Symmetry factor

This week workers started removing old Van de Graaf accelerator from the basement of our Physics building.

Here you can see them removing bricks of radiation shielding from the accelerator lab in the basement. The lab has been empty for many years now, in fact, part of the accelerator hall was used as lab space by our Heavy Ion group for construction of Electromagnitic Calorimeter for the STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Lab (BNL). Of course, the main task would be to remove the accelerator itself (or what remains of it), a huge tank that’s been sitting there for years. It’s a welcome development, as the lab would finally be cleared of old junk. Two things are kinda sad, though. First, one chapter of WSU physics department’s history finally closes (it was cool to have our own accelerator)… Second, the resulting lab space does not go to Physics, but to… Geology! Talk about assigment of lab space… It is interesting that even among the physicists in the building, lab space is a precious commodity… well, welcome aboard, Geology…

There is a very interesting paper in tomorrow’s mailings of hep-ex physics preprint archive (or as it is known, ArXive). It is a talk, “Charting the Course for Elementary Particle Physics,” that Burton Richter, Nobel Prize laureate and former director of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) gave at the San Franciso’s meeting of American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS). It can be found here (there is a link to a pdf file).

This is a very compact and nice presentation of what we are doing in particle and astroparticle physics with absolutely no formulas - an excellent easy reading piece. He talks about many things: the LHC and its run plan, International Linear Collider (ILC), noting that it can be built as early as 2019 (i.e 10 years after the first physics results from the LHC) and its price tag of $8 Billion (to compare: cost of building of a new aircraft carrier is $8-$14B, cost of building the Golden Gate Bridge is $35M in 1930’s dollars — approximately $1.2B today), upcoming astrophysics and neutrino experiments.

One of his statements has caught my eye. He stated that if LHC works well and finds nothing by 2012, the ILC will not be funded. This is the point that might need some clarification. First of all, something must happen at the TeV scale. One of the reasons for it is the fact that scattering of longitudinal W-bosons violates unitarity at the center-of-mass energy of around 1 TeV if only experimentally-established particles, i.e. W-, Z-bosons and photons are taken into account. What does it mean? Well, loosely speaking, in order for a theory to conserve probability, any scattering cross section for any particles cannot grow as a power of energy. Unfortunately, scattering of longitudinally-polarized W’s does, it grows asenergy squared. This is fixed in the Standard Model by addition of a Higgs boson, which besides providing the nice parametrization of how particles acquire mass, also provides a fix for the unitarity problem by canceling the dangerous growth of that cross-section. But this is the simplest mechanism for how this cancellation happens, there are many more models that do the same job, withHiggs bosons and without. So, regardless of what exactly happens at 1 TeV, something must be there and LHC is bound to find something. But what if the Nature prepared for us the worst-case scenario? That is, LHC will find the Standard Model Higgs and nothing else, no SUSY particles, no Technicolor goldstones, no extra dimensions… What then? Would you build the ILC then?

I’ve been asking this question to many people. And the answer that I get is the one I’d probably give myself — in this case theILC would be the best machine to study much higher energy scales by carefully studying Higgs’ dynamics, kinda like current-day B-factories are looking for indirect effects of New Physics in decays and mixings of heavy flavors. But would it then be better to build a muon collider (muon’s couplings to Higgs are much larger than electron’s), even given its all technical problems today? I don’t know…

Even though the title of this post sounds promising, I actually don’t know the answer to this question. The whole reason for this post is that we started interviewing candidates for the faculty position (which is not in my field) that we have open this year.

So everybody knows that selecting a faculty candidate is a rigorous process. Indeed, we are choosing our colleague that we hope to have with us for the duration of his or her whole career. Wayne State is not exactly Harvard or Yale (of course we’d like to be), but we do get some excellent candidates — after all, I don’t know any other physics department in the United States that has five CAREER and onePECASE awardees in the last five years. So precisely because we are not Harvard or Yale, we do try to select faculty who we think will get tenure in our Department.

So, what is the process? Well, the prospective candidates send their CV’s, statement of research interests (sometimes the statement of teaching philosophy is also requested, but I don’t think that it plays a big role if you are trying to get a job at a research university; we don’t even require it) and ask their peers to send recommendation letters on their behalf. This is rather standard. But what happens then? It might be different from one University to another, but the main stages are the same. First, secretarial stuff separates all the documents into folders. At WSU, however, we have an electronic application system, where all the applicant’s information is stored electronically. Then, search committee looks into the pool of applicants to select a “long” and then a “short” shortlists (usually, 10 and 5 candidates respectively). The candidates on the “short” shortlist are invited for a campus interview, give a colloquium, talk to the Chair and some faculty members (usually, members of the search and executive committees), and visit the Dean. Then, search committee, executive committee and the Chair get together, select the candidate, make recommendation to the Dean and the person is offered a job. That is it! In the best case scenario, the offer is accepted and the person shows up in the Fall. If not, the process comes back to the point when the search committee, executive committee and the Chair get together, select the candidate, …

What’s the probability of getting the job one applied for? This is a loaded question. Statistically speaking, it depends on the number of applicants. But this counting is clearly wrong. First, the hire is usually made in some particularsubfield . It might or might not be spelled out in the ad, but there is usually some agreement that unless a star applies for a position, the person from another (sub)field will not make the shortlist — if something like that happens, there is usually no shortlist at all and the hire is called “target of opportunity” and is often made at a more senior level. Second, the person “on the paper” may look completely different than the the person “in real life.” In fact, my postdocadvisor at JHU kept saying that “your research puts you on the shortlist, what happens then — depends on many other factors”. Those factors include knowledge of one’s field, general breadth of knowledge, how the person communicates… They also include how the candidate presents his or her colloquium. This is actually important. See, most of the faculty in the audience do not work in the same field, so a colloquium should really be… a colloquium — that is, a presentation of the candidate’s field (including one’s own work) to physicists working in other fields. This is one way how teaching ability is evaluated. Same goes for individual interviews with faculty members — often use of jargon, references to the names of equations and methods very particular to one’s narrow subfield without explanation of what they actually are do not impress, but rather annoy the other side… and it’s that side that participates in the decision-making… Even a genuine interest in the department makes a difference — it shows that the person is interested in coming, not just in using the potential offer to leverage salary/startup at some other place.

So I’m looking forward to seeing what candidates come for a visit this year…

We decided to move into the 21st century. Well, technically, we are there already, since we have not one, but two robots roaming the open spaces of our house. What I’m talking about are the two robots that perform two functions that humans need to perform from time to time in order to keep their habitat clean, floor-vacuuming and floor-washing. So we got Roomba and Scooba. The later is especially helpful with tile floors… Here it is:

 It actually works… That is, it still works… until I get this book and start experimenting with it… By the way, if you are thinking about getting one, buying one in the Sharper Image store is the last thing I’d do (they’d overcharge you by a factor of 2)…. just my two cents…

Yesterday the President’s request for the 2008 budget was announced (see the Department of Energy’s share here: http://www.energy.gov/news/4706.htm). So, the American Competitiveness Initiative is still there — great! Also, DOE’s Office of Science, the largest federal supporter of basic research in the physical sciences (half of the faculty in our Department are supported by DOE), requests $4.4 billion, with major increase in nuclear fusion research (that is because US has joined ITER, the first international experimental fussion reactor to be built in France). If approved, RHIC would be able to run (good for our dept’s nuclear experimentalists), as well as the Tevatron (also good for our dept’s HEP experimentalists). In all, the HEP budget proposal’s dynamics looks as follows (in millions of dollars):

2006 actual … 2007 est. … 2008 est.

…..701 ………… 733 …………… 782……

So it is a 0.9% increase in funding… not much… The only thing is that a huge chunk of that funding, SLAC linac operations, will be transferred from HEP to Basic Energy Sciences, so really it is a 12.6% increase in 2007 and additional 3.7% increase in 2008 (update: this info is from the Under Secretary Orbach’s presentation of the 2008 budget request available here, see footnote on page 4). One thing, though, is that I don’t know what “2007 est.” is, as so far we’ve been operating under Continuous Resolution, i.e. all the grants have been funded (so far) at the level of last year, dollar-by-dollar…. Congress is still working on 2007 budget…

Well, the title of this post is the question that I keep asking myself since entering graduate school, albeit always in a different context. At school I was concerned with finding a good position (meaning, a good university and a great advisor). I was lucky to be a postdoc at Johns Hopkins and Cornell, my advisors were great people, amazing scientists and excellent teachers. Now, since becoming a faculty member myself, I’m concerned with filling a postdoc position that I have from time to time (in particular, this year). In other words, looking from another side…

And there are many specifics. What salary should be offered? It should come as no surprize that higher salary is better… well, except for that grant that pays for a postdoc can only allow for certain salary plus I also have to pay benefits, insurance, overhead (so in the end, each postdoc’s cost is salary times 1.8-2.0 if all that stuff is taken into account)… also postdoc should have some travel budget… Should we get a fresh-out-of-graduate-school person? Would that person be independent enough? Would I be able to learn from him/her? Should we get more senior person? Can we afford him/her?
Also, several things changed from the time when I was a postdoc. Even though it was only six years ago, things accelerated a lot. I remember that January was the time when people started making offers. It was great to get an offer early in the year - no worries until September-October, when you acually move to the new place! Just research, research, research! Now it is very different. A shortlist for WSU position was formed in mid-end of January — and it was a long short list. So I started contacting people on the list about their availability… big surprize! Half of them already committed to other places! Man! That was frustrating… Then, after talking to some of my colleagues at this conference, I realized that that’s not just me or WSU. Everything moved up by at least two months — first positions started filling up in November, at least according to this website. And for some reason people blamed MIT’s Pappalardo Fellowship for starting all this trend  (their deadline is REALLY early)…

Anyways, the offer has now been made… The problem is that the candidate is also on the shortlists for several faculty jobs… well, this is, of course, my problem — I honestly wish this person good luck — but that is yet another side of trying to find a good postdoc in particle theory…

I noticed an interesting thing today: we are outsourcing particle/nuclear theorists to China! Here is the story: several national labs in the United States have several so-called “bridge faculty positions”. These positions usually involve two parties (hence the term “bridge”), a national lab and a university. This program has been extremely popular among theorists — brigde positions between Jefferson Lab (JLab) and nearby (and not so nearby) universities, Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) and US (and some Canadian) universities, etc. Usually, the lab — in other words, U.S. Department of Energy — pays half of the theorist’s salary for five years, that is, until that theorist is tenured at the university on the other side of the bridge. Those positions are good for the lab (they get theorists who work with lab exeprimentalists/users) and for the university participating in the program (brings external money and prestige). It would be great to bring one of those positions to WSU one day in the future…

So, here is a new announcement for a new bridge position with Jefferson Lab! Cool — one more theory job! Well, only this time the bridge is a bit too long. The position is in Beijing — that is, in China. Same deal though, JLab pays half of the money for five years. I wonder what the salary is…

It’s interesting, though, why Peking University is chosen as a recipient for this bridge. It appears that the whole experimental delegation from China is about 8 people (none of those eight are from Peking University). That is, 8 out of hundreds of JLab users (for example, Armenia: 48, France: 112, Japan: 44, Russia: 65)….