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

 

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

 

Fire at GSI/FAIR

I got forwarded a press release from the GSI / FAIR facility in Germany describing a "major fire" which happened there yesterday.  The fire happened in the "GSI" part - the longstanding facility which has been conducting research in nuclear physics for many years (the SI in GSI is Schwerion = heavy ion).  FAIR is the linked site where they are building a new facility, which is apparently unaffected by the fire.  

The main piece of specific information in the press release is the UNILAC linear accelerator building is "severely affected" by the fire.   This is perhaps the worst bit of the facility to have a problem with, as it is the starting point for the rest of it.  The linear accelerator takes ions from a source and accelerates them to then be passed to all sorts of other beam lines.  No UNILAC means no beams at any part of the facility.  I don't know just how bad things there are, but on the face of it, the news sounds bad. 

Here's a diagram showing the UNILAC provide beam for the rest of the GSI facility, and how the GSI facility then sends a beam to the new FAIR project built next to it

 

The latest funding upheaval

The last week has seen the outcome of the recent UK government spending review trickle down through all the levels of the science funding structure.  From the STFC council came a headline announcement for many doing "curiosity-driven" research in Nuclear Physics, Particle Physics, and Astronomy:  That there will be a ~30% reduction in the budget for such activities, at least in the grant lines that have traditionally funded them.  This is obviously unwelcome news to all of us in any of these communities, worried as we are about our own jobs, current and future jobs for the young researchers we are teaching or mentoring, and for the international standing of the UK in international projects and collaborations. 

The news coverage has generally focussed on the potential negative results of these cuts.  Here's an example from the American Science Magazine.

Ian Chapman, the head of UK Research and Innovation – UKRI – which is the umbrella organisation at the top of all government funding councils, today wrote an open letter giving some more context about the decisions across all funding councils.  It attempts to place the details of the STFC council outcomes in a wider context of directions from the goverment, as well as the international situation with large-scale facility support in the STFC budget.  There is mention of "doing fewer things better", which has felt like a mantra for the whole 30 years I have been working in science research in the UK, and has felt at my least cynical that it is the UK managing its relative decline in standing in the world, and at my most that it is due to the lobbying of large groups and/or large universities to grab money for themselves.  Some useful context in Chapman's letter implied that even with fixed or modest increases of funding, emerging areas (such as AI) crowd out older fields in their demand for a share of funding, and cross the research council remits so that new funding calls are less likely to sit in single-council traditional grant rounds. None of that sounds obviously unreasonable to me, and I'm not at all wedded to the idea that we should carry on at all times doing things the same way we have always done.  Whether reasonable support and opportunities will be given to researchers to move into new areas by funders and employers will be key here.  I don't mind well-managed change, though bonkers tech-bro break-things-and-see-what-happens is something I am wary of, as it is popular with some in power. 

Nuclear physics, as ever in my time in the UK, sits in an uneasy place.  The more "fundamental" physics bits of the nuclear world (as opposed to e.g. nuclear engineering or applications in radiation protection or medicine)  moved away from the EPSRC council many years ago, with the general consent of the nuclear physics commnunity, into the newly-formed STFC.  Here, it was hoped, the lack of immediate application which had made us the poor relations of EPSRC, would be no issue.  In the end, I think the nuclear physics community has felt like the poor relation in STFC which you can often hear described as the particle and astro council, forgetting the tiny nuclear component. We have gone from being the least applied field in EPSRC to the most applied in STFC.  But thanks to the applications of nuclear physics, we have some hope.  For example, this coming week we're expecting the announcement of the funding of Nuclear Skills Doctoral Focal Awards (to train new PhD students).  We (the "blue skies" nuclear physics community) have joined this call eagerly, knowing we are well-placed to provide skills for the wide nuclear industry, and because of things like this, I am not as pessimistic as I might have been in the past at the raw 30% headline announcement of a cut.  By itself, an increase in student numbers alongside a decrease in research jobs for the students to go into is not where all of us want to be, but as someone who has been able to access cross-field nuclear/quantum research job funding, I have to remain cautiously optimistic that such opportunities to break out of our traditional path will become increasingly more available to us.  

As usual, I want to include a picture on each blog post.  I'm not sure what fits here best, so here's a direct link to the picture UKRI used on the open letter from Ian Chapman.  The URL gives the file title as UKRI-010226-Stock_abstract-rectangular-metal-tiling-building-facade_Unsplash.jpg so I guess that's what it is

 

Mathematics distracts from God

I've just returned from the British Film Institute where I went with my brother to watch Eric Rohmer's 1969 film My Night at Maud's. It's a supremely French film of love, relationships, philosophy and religion.  The protagonist has, among other habits, an interest in mathematics.  Early on there was a quick glimpse of a textbook he was looking at.  I tried to read the subfield of mathematics as we got a glance, but it was too fleeting.  Where I did really wish I could quickly whip out my phone and get a shot, though, was the image where the subtitles gave the character's verdict that "Mathematics distracts from God. A useless, intellectual diversion - worse than other diversions."  It would have made a great picture to put on any number of talks I give.   I might have to get a DVD of the film just to be able to make such a screengrab. 

Here's a still from the film's IMDB page, from Maud's flat, during the titular night

 

Hello 2026

It's my first day back in the office since the Christmas / New Year break and I am a combination of raring to go and slightly filled with trepidation about just how busy the upcoming couple of months are going to be.  For one thing, it is the time of the eyar when I have the most intensive teaching activity, giving two courses in semester 2 on quantum computing.  It's fun, but busy, and it doesn't stop other activities, such as ongoing research projects and associated PhD and postdoc supervision.  There are a couple of big grant submission deadlines coming up that I need to work hard to hit and though my external fellowship is taken into account when allocating University duties, the work needed for both fellowship and University obligations is more than one person's tasks, but I have to manage it as one person.  It's fine, but I just need to be prepared for the time of year when the uneven workload bunches up! 

Later this week I'm off to GANIL in France to give a talk and visit some people I work with there.  I hope the winter ferry crossing is okay 😬 

For a wintery picture to accompany my post, here is me and some friends on the ice rink at the Brighton Pavillion, where I went on Sunday