Symmetry factor

I am a faculty advisor for the WSU’s chapter of Society of Physics Students (SPS). What that means is that I help our undergraduate and graduate students who are members of SPS with what they need from the faculty/Chair/University/… — basically a liason between them and anyone else when senior faculty involvment is required. Our SPS fellows are really a great bunch! After some years of inactivity, this year’s incarnation of SPS is burst with activity — among other things I just have to mention a program for tuitoring of high school girls in Detroit that they developed! Of course, this is all due to their leadership, Aragorn Steiger, Emmet Brown, Wesley Leonard and their “cabinet” (see the above link to our SPS chapter). Of course, I’m trying to help them with anything I can, but it is really their sucessfull enterprize and my help is minimal. They are running a fine SPS chapter and should be recognized for that.

Yet, in a surprise development, they informed me yesterday that recently they nominated me for the Outstanding Student Organization Advisor Award, which is a part of WSU’s  Campus Life Leadership Awards. Moreover, they also informed me that, as of yesterday, I won that award!

Thank you, guys! I really appreciate that!

P.S. They also told me that this award was also a recognision for the HiSchool DiSCo project that I’m trying to run, but which really needs money to buy new computers… I’ll blog more about this project tomorrow.

I already blogged about Apple’s new products here. How about this one:

(thanks, David, for sending this one). Now, I know, it’s not physics…

I noticed that my blog has been hit many times with the following search request: postdoc salary (in physics or particle physics or at some particular university/lab). I take that, besides general curiosity, someone gets an offer from somewhere and wants to know if the place is kinda cheap, i.e. tries to pay as little as possible. So I wanted to address this issue here.

While the possibility of a place trying to pay as little as possible is certainly a possibility - I’ve heard stories about Ivy League schools trying to hire Nobel-Prize-grade people for cheap (well, at the time those people haven’t won their Nobel Prizes yet), most of postdoc salaries are written in the grant applications of faculty who are trying to hire those postdocs. So there is almost no wiggle room there. Of course, salaries of less experienced postdocs would generally be smaller than those of more experienced postdocs, but at the end all those numbers are still in the same ballpark (I already talked about that here). The only exception would be national labs (FNAL/ANL/BNL/SLAC/…) where salaries are generally higher. And of course universities located in places like New York City pay more and maybe even offer University-assisted housing. So, excluding those things and things like prize postdocs such as this, this, or this, the general bracket for a postdoc salary in particle theory is $38K-$42K this year. When I was a postdoc, those numbers started in the low 30’s…

Great news! Two collaborations, BaBar at SLAC and Belle at KEK announced the evidence for D0-anti-D0 mixing today during the conference in Moriond.  They reported evidence for mixing using two different techniques, which is even better.

First of all, what is mixing? A phenomenon of meson mixing has been observed in several meson systems. As it turns out, electroweak interactions of the Standard Model allow some mesons and anti-mesons mix. This is possible because this process does not violate any conservation laws of Nature. For example, both D0 (made of a charm quark and up antiquark) and anti-D0 (made of a charm antiquark and up quark) are neutral as far as electrical charge is concerned. They are made of quarks of different flavors, but weak interactions do not conserve flavor, so Standard Model allows for diagrams that change D0 into anti-D0. For more information, see my recent review.

Why is it interesting? Well, for starters, this is the last unobserved meson mixing (mixings of neutral kaons, B and B_s mesons have been observed already). Second, this is a system that makes theoretical predictions difficult and thus interesting. I’ve been working on charm mixing for about ten years…

So, what did they see? When meson and antimeson mix, the phenomenon that occurs is very similar to a mechanical phenomenon of double pendula connected by a weak spring: after some time the system will develop oscillations that are described by generalized frequencies, which one can find. Similarly to that, time development of D0 or anti-D0 meson is described by a Schroedinger equation with non-diagonal Hamiltonian. This results in two states composed of both D0 and anti-D0 (the “heavy” and “light” states). So one can ask what the mass and lifetime differences between those  states are. And that’s what they measure! Both those quantities are usually normalized to a meson’s lifetime, so notmalized mass and lifetime differences are called x and y.

Now to the results: 

Belle finds y = (1.31 +- 0.32 +- 0.25) % with a significance of 3.2 sigma including systematics.

BaBar finds y’ = (0.97 +- 0.44 +- 0.31) % and x^’2 = (-0.22 +- 0.31 +- 0.21) x 10^-3 with a significance of 3.9 sigma.

This is consistent with a theoretical prediction (not post-diction) reported here.

And that’s the news! I’ll report about theoretical implications of that later!

I was recently pointed to an interesting paper in Physics Today “Experimenting with plagiarism detection on the ArXiv” by Toni Feder (thank you, Andrei Sidorenko, for pointing it out). Let me shamelessly copy the first paragraph of that article: “Starting this summer, submissions to the arXiv, the online server where many physicists check daily for new preprints, will be compared with the server’s existing 400 000—and counting—manuscripts to check for plagiarism.” Apparently, this news was already discussed a couple of years ago in an interesting article in one of the old issues of The Chronicles of Higher Education (sorry, you might need a subscription).

It is an interesting development. According to this paper, Paul Ginsparg (creator of the ArXiv) and his graduate student Daria Sorokina did a study which found that about 10% of all papers on arxiv has blocks of overlapping text! Indeed, this should not be surprizing, as many authors reuse their own papers when they write conference proceedings. But then, excluding those, they still found about 1% of papers that were clear copies of other authors’ work! Once again, it’s 1% of 400 000 papers — you can do the math (that is, unless you work in a Honda Dealership in Farmigton Hills or, as I recently learned, at Home Depot)!

I think this kind of software is really needed. I recall a scandalous case of one fellow who submitted a bunch of papers to the arxiv which were just copies of various papers he found on the same arxive. In particular, he copied several chapters of the BaBar Physics Book. I wrote one of those chapters! 

Nowdays, you can even fight self-plagiarism! But then again, it should be easy to remember what is published and what is not… Although I can recall at least two instances when this happened: I was refereeing a paper submitted to Physics Letters B when I noticed that almonst all text of that paper was exactly the same as the text of previous paper written by the same author! Well, the formulas were different — maybe that’s what counts — as the author talked about a different meson system. But all the text was the same!!! Then the same happened when I reviwed another paper for Physical Review D. Apparently, some people just want to improve their paper count… 

I am on the Graduate Recruitment and Admissions Committee this year. What it means is that within our department I am part of the group of three people who look through applications of prospective graduate students and decide who would be the best candidates to become grad students in our department. I will write later on what the application should have in order to be successful. Today I wanted to mention some things the applicant should avoid. Well, first and foremost, the applicant should aviod NOT following what we say in the advertisment or on our admissions pages. That is to say, we, as any other physics department in the US, require each applicant to fill out an application form. In our case, this application form is on-line, whch is very convenient for both applicants and us. We specifically say that we need this form — and this is not just another burocratic requirement — it conveniently contains GRE/TOEFL scores, basic info about the applicant, letters of recommendation, transcripts (as attachments), … In other words, all that we need to make an informative decision on who to admit in one place!

And then there is another thing — personal communication. If we contact the candidate and he/she does not reply for weeks, it tells us something about the applicant and his/her intentions (for instance, we don’t want some applicants from overseas to use the deparment to get visa and support for a year before they leave for engineering or computer science — believe me, it happens more often than one might think… so we learn to root those out in the first place). But then there are also other types of e-mails. Oftentimes I get messages from prospective students that go something like that (quote):

“I have gone through website for the vacancy of phd studentship. I intend to do my Ph.D in CONDESED MATTER PHYSICS. As my interest lie within your frame of research work, I would like to join for Ph.D in your esteemed group. Please consider my application for the same. I will be glad to work under your guidance. … I want to become a part of your group to pursue exiting projects.”

Come on! It is sooo clear that this person didn’t even look at our DEPARTMENTAL website, leave alone mine! For starters, my “official” website clearly states that my research interest is theoretical particle physics. And so my group and I are doing just that, theoretical particle physics. Second, if this person looked through our advertisments, he/she would clearly noticed that all communications should have been directed to our admissions chair, not to the person who submitted the ad… So I’m inclined to treat those messages as spam… but I don’t, I faithfully forward them to where they are supposed to go in the first place, our admissions chair…

Today is the International Women’s Day (8 of March). Being called “international,” it is naturally celebrated only in Russia (ok, also in the countries of the former Soviet bloc), which puts it in the same category as the World Series of baseball. It is a day which was designed to be a political holiday (wasn’t they all in the former Soviet Union…), but quickly lost its political flavor and became an official holiday of women and an official day-off. It is also a day when men are supposed to take over house chores and give their ladies flowers. At least for one day in a year…

Happy March 8!

Today, directors of both US particle physics labs (SLAC and Fermilab) responded to the question posed by Undersecretary Ray Orbach (see here) during the last High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) meeting: what should US experimental particle physics do if the linear collider’s construction is delayed until mid-2020’s? SLAC is sticking to its guns and supports ILC R&D . This is understandable, as it appears that SLAC is poised to leave accelerator-based high energy physics research once BaBar stops taking data. Fermilab’s director decided to form a commitee (see here). At the and of the day,  “…the strategic plan that Fermilab will develop in partnership with the HEP community will propose to HEPAP, P5 and the DOE a robust program of accelerator-based particle physics during the next two to three decades with the intent to maximize the potential for major discovery during that period.“

Hmmm…. top-quark factory at FNAL with a detector built out of CDF and D0? All neutrino experiments one can propose? Will see…

A number of my colleagues here at WSU and I are writing an IGERT proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) this year. What is IGERT? Well, IGERT stands for Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship. In other words, a grant program designed to support educational activities (fellowships for graduate students plus program development) in a new or “hot” research direction. Another important aspect of this program is that it has to “interdisciplinary” (I guess that is also what is meant by the word “integrative”). At any rate, this is one of thise programs that involve several department or even universities and so, it is very competitive. Only up to four preliminary proposals from any given university are allowed and then only three full proposals are possible if NSF gives a nod at the pre-proposal stage. So it is a rigorous three-stage proposal program (one extra hurdle is an internal university competition, which we already passed).

But I digressed a bit. The reason for this post is to ask a question: what is the point of restricting the number of PIs for proposals like that to five??? The IGERT proposals usually are a collaborative efforts of many professors (we have 8 professors from three different department); I’ve seen as many as 19 investigators participating in IGERT. So why only five?

I don’t know the answer, maybe someone can tell me what it is. Of course, there are special mechanisms to include more than five faculty on that type of grant — include them as “senior researchers.”  My problem with that is that once you are not classified as a PI or co-PI, there is a perception that yearly faculty departmental review would not count that grant as “yours…”

We’ll have to see how it works in practice: this Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) grant was renewed this year with only two PIs — this is another example of a new policy from NSF –  so on a renewal I’m listed as “senior personnel” and have no access to that grant on Fastlane (which is NSF’s computer system for submission and renewal of grants). Why is that done this way? Beats me…

Ok, I just had to post this. Here is a funny YouTube video of Jim Carrey (you know, “Ace Ventura” or “The Mask” or excellent “The Truman Show”) “talking the talk” on quantum physics on Connan O’Brien show (see Update at the bottom):

I wonder who wrote it for them? Maybe it was similar to this…

Update: I think NBC removed this video from YouTube. However, you can still find it here. Happy viewing!