Jyväskylä PAC meeting

 Yesterday I attended my final meeting as chair and panel member of the Jyväskylä Programme Advisory Committee (PAC).  This is the group that looks at proposals for experiments to take place at the accelerator facility and decides which to suggest to the laboratory to accept.  The period of tenure on the committee is 3 years over which 6 meeting take place.  Of course the last three years have been very unusual and we ended up running most of the meetings virtually.  There is also the issue for the lab of what to do with the recommended proposals while people couldn’t travel to the lab during lockdown. 

I enjoyed my time on the committee and learned a lot from the other members about some of the more technical and experimental details. It’s a bit disappointing not to visit Finland but also hard to justify the carbon cost of getting there for a meeting that actually works well virtually. 

Now three new panel members will join as I and two others rotate off.  I wish the new members well!

Day one at the IoP Nuclear Physics Conference

The University of Surrey was closed today, as it kindly gives all, or most, staff a bit of extra holiday around the Easter weekend.  However, it was also the host site of this year's Institute of Physics Nuclear Physics Group conference, so I was in work as an attendee and local organising committee member (though really the chair Paddy Regan has done almost everything from the local commitee point of view). 

 It was nice seeing my colleagues from all over the UK and a few from farther afield.  Even before the pandemic-enforced cessation of face-to-face conferences it was probably a few years since I last attended one of the national ones, and it has been great to see old friends and colleagues.

The picture below was taken by the conference chair, and posted on Twitter.   I am in the picture, just, over at the right though quite cropped.  I'm wearing the stripy jumper and clearly part of a funny conversation with Kate Jones (University of Tennessee) and Carl Wheldon (University of Birmingham).  I think we were remembering the time around 20 years ago when we were all at the University of Surrey together.

As well as meeting old colleagues, I saw some recent ex-undergrads who are now PhD students.  My faviourite part of the day was talking to them, not least because they told me that my lectures were their favourites when then were undergraduates.  A lovely thing to say, and I could feel myself blush when they did so!

QCTIP 2022

 As promised in a post last month, I have come to the QCTIP conference in Bristol.  QCTIP stands for Quantum Computing Theory In Practice and the topic cover quantum computing from a largely mathematical and computer science point of view, with applications to various areas, including physics.  As something of an outsider, I found the talks ranged from very understandable to pretty hard to follow.   While online conference work pretty well for listening to and interacting with the talks, I wanted to attend in person so I could get to know some of the people working in the field, and get known by them.  For that, I think it was worth coming.  Particularly in the poster session, where I displayed a poster made by my student Isaac.  There was a pretty constant stream of people coming up and talking to me.  The idea that someone was applying quantum computing to nuclear physics was new to them, and they seemed genuinely interested.  I was also reasonably reassured that our neophyte forays into quantum computing were along the right lines.

The conference is organized by the mathematics department at Bristol.  As such, there are blackboards dotted around the building and people used them to discuss work during coffee breaks, as in the picture below

Bristol

I am in the process of organising a trip to Bristol to attend a conference (this one, if you are interested).  I lived in Bristol for a while as a child (1980-1983, or something like that).   I was young enough that my memories centre around home, the nearby environment, parks, the walk to the local shops, the Downs, and a very few other things - the long road with the toyshop (Dawson's Toys) on, for example.  It will be strange to be back.  Like with any work travel, I will be there just in time for the start of the meeting and leaving just as the meeting ends and will not be able to visit any old haunts, but I expect it will be a slightly odd experience in any case.  It's the only place I've lived as a child that I've never really been back to.  I was born in Glasgow and have been back many times, and lived in London, Oxford, Tennessee, Portsmouth, Bishop's Stortford (where my parents still live) and have visited all those places again over the years.

If you ever watched the opening of TVAM's Good Morning Britain programme when it was on the air over many years, then you would have seen me, aged 6, somewhere in the top-right part of the "D" in this spelling out of the words "GOOD MORNING BRITAIN" made by a group of people on the Bristol Downs.  

The snapshot is taken from a YouTube video I found (here) so you can see the whole thing, where we were all milling around on the Downs and then at a signal we all had to move to a roughly-designated position inside some letters that were marked on the ground.  The director on the ground heard back from the helicopter that it had apparently worked brilliantly - and the effect is pretty neat!

PDRA positions in York

The University of York nuclear physics group is currently advertising for three post-doctoral researchers to work with them.  This is excellent news for the group there, indicating as it does great success in having their peer-reviewed grand proposals funded, with three full-time researchers enabling them to carry out the promised research.  It's also good news for the UK nuclear physics community, and in particular the very small theory component of it.  Especially it is good for those looking to secure a post-doc in nuclear theory, based in a lovely city. 

The deadline for applying is 18th March.

Here is an image I found of the theory group at York, probably taken before the pandemic!  As I understand it from the job advert, the Principal Investigator on all three projects is Prof Jacek Dobaczewsku, on the left in the picture

doi on arxiv

 My last post was about the arXiv and now there is more news to report about it:  All papers posted there since the beginning of 2022 will have a doi assigned.  This is excellent news, as the doi has become such a standard way of providing a link to an online article.  I assumed that that the reason this hadn't been done in the past was because of the non-zero cost of having a doi assigned.  I don't know what the cost is, but I guess it was not so much of a hindrance after all - and of course arXiv is not free to run, but it does have sponsorship and institutional funding, and presumably the arXiv board arrived at the decision that subscribing to the doi system was worthwhile and affordable. 

From arXiv to ar5iv

A little while ago I posted about a website which took arXiv articles and presented them as html for better reading on devices such as phones where pdf does not work so well.  Now I've come across another one, ar5iv which makes html5 versions of arXiv papers (where the original is in LaTeX).   To use it you can just replace the X by a 5 in the URL of a paper and hopefully it will return a readable version.  

Here's an example from a paper writing up a summer student's code.  It seems to work pretty well even with the LaTeX package we used for pretty-printing the source code in an appendix.