Spring conferences in Edinburgh and Michigan, but really from home

 This year's IoP Nuclear Physics conference is going ahead, hosted by the group (Edinburgh) who were due to host it last year before it was cancelled.  I was all set up with accommodation booked for the conference last year, which I managed to cancel.  This year, I am also all set up with accommodation, since it is my home from where I will attend the conference remotely. 

The deadline for abstracts is tomorrow (see conference website) 26th Feb, and I will be submitting an updated version of the one I used for the IoP Twitter Poster Conference which ran last July.  Here's a plot of the calculations - octupole states

One of the upsides, or downsides, of remote attendance to conferences is that I can also attend another conference at the same time:  This one is called the Sixth International Conference for Young Quantum Information Scientists and is being held at Michigan State University in the USA.  This is related to the part of my research on quantum algorithms for nuclear physics.  

In case anyone was wondering, this note from the conference, particularly the bit in brackets, is relevant to me: "Registration is free and open to everyone (you do not need to be a young researcher to register). "

EXON is ON

 

Given the current Coronavirus pandemic situation, most scientific conferences have been switched to online only (like the annual nuclear physics IoP conference that I hope to attend around Easter),  rescheduled, or both (like Nuclear Photonics "2020").

I just received an email from the organisers of EXON-2021, a major international conference that is held in Russia.  They are going ahead with a face-to-face conference in St Petersburg in July.  They explicitly state "online participation is not possible. All safety measures against COVID-19 will be strictly followed".  I suppose that doesn't include the safety measure of not organising face-to-face conferences. 

I certainly don't see myself attending.  It may well not even be legal for me to travel then, and even when travelling is again legal, I'm not sure how long it will take for my University to authorise work trips to conference.  I suppose it will depend on the advice available.  I expect EXON-2021 will have a limited range of countries from which attendees will come.   It won't be the first EXON conference that I'll be a little bit wistful about missing.  A previous one was in the hard-to-visit city of Kaliningrad which would have been pretty exciting to visit, but I didn't go to it...

Time-dependent methods editorial

 I had a notification this morning that the editorial that I wrote for the Research Topic on time-dependent methods in nuclear physics has been published in Frontiers in Physics.  That nearly wraps-up the project.  I think the one remaining thing that will happen is that the people at the journal will make a combined e-book in pdf and epub format.  The latter will be especially useful for those who want to read the papers on the beach on their Kindle.

Here's the editorial, which has links to all the papers: https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2020.629889

I suppose it counts as my first publication of 2021.

Wartime Codebreakers at the University of Surrey

An interesting piece of history with a link to the University of Surrey came to my attention last night thanks to a Tweet from our Vice-Chancellor

One of the three in the team of Rejewski was Henryk Zygalski who later settled in the UK and became professor in mathematics at @UniOfSurrey https://t.co/1zJXNge1pq https://t.co/k8BDk9AEqp

— Max Lu (@uniofsurreyVC) January 17, 2021

It concerns one of the key players in the breaking of Enigma code prior to the Second World War,  Henryk Zygalski.  He was a Polish mathematician, educated at the University of Poznan who joined a small team working on deciphering Enigma encrypts.  They were not only successful in doing so, but the Poles also, vitally, made working models of the Enigma machines that the German military were using, and handed them to the British and French when it was clear (thanks to their decrypting work) that Poland was about to be invaded.

As soon as the invasion started, the team destroyed all evidence of their work and fled Poland, to Romania and then France.  Zygalski ended up in the UK before the end of the war, where he joined in work on decyphering Soviet signals.   He settled in England and ended up as an academic at the University of Surrey.  As was the agreement at that time, he never spoke of his wartime code-breaking work.  He died in 1978.  The Tweet above links to an open-access paper giving a more detailed history.  Our Deputy Vice-Chaceller for Research replied to the Tweet suggesting we put up something like a commemorative plaque at the University.  Sounds like a good idea to me.  We already have a statue of Alan Turing.  He (Turing) has links to Guildford, where the University is, though not to the University itself.

The picture below shows a commemoration to him at the Chichester Crematorium where, according to the Polish Embassy, his ashes were scattered.

 

RIP Bill Rae

The sad new of Bill Rae's death has been brought to my attention by my colleague and friend Wilton Catford.  Wilton knew Bill considerably better than I did, and he (Wilton) has kindly let me share the following obituary of him:

Some of you working in the same research area as me will have heard of Bill Rae and maybe even have known him. Bill was a friend of mine and one of the most gifted nuclear physicists that I have met. We've just heard via a mutual friend Dick Hunt that Bill has passed away, so I'd like to pass that information along. 

 

Bill was born in 1951 in Scotland and was very Scottish. From 1976 to 1978 he initiated and wrote OXBASH, deliberately designed as a shell model code that could be accessed and used by experimenters. It remained one of the most powerful codes in the field until Bill completely rewrote it in 2005, calling it Nushell. 

 

In 2006, he wrote a different programme that used new innovations in matrix multiplication to hugely extend the capability - this was called Nushellx and remains one of the world leaders. During the 80s and 90s, Bill became a Fellow of both Trinity College Oxford and St Cross College Oxford. Bill was forced to retire at age 50 in 2000 due to the debilitative effects of Parkinson's Disease, which eventually stopped him programming at his home in Garsington (just outside of Oxford) in 2009 but which he fought off for nearly 30 years. Amongst other things, he subsequently invented his own walking stick (cane) with a laser (of illegal power, bought through eBay to his great amusement) that allowed him to walk in a straight line by following the red dot on the ground. 

 

Bill is best known for the shell model work, but he also began a renaissance in alpha-clustering work both experimentally and theoretically. He wrote a new code in the 1990s to use the Brink model and extensively published new results, and he personally designed with Dick Hunt the electronics for the world's leading (at the time) multichannel data acquisition system for silicon strip detectors which underpinned the cutting-edge work of the Charissa collaboration (which he founded) in the UK and at laboratories in France, the USA and Australia. 

 

At times taciturn, his sense of humour was as rapier sharp as his scientific brilliance and he was a pleasure and an inspiration to work with. Vale, William Dickson Mudie Rae.

 

W D M Rae in 2007, courtesy B A Brown

 

Nuclear Spot The Difference #10

 I wonder if readers have noticed the similarity between footballer & sex-symbol George Best and nuclear wunderkind and Nature-botherer Liam Gaffney?

Best

Gaffney

Bell Burnell Diversity PhD studentship at Surrey

My department are offering a fully-funded PhD studentship to candidates from under-represented groups.  It is loosely tied to the IoP Bell Burnell Scholarship, and we would seek to submit an application to the IoP for the successful candidate, though the university guarantees funding even if the IoP bid is unsuccessful

More details are here.

I did post this on Twitter already, trying to see if anyone there might be interested in applying for the studentship with me.  I got one angry (or "disgusted") respondent who does not like this kind of scheme.  The point is that the word "under-represented" means less represented than you would expect if there were not a long-standing systemic bias against particular classes of people.  Those who don't fall in the "under-represented" category already have plenty of opportunity to get into they system, as seen by their over-representation. 

This studentship is unusual (compared with any other studentships that have been used to fund students I've taken in the past) in that it even international students are eligible, which is usually not the case for government-funded places.