Outreach at York

This is a quick public service announcement on behalf of my redoubtable colleague David Jenkins at the University of York. The Physics Department there have a 1-year position going for an Outreach Officer. If you are fancy it, do apply - and tell Dave I sent you :-)

Holiday in Scotland

I've just had an enjoyable week in Ayrshire, Scotland, in the company of some of the scottish part of my family. While I was away, I reached the ripe old age of 38, and it was nice to do it in the presence of my parents, who came up too to stay with my cousin, her husband and their children in the slightly chaotic house they've moved to.

The train journey up went pretty smoothly, though I've never seen such a busy train on a Sunday from Guildford to London. This was presumably due to the olympics. I ended up sitting at a table with a family, while my girlfriend and daughter, Flora, sat together further down the carriage. The little girl opposite me showed great interest in my Saturday prize Independent crossword, which I was trying to finish. I'm not sure that I was really able to give a good answer to her question she asked after some studying of the grid, which was "why haven't you done 16 across yet?"

The holiday was a nice combination of homely relaxation and day trips to fun things. The fun farm just outside Ayr was great. Flora liked feeding the animals and I could hardly peel her away from the "bouncy pillow" trampoline-like thing. This was especially nice as normally she shies away from both physical activity and things crowded with other boisterous children. The Glasgow Science Centre was also really good, easily among the best of such things I've been to, though swimming in the sea in Ayr was just a nice in a different way.

For my birthday itself, my Dad took me to the Ayr Brewing Company's only outlet; a hotel which has the brewery in its garage. Their beer was pretty good, and it was nice to hang out with my Dad, who I don't really see often enough. My girlfriend then took me for a pre-meal glass of champagne in a wine bar, and we then went off to meet everyone else for a meal.

Travelling back yesterday, I learned that alas I yet again failed to win the Saturday prize crossword in the Independent. On the other hand, I'm quite proud of the clue I submitted for the informal competition in the Guardian Crossword Blog this week.

Over all, it was a fairly nuclear-physics free week, though I may have done a little work on a paper about isotope shifts in lead radii - hopefully will submit that one in the next week or so.

Going for Gold!

If you're around my age, the phrase "Going for Gold," which I've been hearing quite a lot lately, will remind you of this. You're very welcome.
 

Ring-shaped nuclei

Nuclei are tricksome little beasts.  Made of two types of particles that interact in a quite complex way, according to the rules of quantum mechanics, and via the residual strong force, they can exhibit all sorts of interesting behaviour.

They can come in many shapes.  Their ground states are either spherical, or squashed or stretched spheres (smartie or rugby ball-shaped respectively), or possibly pear-shaped, or even tetrahedral.  If you excite them into some of their natural exitation modes, they can start vibrating, wobbling, or deforming in to new metastable shape configurations.

Over the years, physicists have searched, both experimentally and theoretically for interesting new shape configurations.  Perhaps the most famous topic within the nuclear physics community has been so-called "bubble nuclei" which have largely empty cores, thanks to the decreasing proportion of occupied s-orbitals.  A new paper on the arXiv server appeared earlier this week which looks at toroidal nuclei; those shaped like a lifebuoy or doughnut.  Previous calculations had shown them to be unstable, spontaneously returning to a spherical-like state, but new calculations show that a large amount of angular momentum can stabilise the torus-shaped nucleus, at least for the case of ⁴⁰Ca that they calculated.

This nucleons in this nucleus would be kept in the ring by the strong nuclear force, and kept out of the centre by the centrifugal barrier.  The alignment of angular momentum would mean that they nucleons would be circulating in the same direction, creating a phenomenal magnetic field.

How such an excited state could actually be made in experiment is not clear.  The predicted excitation energy is extremely high - in a region where most if not all other excited states would quickly lead to fission, but the calculations are certainly interesting.  If the predictions are correct, we are likely to see the thing in nature sooner or later.

edit: I've added a pretty picture from the preprint to the top of the post.  It show a slice through the starting configuration they used for their iteration procedure on the left, and the resulting stable smooth ring predicted by the nuclear force on the right.

T. Ichikawa, J. A. Maruhn, N. Itagaki, K. Matsuyanagi, P. -G. Reinhard, & S. Ohkubo (2012). Existence of exotic torus configuration in high-spin excited states of
  $^{40}$Ca ArXiv arXiv: 1207.6250v1

What are Universities for?

I've just read an interesting post on the blog To the left of Centre partially concerning the recent behaviour of Queen Mary University.   It's worth a read, though it is quite depressing.

Open Access

There's be quite some talk about Open Access across the internet recently, largely thanks to the acceptance of the Finch Report, making it a requirement that the results of publicly-funded research be freely available to the public.  This seems like such a obviously correct thing that it might come as a surprise to many that it is not already the case.  On the other hand, it often seems like much science research is just a scheme to turn public money into private enterprise, so perhaps there should be no surprise.

On top of this, European grant funders are doing the same, as I tweeted recently from the Euroscience Open Forum in Dublin last week, during a talk from Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the current European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science.

In a way, though, it's all a bit disappointing.  Currently publicly-funded scientists perform research, write it up in the form of a paper and send it off to an academic journal.  The journal editor, or editorial team, will arrange for peer-review (done at (usually) public expense, as an unpaid favour by other scientists), and if the peer-review is successful the journal will publish it.  Then they will charge the scientist's (or scientists') institute thousands of pounds to buy the article back in the form of a journal subscription.  It's this subscription cost that the new policy will seek to change in some form or other, and they have done it not by challenging the whole system, but by encouraging, or mandating that authors pay to have their articles made open access (which many journals allow).  Typically, most journals currently charge of the order of a couple of thousand pounds to do this.  Many of the blog posts and twitter comments worrying about the new announcement have concentrated on this part - that pushing the cost to the author rather than the reader is no help.  Those comments are probably right.

To my mind, the better solution would be to dispense with traditional journals and do something along the lines of Peter Coles's suggestion for an electronic open-access journal that would be rather cheap to run.  There are already other examples around, such as the wonderful Journal of Integer Sequences, and the major stumbling block, judging by comments I've seen, is that employers and potential employers currently put much stock in the impact factor of where a scientist has published, and people not already somewhere high up the ladder will want to do what gets them jobs.  Clearly, in a sane world the employers would judge the merits of the science, rather than just look up the impact factor of the journal.  If the UK government wants to be bold and iconoclastic in its support of open access, it should rather ask for all REF outputs to be presented to the panels scrubbed of their publication details and outlaw the use of bibliometrics as a proxy for judging scientific merit.  It make make the REF more expensive to run, but changing the open access model would overall make science cheaper to fund.

Of all that's been written or spoken about this issue (and I attended a couple of sessions at ESOF2012 about this) the only one that really makes me think twice is the fact that many learned societies depend somewhat on income from journal publishing.  In my area, the UK Institute of Physics and the US American Physical Society publish good journals, to which I send most of my papers at present.  They are generally good guys in my mind;  their journals are priced pretty reasonably, and the IoP even make all their articles free to read for a month on publication, and I do appreciate that the current model for publishing is somewhat expensive.  I slightly worry for these good institutions if the traditional journal is on the way out, but it's not a strong enough argument to retain the old model, for me.

Tax avoidance

I just had the pleasure of talking to an estate agent, who was trying to put me in touch with a company that lets one avoid stamp duty, using a scheme something like this one.  Frankly, I'd rather Mr Osborne had the money than a bunch of shysters *sigh*