Symmetry factor

I got back from that trip to Nashville for the 2nd meeting of the Topical Group on Hadronic Physics of the American Physical Society (GHP, for short). In all respects, it was an interesting meeting. This topical group tries to unify the people dealing with strong interactions (ain’t we all?):  RHIC/QGP, meson/baryon spectroscopy, electroweak interactions in nuclear physics/lattice. One good thing that comes out of those meetings — I was lucky enough to help to organize the very first meeting in the series — is that you really learn what people do in the field right “next to yours.” I’m not going to spend much time talking about physics here, but it was interesting to learn about some differences in, say, terminology. For instance, in describing something related to strong interactions, the term “model-independent result” means different things in the spectroscopy/nuclear community and in high energy physics. For the spectroscopists it means “true in several quark models” while for HEP physicists it means “obtained without use of any quark model.”

 Some “useful” quotes from the meeting:

 ”The CLEO detector becomes available in 18 months” (W. Roberts, finishing up his talk on the desire of nuclear/hadronic community to build a hadron beam facility) — any eccentric millioners out there who want to get a rarity?

“Stop thinking what lattice can do for you, think what you can do for the lattice” (P. Bedaque, apparently tired of requests from the quark model community to compute quark model parameters on the lattice. Incidentally, some of those parameters can not be defined outside of the quark model). 

 I guess when one works in the framework of a particular (quark) model, one might eventually tend to think that the Nature is built according to this particular model… it’s human nature :-).

 Have fun!