in the title of papers from the 90s which are all very high-up in each of their all-time highest-cited papers.  

Because of the peculiar structure of these halo nuclei, only a very few isotopes in the whole nuclear chart could ever be possible candidates, and it's no surprising that they are no longer at the cutting edge of nuclear research.  That's not to say that there is nothing going on in the area of halo nuclei studies - they are still interesting systems both for experimental and theoretical study, but the lowest-lying fruit was picked some time ago and the number of people working on the remaining hardest problems is small. 

Not having anything really to do with halo nuclei, I definitely don't intend to go to the conference, but I hope they invite one of the more-recently retired colleagues from Surrey to relate the theory work from 30-40 years ago.  What you might find interesting to read is a Physics World article from 1996 which represents one of Jim Al-Khlalili's earliest public outreach works, entitled Nuclei on the Dripline.