The lithium-beryllium wars, continued

In May I posted about a public spat playing out on the arXiv between one member of a (former) collaboration, M. Gai of UConn, and other members, led by D Schumann of PSI.

My previous post was prompted by a lengthy note submitted to the arXiv by Gai (1905.06999) in response to a brief note by Schumann et al. (1904.03023v1).  

Earlier this week Schumann et al. superseded their note with version 2 (1904.03023v2), which is a substantially different document, going in to detail with an analysis of the history of the project and where they contend there are scientific errors.  Alongside this is some general statements about scientific research (e.g "It  is  the  dream  of  every  serious  researcher  to  contribute  with something  essential to the progress in  his/her  field  of  science.") as prelude to a continuation of the personal argument against Gai in terms of appropriate scientific and collaborative behaviour – so we may well see a response from Gai in due course. 

I find it tempting to read all this stuff slightly hiding my eyes behind my fingers, to avoid seeing things that make me cringe too much.  In the concluding section, Schumann writes "We have also to admit, that, making the entire quarrel public by posting comments and reply to comments further and further on, is not the way one should handle friction in a collaboration. These problems should have been solved internally before publishing anything."   Well, quite.

Proceedings of the EFB conference - open refereeing is go

I'm enjoying my temporary role as guest editor of the proceedings of the European Few Body Conference that we organised here at Surrey last month.  Because we are publishing the proceedings in SciPostProceedings, using their open refereeing model, the submitted papers are there for anyone to comment on. 

I'm expecting most of the submissions to be made closer to the deadline, but if you want to, feel free to look at the following and make comments online:

• Roy Glauber and Asymptotic Diffraction Theory by Per Ostlund, is a mini review of one of Roy Glauber's achievements along with some biographical reminiscences.

• Properties of heavy mesons at finite temperature by Gloria Montaña, Angels Ramos, and Laura Tolos, describes the authors' effective hadronic theory as applied to heavy (charmed) mesons

• Study of deuteron-proton backward elastic scattering at intermediate energies by Nadezhda Ladygina discusses d-p elastic scattering using a relativistic multiple scattering framework, and

• A time-dependent Hartree-Fock study of triple-alpha dynamics by P. D. Stevenson and J. L. Willerton uses a mean field dynamic approach to study the fusion of helium to form carbon.

If you feel qualified to comment on any of these, please go ahead.  They are all sent to a nominated referee, too, but open refereeing means that anyone can contribute. 

 The picture attached to this post is from the first paper listed, and shows Roy Glauber (winner of 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics) from the collection of the author of the proceeding article, Per Ostlund, as featured in the article.

Dr Lennard-Jones

I was attending an appointment at the local hospital earlier this week, and one of the doctors present was called Dr Lennard-Jones.  I immediately thought of the Lennard-Jones potential, such a standard part of physics and chemistry that we teach it to our undergraduates, and named after Sir John Lennard-Jones (d.1954), who was a professor of physics at Bristol and Cambridge.

I wasn't sure if it was okay to ask if she (the doctor) was any relation, but during some small talk it came up what I did for a living, which was a way in for me to ask if she was any relation of the famous physicist.  The answer was yes, unsurprisingly (since presumably this particular combination of names has only been double-barrelled once).  If I remember what she said rightly, he was her great-grandfather.   She said it had been a while since anyone had asked and it was always nice when they did.  

I thought it was nice, too, to make that link, and to meet a real-life Lennard-Jones.  The picture is the famous 6-12 Lennard-Jones potential, courtesy of Wikipedia.

It was 20 years ago today...

More or less twenty years ago today (I can't remember the exact date) I finished writing, and submitted my D.Phil. dissertation.  I was a graduate student at the University of Oxford though I was working on a project co-supervised at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, and I spent most of the last year of my studies out there.  I had to be back in Oxford to submit the right kind of hard-bound copies in the right place at the right time, which I duly did.  

It was a busy month-long trip back to the UK:  After submitting my D.Phil. I had the viva exam, then I got married, went on honeymoon, and then went back to the US to start a postdoctoral position at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.   It seems like such a long time ago.  I suppose it is a long time ago.  This week is freshers' week on campus here at the University of Surrey.  Most of the arriving students were born after the events described above. My youngest son is a toddler; no longer a baby, and increasing competent with language and reasoning.  He was born after the referendum on leaving the EU, and knows nothing of the halcyon time before the vote.  I wonder how old he will be by the time the situation is resolved.

Last night I came across an old photo of me from when I was a PhD student, and I attach it here.  This is probably about mid-way through, so more like 1997 than 1999, and shows me dressed in a Tennessee T-shirt in proper school colours.

Semi-empirical mass formula on the plane

I've just returned from a long trip away, to visit students on MPhys placement, attend a conference and discuss work with some people I am collaborating with (a phrase I still think of as meaning something sinister).  On the plane I watched a terrible film called Red Joan.  It sounded like it might be a decent enough spy thriller and Judy Dench's name lent it some respectability.  On-topic for me is that it featured someone (the eponymous hero, or antihero, Joan) who passed secrets about the UK's wartime and post-war atomic weapon secrets to the Russians.  There was one scene, supposedly dramatically showing people thinking about a physics problem, in which the camera focused on the pencil-and-paper working of one of the scientists, which showed the semi-empirical mass formula (see attached photo).  This is certainly something that was known in the late 40s, and the kind of thing that would have been used to give an idea of the energy release from nuclear fission, so credit to them for doing that research.  Given that I was on my way to a conference where I talked about the semi-empirical mass formula, it was a nice coincidence, and I took the photo of the screen on the back of the seat in front and used it in my talk, and here in this post.

HIAS conference photo

It's the last (half) day at the HIAS2019 conference today.  Just before the first session started (with some oldish results from RIKEN around the tin-132 isotope, they presented the obligatory group photo which was taken on Tuesday.  Here it is.  I'm in the back (as ever, being quite tall), wearing a blue hoodie, and a beard.  Next to me is ex-Surrey student Ed Simpson who laughed at me when I called my hoodie a "cardigan".  The photo can be clicked on to get a high resolution version.

HIAS-19

I'm in Canberra visiting some students on their MPhys Research Year placement, and also attending the HIAS-2019 conference (HIAS = Heavy-ion Accelerator Symposium).  The scientific topics cover any of the things that one can do at a heavy-ion accelerator which include the kind of reactions that I am interested in calculating, but also things like accelerator mass spectroscopy.  This is a very sensitive way of measuring the masses of individual isotopes in a sample of material.  One such application was presented by Dominik Koll who showed how to measure the abundance of Iron-60 which is a long-lived radioactive isotope generated in supernova explosions, and shot out into interstellar space, some of which then arrives on the Earth.  It turns out that it is currently raining down on Earth to the extent of a couple of atoms per square centimetre per year.