Einsteinium + Calcium = Element 119

 I have a new paper published today: "Mean-field Simulations of Es-254 + Ca-48 Heavy-Ion Reactions", Paul D Stevenson, Frontiers in Physics 10, 1019285 (2022).  It's a rare single-author paper from me, reflecting my growing misanthropy with age.  

The work for the paper started a few years ago, when I attended a workshop in Japan on the subject, partly, of what one could do with a target of Einsteinium-254, which they had at JAEA (Japanese Atomic Energy Agency).  I took a look at some simulations of Es + Ca collisions which gives a compound system of element 119 - the next one beyond the highest-certified element 118 = Oganesson.  

The calculations showed some intersting cases where fusion occurred, and I have sat on them ever since wondering whether to publish them as is, or turn them into a more extensive set of calculations.  In the end, prompted by a call in Frontiers in Physics for a special issue on the subject of superheavy element synthesis, I decided to write what I had up as a "brief research report" and see if the referees would like it.  They did, well enough, and so it is now out there in the research record. 

Here's a zoom in of one of the pictures, where the reacting nuclei look like avocados:

Decomposing matrices

Over the summer I had an undergraduate project student working with me on a project to write a code which takes an arbitrary Hamiltonian written in matrix form and expresses it as a sum of tensor products of Pauli spin matrices.  Our underlying reason for wanting the code is to implement algorithms to find Hamiltonian eigenvalues on quantum computers.  Since it was a nice result, and could be potentially useful to others, we decided to write up the code into a short paper.  Today it appeared (or "landed" in 2021-speak) on the arXiv: arXiv:2111.00627.  The idea is to send it to the journal SciPost Physics Codebases, which is part of the excellent SciPost stable, as a community-led free-to-publish free-to-read online journal.  It's a new journal for them, designed to allow often unpublished codes to have a formal write-up and stable record in the research environment. 

I am not sure if the code will be considered too basic by the referees.  We shall see.  When I first thought of submitting the code to SciPost Physics Codebases there were no papers yet published in this new journal.  As of a few days ago the first accepted paper appeared there.  It's a much more ambitious code than ours, and the write-up is a little over 100 pages long.  I hope that hasn't set a precedent.  Ours is only a few pages long!

When I write a blog post about a new paper I usually take a figure from it as picture for the blog post.  There are no figures in this one, but here's a screengrab of an equation