Warrington

I made what I think is my first visit to Warrington proper last week.  I had been there before to arrive at the station and get a taxi straight out of town, which I think barely counts.  This time, I arrived at the station, and walked to the hotel I'd booked for the night, then in the morning took a leisurely walk to the bus station to get a bus to Birchwood (a suburb or a separate town, I don't know) for a meeting at UKNNL's offices.  

I suspect Warrington does not feature much on a typical tourist destination.  I quite enjoyed my morning walk to the bus station, which took me from one side of the town centre to the other, crossing the river Mersey on the way.  

The streets were not very busy with other people walking around, which may have been because of the men's football match the night before when England were playing, but the roads were perfectly busy, so perhaps it's just that not too many people walk through the town centre.  Actually, like a lot of towns, cars are prioritised to the extent that when I wanted to walk from the Warrington Cenotaph to the other side of the road I had to cross 5 pedestrian crossings with call buttons at a junction where of course car drivers wait for one light change to get where they want.  On the other hand, once past that junction, there was a part-pedestrianised (depending on time of day) area centred on Market Gate which looks like it had once been a busy roundabout for traffic, but now was a nice place to walk, with a fountain in the middle. 

As well as the Cenotaph, there was a nearby statue of Cromwell, and a plaque about how the bridge was important in the closing days of the Civil War.  I took a picture of the Cenotaph, which I include below.

I also liked Warrington's bus station, which is nicer, brighter, and better-kept than Guildford's 

Review of Warrington over.

 

RIP Penelope Keith (1940 - 2026)

It has made the front page of the BBC News today that Dame Penelope Keith has died.  While her fame came from her acting career, her (slight) relevance to me/this blog is that she had strong links to the county of Surrey and was often to be found supporting county activities.  She served a term as the High Sheriff of Surrey and took part at official University events on occasion: For example, on the occasion of the University's 50th anniversary, she took part, in academic robes, in a celebratory procession on Guildford High Street.  Here's a story where you can see her, and my nuclear physics colleague Jim Al-Khalili dressed in their finery in the procession.  

RIP Penelope 

Here is a picture of her on Wikipedia (By Funk Dooby from Kent, UK - Penelope Keith, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link)

 

Thanks, readers, for making me rich

 Some years ago, I think I flicked a switch on this Google/Blogger hosted blog to allow adverts.  I would, in principle, see some cut of the advertising revenue.  I haven't yet, but I was excited today to see this email from Google, beginning with this text-graphic:

 

I supposed that a sudden spike in reading of my blog, and users finding the algorithmically-targeted adverts so much to their liking that they click through and buy stuff (nuclei, I suppose).  

Well, my hit statistics are pretty much unchanged, but I followed the link in today's email to my Google AdSense account to find that:

 

 

At this rate, I should be able to buy a ticket to see a men's football world cup match in something like 2000 years, though who know how much the tickets will cost by then.  

 

According to their email, it could also be that something about my blog is against Google policies.  It can't be the post I'm writing right now, so it's all a bit of a mystery to me. 

 

Well, sorry for the lack of adverts for those of you who come to the blog to follow the sponsored links.  I guess there will be fewer of those from now 

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