STFC & Quantum Technologies

Following the funding agency STFC's Quantum Technologies for Fundamental Physics series of grants and subsequent research, all principal investigators were invited to submit a paper to a special issue of New Journal of Physics (which, a bit like New College, Oxford, is not very new any more).  It wasn't a requirement of having won a grant under the programme, but contributing to the special issue felt to me like an appropriate part of belonging to that community.  It also seemed like a good way to give ammunition to STFC and all grant-holders in securing future funding by having a high-quality special issue.  

I wanted to see how much impact the QTFP work has had on future research.   It's not the only way to measure it, but looking at individual per-article citation counts for this special issue seemed like a reasonable proxy to me.  I'm happy to say that the article written by my postdoc Bharti and I is by far the most cited paper.   Here's a little graph to celebrate that fact.  The x-axis gives the article titles truncated to the first 20 characters and ours is the title that begins with "Shell-model study of"

 

Welcome to some new isotopes!

Just a quick one to paste verbatim the message from Michael Thoennessen from Michigan State University.  He heads up a project which tracks discovery of isotopes, and he has spotted a new slew of first observations as follows:

Dear Isotope Friends,

Five new proton-rich and seventeen new neutron-rich nuclides were observed with the RI-Beam Factory at RIKEN, Japan. In the article "First Observation of Twenty-two Exotic Isotopes Using a 208Pb Primary Beam at RIBF" published in the journal Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Fukuda et al. reported the discovery of cerium-118, praseodymium-120, holmium-179, erbium-181 and 182, thulium-184 to 186, ytterbium-188 and 189, lutetium-191, hafnium-152, 153, 193, and 194, tantalum-154, 195, and 196, tungsten-198 and 199, and rhenium-200 and 201. 

 I've sketched out (roughly) where the new isotopes are on a chart of the nuclides, below, in the marked red areas.  You should be able to click on the image to get a bigger version.

 

Mixed updates

 A few updates:

1. The BBC got in touch last week to ask if I'd look at a press release and embargoed preprint on quantum computing to give some expert commentary.  The work turned out to be from Microsoft, claiming another breakthrough in their desire to fabricate functional majorana qubits.  The preprint shows their "multi-qubit" tetron device, with signals coming from its operation.  What was not terribly clear was if they were really claiming that their qubits were functional yet, or if the long lifetime of a mode that the were claiming was a clear signal of a relevant quantum effect.   I could do no more than give a general comment about what it would mean if it were all as Microsoft claim, and caution that it might not be. The BBC wrote it up here. 

2. I organised an end-of-semester nuclear theory gathering at my house last weekend.  The day was dry (unlike today as I write this) and not too hot, unlike some of the days leading up to it.  We had a good turnout from group members - academic staff, phd students, visitors and associated family members.  Here's a picture of the gathering (minus me, taking the picture).  You can click on it to see it in higher resolution, if you like:

 

3. I made a virtual visit to on MPhys student on placement at the Univesity of Barcelona with our old colleague Arnau Rios.  Ben (the student) is working on applying quantum computational methods to solve the nuclear shell model - very much something I am working on too. 

4. A sad incident on campus this week made the UK national news - an ex-student shot and seriously injured a campus security team member.  Fortunately, it seems that the injured person will fully recover - physically at least.  The shooter is a Saudi national, and there have been correspondingly unhelpful comments on social media that play into the febrile atmosphere we have right now where far-right parties stir up hatred against immigrants. In fact, as I write this, listening to 6music on the radio, the news has come on that JD Vance sees fit to make pronouncements that we (white British people, I think he means) should be "righteously angry" about "mass immigration" (see e.g. this).  Fortunately no "Farage Riots" have happened in Guildford as they recently did in Southampton. 

5. I've ended up agreeing to go to a few meetings coming up, which has me travelling around the world.  I have not travelled far outside Europe in the last couple of years (furthest being to the Asian part of Türkiye), but I have an invited talk at Nuclear Structure 2026 in Vancouver next month, and then will go to the Compound Nuclear Reactions (CNR) conference in Fukuoka in October.  This week, we had a seminar from Tomoya Naito from Tokyo, who mentioned that I would be invited to a workshop in Japan the week after CNR, and lo and behold an invitation arrived later that day.  I accepted, though being away for two weeks is something I used to do more when I was younger, and am a bit less keen on now.  Should be a good meeting, though.

6. Planning proceeds steadliy with our Nuclear Data conference taking place in September: UK Nuclear Data 2026, which we loftily subtitle "A Renaissance".  There is actually a nuclear physics conference taking place in the UK next week - Clusters '26 - which looks pretty cool, and is not a million miles from some of my activity ... but it's just a conference too far in terms of finding time to do something a bit too niche for me.  Nevertheless, I'll be mentioned by collaborators who are speaking there because of work we've done together supervising PhD students.  

Gruppenbild mit Physiker

 The organisers of the meeting in Rome last week just sent through the group photos we had taken, so I thought I'd share them here for posterity.

The first, from Thursday 16th April, shows those present at the Nuclear Science Symposium, organised as a satellite meeting to the IUPAP WG9/C12 AGM (don't ask me what all that means).  Those scheduled to attend the Friday meeting (including me), were invited to attend this symposium

 The second, from Friday 17th April, shows those present just for the Friday committee meeting of NuPECC (the Nuclear Physics European Collaboration Committee).  I am standing at the back in the middle on both photos.  I'm pretty tall, and I usually head to the back in group photos

 

RIP Günther Rosner

I missed posting about this last month, but I have been reminded about the recent death of Günther Rosner as part of the chair's presentation in the NuPECC committee meeting I am attending today.

Günther was a professor in the UK (at Glasgow) when I started working at Surrey back in 2000, and I remember coming across him at various meetings over the years he was in the UK.  I never knew him personally, but I remember him as a very enthusiastic person who devoted much time to supporting the field politically.  

There's a short obituary of him at the FAIR website, from which I take the photo below

 

From the Enrico Fermi Research Centre

I'm at a meeting at the CREF - Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi - in Rome.  The building is inside a government compound shared with the Italian Interior Ministry, so is slightly bureaucratic to get into, but the centre is here as it is the building where Enrico Fermi worked.  There is a museum here which I hope to go to later, but as proof that this place has some nuclear physics history, here's a picture of a fountain with a plaque in front, which reads "Using the water of the goldfish fountain of his institute, Enrico Fermi established for the first time in the afternoon of 22 October 1934 the crucial role of hydrogenous substances on neutron-induced radioactivity thus opening the way to the use of slow neutrons in nuclear fission chain reaction"

 

The Isomer League

My University produced a press release yesterday highlighting three of my colleagues and their industry in discovering nuclear isomers.  Isomers (for nuclear physicists) are long-lived excited states of nuclei that decay with different properties (such as half lives) to the ground states or other excited states in the same nucleus.  

The industriousness of my colleagues comes from a league table of coauthorship of isomer discovery papers.  Surrey authors take three of the top 10 positions in the table.  We also have some other people a bit further down:  Bill Gelletly at #49, Wilton Catford at #139, Dan Doherty at #733, and ... me (Paul Stevenson) at #486.

The point of any of the research is not to top a league table, and the website that generated the table has, as its main purpose, the role of documenting discovery and keeping an authorotative record of how, when and where each isotope was discovered.  The league table is just a bit of natural human interest addition to the history.  

Here is a screengrab of the top of the table