Bayesian calibration

Today sees the first preprint appearing on the arXiv from my student Sam Sullivan.  It represents the results of work he undertook as part of a BAND fellowship which took him to Michigan State University last year. He used Bayesian methods to fit a new optical potential appropriate to a particular region of the nuclear chart (around zirconium isotopes).  The method intrinsically includes uncertainty quantification, so that any predictions made with the optical potential come with well-formulated error bars.  

Sam has submitted it to Phys Rev C, and we're hoping that's where his first publication will appear.  Fingers crossed 

Here is a plot  from the paper showing predictions of neutron elastic scattering cross sections in Y-89

 

 

Summer speed skating camp

We are deep in the school summer holidays for my kids, and as such, I am taking a lot of the time as annual leave, though with a couple of deadlines put in the summer holidays, I have to keep the odd work day in the calendar slightly against my wishes.

The last week has involved being in Oberstdorf, Germany's southernmost town, where two of my kids take part in a shorttrack speed skating training camp and competition.  They are both members of the local club in Guildford, and they really enjoy the annual trip to Germany.  The place, in the Alps, is a bit of a trek to get to, being more or less a full day of travel each way between home to rental apartment, but it's worth it, and both kids finished saying they want to go next year, so looks like I will start saving up for that trip now, and make plans to be back there same time next year!

Here are a couple of photos - me and the boys, and the two of them on the ice racing each other

 

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.