Congratulations Kieran Flanagan - 2022 Ernest Rutherford Medal Winner

 The 2022 Institute of Physics Ernest Rutherford Medal recipient has been announced, and it is Prof Kieran Flanagan from the University of Manchester.  Prof Flanagan is a leader in the world of laser spectroscopy for understanding exotic (short-lived) nuclei through the hyperfine interaction in their atomic spectra.  The experiments give among the most detailed precise values we have for nuclear properties - particularly the charge radii.  Though the method is indirect, in that it is atomic electron spectra that are being measured to deduce what is happening to the nucleus, the theory linkning the measurement to the nuclear properties is reasonably free of model dependence and the method has become a standard one peformed at severeal labs across the world.  

There is a longer citation on the IoP announcement.  Well done Kieran!

Bdrmm in the Boileroom

 Last night's cultural activity was a visit to the Boileroom venue in Guildford for a gig by Bdrmm (pronounced Bedroom).  They are a band that I didn't know particularly well when I bought the tickets but I'd come across them from emails from their record label, and had a listen on Bandcamp.  They fall into the shoegaze genre - one that came into prominence in the late 1980s by bands like Slowdive, Pale Saints, Moose, and My Bloody Valentine.  The popularity of the sub-genre appears to have waned since that initial heyday, though it may be just that my finger is not on the (slow) pulse, and indeed Wikipedia points out that there is, since the late 2010s, a renewed interest in the form of the "nu gaze" and "blackgaze" scenes.  

Anyway, I enjoyed the gig a lot.  They built up a beautiful droning wall of effects-pedal-enhanced guitar sound, managing to weave some catchy songs into the noise.  They seemed like a lovely group of people whose delight and surprise that a packed-out venue of people actually wanted to come and hear them.

Here's a picture from my ageing phone, which struggles to focus in low light.  I eyed, slightly enviously, all those people in front of me who were holding their phones up and getting nice clear shots

 

My new oldest cited paper

 Through Google Scholar, I have come across the fact that someone has cited what is my first scientific article, which I had practically forgotten:  It is a conference proceeding from a conference on fission that my UK PhD supervisor went to (but I didn't) and where she presented my work.  As it was co-written with my US co-supervisor who worked at a national laboratory, it was filed with an official document number of Oak Ridge National Lab, and has since been uploaded to a US government research archive here.  

Somehow, someone has seen this paper, and has begun citing it as an example of the use of stochastic mean fields methods in quantum chemistry, which it is not.  The citing articles that Google Scholar has picked up are here, and the do seem perfectly genuine in the sense that it is really my article that is being cited, albeit for what appear to the wrong reasons.  Here's a screenshot of the citation to my paper, nestled between two citations which I think are much more on-topic for the citing article.

 

Cycling in London for my brother's 50th birthday

 Today is my brother's 50th birthday.  He organised a party in London for friends and family, and I, of course, attended with my own family.  

My brother, Mark, planned the party long ago, and long before Network Rail decided upon their maintenance schedule.  It turned out that the train line serving the nearest train station (Forest Hill) was closed for the day and so the most obvious route for travelling was not possible.  We decided to take our bikes on the train and cycle from Waterloo to Forest Hill.  Any time we have tried cycling in London before has always been a lot more pleasurable than doing so around Guildford, with London offering much better cycling infrastructure.  

In the end it was a nice ride, and cycling across London is a great way to see different parts of the city.  I'm not sure I've ever been to Walworth before, but we rode through a most beautiful estate of houses that looked like a film set for a Victorian period piece. Here's the route we took (click for (a bit) more detail):

For my brother's birthday I tried racking my brains for a while to think of a good present - maybe taking him to a concert or other event, but I couldn't really find the right thing.  In the end, I decided to buy every single that had been number one in the charts on his birthday since 1972.  In the end, it was quite easy to get hold of physical media for them all up until about 10 years ago.  It was fun collecting them, and then fun handing them over today.  He seemed impressed and grateful.  

We were the first to arrive at the party, and people steadily arrived during the couple of hours we were there.  There were people from different parts of my brother's life, including a group of schoolfriends he keeps in touch with, and whom I remember from my own schooldays.  He asked guests to bring a cake each, and so there was lots of nice cake to be had which was definitely fine with me, and most of my kids.  One of my children does not much like cake, but he has, on the other hand, been caused to memorise the announcements on the train through frequent listening.  He spontaneously came out with the following on the train, which we then asked him to repeat from posterity:

 

RIP Don Perkins 1925-2022

 I saw from an email today that Don Perkins died.  He was a professor of particle physics at Oxford when I was there as an undergraduate.  At least, he retired when I was still early on in my undergraduate studies around 30 years ago, but became an emeritus fellow after retirement.  I did not know Prof Perkins, but heard his name invoked, and treated his textbook Introduction to High Energy Physics as the bible for any particle physics studies I had to do as an undergrad.

I recal in one tutorial with Dave Wark that we had found what appeared to be a mistake in the textbook.  Dave saw Don and said "Don! I think we've found a mistake in your textbook!" "hah!  only one?" was his response.  RIP, Don.

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:

Quizzing in London

On Tuesday night I took part in a quiz in a pub in London that was more than just a pub quiz.  Part of the Quiz League of London, I was in a team competing in a fixture against another team in the league.  This is pretty serious level quizzing and whenever I go, I am always slightly conscious that I don't want to let the team down by any lack of knowledge of trivia.  I don't think I will ever get to the stage of knowing many of the sports people or sports facts that come up - it's a huge subject that I am not very intersted in, but I was pleased/fortunate that I had a nuclear physics question - 

"Which New Zealand scientist won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908, for hiswork on investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistryof radioactive substances?".  

I was tempted to jump in after the first four words, but in the quiz format, there is no benefit to doing so, and this was a question specifically for me.  You can see the scores on this page from which you can also download the quiz and the friendly quiz following it (see links at the top middle of page).  In the main quiz I was asked the 2B questions in rounds 1-4 and the 2A questions in rounds 5-8.  

After the quiz and the first friendly, we did one more friendly themed quiz whose theme was animated tv & film, though many of the questions were also gettable through general knowledge by the way they were phrased.   One of the answers, asking about an actress in Bedknobs and Broomsticks was Angela Lansbury.  At the end of the quiz, we hear that she had died earlier that day.  One of those coincidences...