Symmetry factor

Ouch! What a news from the UK! PhysicsWorld reported that due to a funding crisis in the UK science (aren’t we always in crisis when it is about funding science? It’s much easier to give out subprime loans and then moan about the crisis when peoople default on those), the country is pulling out of the International Linear Collider project. And not just pulling out because of the lack of funds — here is the exact text from the Delivery Plan, the document that is produced by the UK’s Facilities Council (which is “… [the organization that] operates world-class, large scale research facilities and provides strategic advice to the UK government on their development. It also manages international research projects in support of a broad cross-section of the UK research community. The Council also directs, coordinates and funds research, education and training.” — see the website):

“We will cease investment in the International Linear Collider. We do not see a practicable path towards the realisation of this facility as currently conceived on a reasonable timescale. “

How about that? And this is with all the ideas and plans that are already on the table (including projects that were chopped because of the ILC)… The International Linear Collider just became a chunck less international… This is really bad timing — as we learned recently, the real cost of ILC would also likely to go up…

P.S. One can find the complete text of the Delivery Plan here.

As I predicted here, Persis Drell has been named the fourth director of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. She is a great physicists and, I’m sure, will lead SLAC to a brighter future (which can be read as you wish — especially since SLAC will soon have no on-site particle physics experiements, but will have a very bright X-ray source). We interacted a bit what I was a postdoc at Cornell (she was a professor there for 14 years). She helped turn SLAC into an active astrophysics lab and resisted attempts to argue for building of a super-B factory there.

Hmm… maybe I should do predictions for money… wait, I actually do that — I’m a theorist…

How much does it cost to build the ILC? Well, according to the ILC Reference Design Report (already discussed here and here), it would cost about $7B (plus manpower) — not that expensive, if you put it in the perspective: for example, one new aircraft carrier costs about $8B.

Now, there is a letter to the Editor in the recent Physics Today which disputes this figure. In fact, Michael Riordan (UC Santa Cruz) claims that the correct estimate of the cost is not what was released in that report. To quote the article,

“The $7.5 billion total estimate cited is what such a collider might cost according to European accounting practices, assuming it were located at an existing laboratory, like CERN, that could absorb much of the construction management, R&D, and other costs into its normal operating budget. Nor does it include the costs of experimental detectors, contingency, or inflation. Adding those costs would push the total well north of $10 billion, by my calculations. If, as many of us hope, the ILC were to be built in the US, the Department of Energy would insist that all of the other costs be included, making it—as correctly reported in Science—a $10 billion to $15 billion project.”

Now, $15B — that is a big number. According to Burton Richter (Nobel Prize winner and former Director of SLAC), this number is about right:

“The cost in US terms is easy to calculate. The ILC value cost estimate leaves out lab personel costs, inflation, contingency, detectors, physics support buildings, and R&D in support of construction. When I put those in I get about 15-16 billion for the cost of the 0.5 TeV version as construction projects costs are usually calculated here.

The DOE has been through this before for ITER. The value cost of ITER is about $5 billion, but in US terms the budget throught he construction project for our share (10%) is not $500 million, but $1.1 billion. The DOE and the administration made the decision to join based on the cost in US terms. The same process will be used for the ILC. The US HEP community should take its head out of the sand and face the reality. A US 50 % share as host is within the
realm of possibility, but only if the community gets behind it and recognizes the true financial impact.

Feel free to circulate this iif you wish.

Burton Richter”

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So… well, supersymmetry (or something truly exciting) is better be there - let’s see what LHC tells us about that…

Ever since the invention of carbonated water by Joseph Priestley and Torbern Bergman, people wanted to find new uses for this refreshing drink — uses that are unrelated to its primary function of actually providing refreshment (Russian-speaking readers of this blog might remember popular children’s fiction novels “Neznaika” of Nikolai Nosov where carbonated water was used to propel cars and rockets).

Now, everybody knows that carbonated water is obtained by dissolving carbon dioxide gas in water - the result is the formation of carbonic acid (chemical formula H₂CO₃) that effectively “traps” the carbon dioxide. It is also known that carbon dioxide is one of the anthropogenic greenhouse gases, whose overconcentration is not really good for this planet. Putting two and two together, researchers from the University of Leeds Stephanie Houston, Bruce Yardley, P. Craig Smalley, and Ian Collins proposed storing CO₂ in water that is being pumped into oil reservoirs to enhance the flow of oil. Read more about it here. Here is their published paper.

I got back from Fermilab, where I stayed for a day of a Project X workshop. This workshop is the second in a series of trying to chart the intermediate future of Fermilab — in other words, in between 2009 when we loose Tevatron until 202X when the International Linear Collider (ILC) will be operational at FNAL (ok, I’m an optimist here). The first workshop was about accelerator issues, i.e. technical aspects of high intensity source at FNAL. So this one was regarding building the “physics case”, i.e. what physics one can do at the “intensity frontier” with that machine. I was curious what would be the outcome of that workshop - you see, there originally was an “intermediate project” - it was called BTeV and it was supposed to study flavor physics. So to make the long story short, I actually was in “physical” attendance for the first day of the conference and was asked to connect “virtually” for the second day (I participated in the “antiprotons” working group).

Instead of reporting about the workshop (you can actually look at the transparences of the talks here), I want to convey the atmosphere of what was happening there, in particular concentrating on the talk by Jon Bagger (which had the gist of what other theorists, Joe Lykken and Hitoshi Murayama also said). It was a bit surprizing to me to see Jon give a Project-X talk, since, as far as I know, he was the one of the biggest proponents to streamline the the high energy physics program by consolidating the efforts of most of the US physicists around ILC (which practically resulted in the cancelation of BTeV and a number of other flavor physics experiments with great physics programs such as RSVP or CKM). He concentrated on three physics topics that one can do with this device: quark flavor physics (kaon rare decays), charged lepton flavor physics (muon transitions via flavor-changing neutral currents (FCNC)) and neutrino physics. Indeed those are the things one can do with 8 GeV super-intense proton beams.

The point is that LHC might not be sensitive to flavor physics of the first two generations, i.e. how new physics at the TeV-scale couples to them. That used to be the reason to do flavor experiments — and continues to be in Japan and at CERN. The only thing that we know now that we didn’t know when the plug was pulled on experimental flavor physics effort in the US is that the Nature happened to be following the concept of “Minimal Flavor Violation” (or MFV) - or very close to it. Which means that whatever new physics awaits us at a TeV-scale, for some reason it chose to communicate itself to low energy scales by the Standard Model-like operators. We were hoping for spectacular results in B (or charm) physics, but it didn’t happen… and we don’t know why.

What was interesting in his talk are the messages that he decided to draw — and which gave him a very hostile reception. First, he asked if “some experiments could be done cheaper elsewhere” (yes, indeed - as someone in the audience noted, the US can simply NOT do any HEP experiments and wait for the Europeans/Chineese/Japaneese physicists to do them — but is this a good approach?). Second, Jon said that “detailed calculations needed to convince everybody of the importance of Project X in the world flavor program” (that drew lots of emotions from people who were on the cancelled Fermilab kaon experiments, which passed the physics studies with flying colors). I actually think that one does need to go back to the drawing board here. First of all, feasibility of new kaon experiments was not demonstrated for the high-intensity setup project X is going to be. Second, one needs to see if the expected results will improve on the approved CERN and KEK experiments. Of course, having an estimated statistics of 800-1000 events for a kaon experiment in Project-X in the FCNC channel K+ -> pi+ nu nu-bar is great! Finally, Jon said the following: “If Project-X positions Fermilab as a credible host [for ILC], it might be well worth the effort. If not — it will be a mistake”… It’s an interesting statement that reflects the ILC-centric views of many in US high energy physics (BTW, the preceeding talk by David McGinnis actually stated that accelerator issues in Project X are very much alligned to what one expects to have at the ILC). But, as many people later complained in private conversations, it significantly narrows the scope of US particle physics program. In particular, it implies that studying QCD is not worth the effort. So here is the gist of it — we report, you decide :-).

One of the impressions that I got at this conference is that how difficult it would be so see if Project X has an easy place to be in the world-wide flavor-physics effort. Many similar studies of kaon decays are done at CERN and KEK; experiments with charged leptons are being performed at PSI in Switzerland, neutrinos are being studied at CERN and KEK, and antiproton experiments will be done at GSI in Germany (PANDA) - their FAIR facility just got government approval. Of course, independent checks of the results are needed… at any rate, it’s the huge intensity of the proposed proton source that can give us an edge…

P.S. For a general discussion of the Project-X workshop (including Gene Golowich’s quote from the CHARM-2007 conference — which really has nothing to do with that particular Project-X workshop, but tells you something about the status of flavor physics in the US) see here.

I am at Fermilab today. Yesterday I gave a seminar in the Theoretical Physics Department there, but today I decided to stay for the Project X Workshop. Basically, the idea is to toss around ideas for the physics case for the Fermlab’s intermediate future project — the high intensity proton source. Indeed, he most obvious physics application of this is a some sort of neutrino experiment. But people talk about new experiments with muons, kaons (some sort of revival of the RSVP experiment idea — but at FNAL — and with a possibility of 800-1000 events of the type K -> pi nu anti-nu), and even antiprotons (low energy, only 8 GeV). Let’s see what hapends…

The 2009 meeting of the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) of American Physical Society (APS) will be held on campus of Wayne State University in Detroit. How do I know that? Well, I am a Chair of the Local Organizing Committee. And Executive Committee of DPF has just accepted our proposal to host this meeting.

So, what kind of meeting is that? Well, this is the main event for the DPF, usually attended by about 500 physicists working in, well, field of particles and fields (and also strings). We are looking forward to hosting this meeting. Here is the Local Organizing Committee:

Alexey Petrov (WSU, co-Chair), Claude Pruneau (WSU), David Cinabro (WSU), Eizabeth H. Simmons (MSU), Gordon Kane (Michigan), Paul Karchin (WSU, co-Chair), Rene Bellwied (WSU), Robert Harr (WSU), R. Sekhar Chivukula (MSU), Sean Gavin (WSU), Sergei Voloshin (WSU)

Please consider attending this conference to hear first results from the LHC, new results from Fermilab and B-factories and recent advances in theory. If you want to dispel some of your stereotypes about Detroit, this would be great time to do so.

This morning I learned that former Vice President Al Gore not only invented the Internet, but also won a Nobel Peace Prize (the later claim is not an urban legend but indeed true). Well deserved!

This morning the 2007 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg “for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance.” Fert was the first to correctly explain the effect and Grunberg holds a patent for its practical applications. GMR (i.e. large change in resistance in the multilayered structures upon changing magnetic field — i.e. upon changing the direction of electron spins in the structure) is a very useful thing that allowed increasing density of information stored on computer hard drives and layed foundation for spintronics. So this year the prize is awarded in accord with Nobel’s will that the interst from his account that is supposed to be “…annually distributed in the form of  prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have  conferred the greatest benefit on mankind…” except for the “preceeding year” part.

Interestingly, Thompson Scientific confirmed its reputation for predicting it incorrectly. Now, to be fair, they did have Fert and Grunberg in contention for the 2006 Nobel prize…

This year the Ig Nobel prizes were awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research earlier than the regular Nobel Prizes. I was looking for some space themes (after all, 50 years ago on Oct. 4 was the day when people sent the first artificial sattelite in space), but alas… Nevertheless, here are some of the laureates:

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MEDICINE: Dr. Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer for their report “Sword Swallowing and its Side Effects.”

PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan and Enrique Cerda Villablanca for studying wrinkle patterns in sheets.

BIOLOGY: Dr. Johanna E.M.H. von Bronswijk for her census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, bacteria, algae and ferns found in our beds.

CHEMISTRY: Mayi Yamamoto for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring — from cow dung.

LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles for demonstrating that rats can’t tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backward and a person speaking Dutch backward.

LITERATURE: Glenda Browne for her study of the definite article “the” and the ways it causes problems when alphabetizing.

PEACE: The U.S. Air Force’s Wright Laboratory for their proposed “gay bomb,” a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually attracted to each other.

NUTRITION: Brian Wansink, whose experiment with a bottomless bowl of soup showed that humans eat more when presented with more food.

ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh for patenting a device that drops a net over bank robbers.

AVIATION: Patricia Agostino, Santiago Plano and Diego Golombek for discovering that hamsters recover from jet lag faster when given Viagra.

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I don’t know of any practical use of putting hamsters on Viagra (I think they do well without), but the prize in chemistry has enormous economic and philosophical value, as it shortens the “circle of life” famously described in the movie “Lion King.” I can also relate to the literature studies and suggest the author to enlarge her study by investigating the troubles that article “the” brings to (the?) Russian-speaking population. Contrary, the nutrition prize is given for an obvious result. Gosh, even Ig Nobels become controversial!