Symmetry factor

Just wanted to share… I was recently pointed to this “article” — it is pretty funny, a nice parody on how normal research papers in theoretical high energy physics are written…

Lev Davidovich Landau, a brilliant theoretical physicist and a founder of a whole school of thought in theoretical physics, was born exactly one hundred years ago, on 22 January 1908. His work was amazingly broad, from condensed matter physics to quantum field theory. He is also an author of a renowned course in theoretical physics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his work on superfluidity of liquid helium. He is one of the few people in the world whose student also got a Nobel Prize…

It is interesting that he instituted a practice of a “Landau minimum” for prospective theorists in many theory departments in USSR - any student who wanted to work with a theory group would have to pass a special exam. This exam was an N-part (and N-day) affair, with N<10 being a number of subjects (Classical Mechanics, Electrodynamics, Quantum Mechanics, ….) that a particular theory department wanted that student to pass. 10 here is the number of volumes in the famous Landau-Lifshts course of theoretical physics mentioned above. For the memoirs of his wife about Landau’s life, see here (in Russian).

Courtesy to Tom Browder, I learned a very good news today: despite recent problems with UK and US budgets for high energy physics research, Japaneese government decided to go ahead with the construction of a “Super-B” factory at KEK and continue strong commitment to the International Linear Collider (ILC). According to Atsuto Suzuki, the KEK’s Director General (full report can be found here):

“The roadmap planning committee has proposed to start an early upgrade of KEKB to realize a unique research facility that will enable advanced studies on rare B decays, and to conduct a strong R&D program on superconducting cavities and related topics in order to contribute to the early realization of the ILC. I support the proposal by the committee.”

(a graphical representation of KEK’s radmap plan can be found here and a complete 5-year roundmap is here).

Actually, KEK officials metioned the possibility of building super-B factory at KEK, if construction of the ILC is delayed, for quite a long time — I personally heard it at the PANIC-2005 conference. It appears that they will be doing just that. It is intersting that papers such as this one, where some nice measurements (with super-B factory) of CP-violating parameters are proposed, might actually be relevant… of course at that time the US own roadmap involved construction of Fermilab’s B-factory BTeV as an intermediate-scale project before ILC is built. There is a good chance now that ILC will actually be built in Japan, leaving US on a side of the road of modern experimental high energy physics…

P.S. see the commentary of this in the Physics World here.

Just wanted to record a curious thing pointed out to me by my colleague David Cinabro: with BaBar going out of business in the beginning of March, CLEO will be the the last US heavy flavor experiment. Now, this is a 30-year-old CLEO experiment I’m talking about, a pioneer of heavy flavor experiments… who could have expected that!

The new semester has started. I will be on sabbatical spending (most of) it at the University of Michigan.  Incidentally, there is a workshop going on here, “LHC New Physics Signatures Workshop“, I’ll report about it later.

As a PI of a DOE grant, I received an e-mail today from Dennis Kovar, Acting Associate Director of the Office of Science for High Energy Physics at the US Department of Energy. This e-mail spelled out the consequences of the disasterous budget for High Energy Physics in 2008. Among other things it stated that operations of SLAC’s B-factory will be terminated in 2008:

“…The sudden and unanticipated work stoppage on NOvA and ILC unavoidably results in collateral damage to the rest of the HEP program. Significant cost savings would require laying off everyone working on those projects immediately. That is not achievable nor desirable. Thus the HEP office had to look for other large non-salary costs that could be reduced to meet the overall budget bottom-line. In the end this came down to a choice between running the Fermilab complex (Tevatron Collider and NuMI) or the SLAC B-Factory in FY2008 (or running both at ~1/2 or less of their scheduled operating weeks). Based on the guidance we have received from the scientific community (e.g.; HEPAP, P5, NAS, etc.), the operation of the Tevatron in FY 2008 has higher scientific priority. Thus the Tevatron and NuMI will operate on their planned schedule, and B-Factory operations will be terminated prematurely. This should not be considered a dismissal of the excellent and important science that the B-Factory has produced, but merely a statement of programmatic priorities in the face of difficult fiscal realities…”

Sounds like a rejection letter (”We had an excellent pool of applicants and although your credentials are excellent, we cannot offer you this position”), doesn’t it? But, as Jafar used to say, “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

You can also read or even listen to Persis Drell’s (SLAC’s Director) All hands presentation today, where this situation was discussed. She also puts a date of March 2008 for the termination of the operations of SLAC’s B-factory and announced that SLAC will lay off 125 of its personnel. Also, “The ILC program will be stopped for the rest of this year and faces a very uncertain future.” Yep, desperate times…

It is pleasing to know that there are some people who want to support physical sciences. For instance, one of the large astrophysical projects, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) has just received $30M, $20M from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10M from Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Here is their press release. LSST will probe the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, which are rather hot developments in astroparticle physics nowdays. Does it mean that Windows Vista is now the official OS of LSST?

So, what happened in 2007? According to popular and not-so-popular media, many things. Of course, it is customary for the popular press to form “the greatest discoveries of 2007″ in the form of “top-10 lists” (I wonder what criteria are used to order those lists - leave alone what puts those discoveries “on the list”) - maybe we should all blame David Letterman for that. Anyway, it is curious to check out those lists: from Science (which is understandably a bit heavy on the life sciences’ side), Nature (which is actually a collection of articles published there), PhysicsWorld (they break it by month: it is sad that “the best of 2007″ from the month of December is a category “US and UK physicists face funding cuts“), and from the APS service Physics News Update (which absolutely correctly puts MiniBoone’s results and top quark mass updates from FNAL among the top news). Even NPR’s Science Friday had a discussion of “most important events in 2007″ (BTW, that was one of the worst shows they had: they ended up with a nonsense discussion of how US science is funded as a “piramid scheme” and why it brings in foreign postdocs — apparently, only because they can be paid less than US-trained postdocs, total BS).

For the Russian-speaking audience I can add a couple of more: this one and this one. I must say that the last one is a bit strange, as it puts quite a bit of emphasis on the Fermilab’s discovery of cascade-b baryon (lots of PR from Fermilab, I guess…) and the infamous paper by Garret Lisi. But it also talks about funding crisis in the US high energy physics (this counters Peter Woit’s statement that it received so little attention in the press. It is interesting that Time Magazine puts return of excessive earmarks under Democratically-controlled Congress as one of the top-ten underreported stories of 2007 (yet another top-ten list, oh well…) — which might be one of the reasons that HEP got such a funding cut.

Since I mentioned the Russian-language press, here is another thing I read there over my holiday break: Russia is considering to bid for a site of the International Linear Collider built nearby Dubna in Moscow Region. If you can read Russian, here is an interview with Dr. Alexei Sisakian, Director General of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Reasearch (JINR) in Dubna. The interview was conducted by Rossijskaya Gazeta (The Russian Newspaper). Also, here is an interview with JINR’s Chief Engineer G. Shirkov about preliminary studies of building the ILC in Dubna, along with some possible site maps. Maybe its nothing. But maybe not — oil is expensive nowdays and Russia has lots of it…

To all readers of my blog: have a happy New Year! And while you are at it, check out new 2007-year review by JibJab.

I usually stay away from discussing politics in this blog. However, it appears that current political decisions are very unhealthy for US science. Case in point: current Omnibus bill that the Congress is about to send to the President.

Amazing thing happened: only several months ago, both US Congress and the President were in total accord with increased funding for US physical sciences. National initiatives such as America COMPETES Act were prime examples of the fact that US science and technology research and education are important for healthy development of the Nation. Fastforward to today: the bill that will soon be signed into law assumes ~10% cut to the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy. Funding for ITER is zeroed out - now, this is after all of the international-agreement-signing-at-highest-levels. Funding for ILC is given at the level of $15M (nice, huh? well, not so: those $15M are already spent, so no funding for ILC either), no funding for NOvA (a neutrino experiment at FNAL). University programs are largerly intact (if you can call a 2% reduction of our WSU base grant “intact”) — and this is the only good sign. We learned all of it during our recent DOE site visit (when a DOE oficial visits a University to check on the progress of a research program) two days ago.

Interesting: imagine you are building a house which is financed by a bank. You have a contract with that bank to deliver money for your construction in several installments. Now imagine that the bank decides not to give you one of your installments. What do you? You never work with that bank again, right? Hint? ITER? ILC?

See APS reaction to this here.

Yesterday CERN appointed new Director General. Rolf-Dieter Heuer will succeed Robert Aymar as CERN’s Director in January 2009. See CERN press-release here. Also, according to the current Director, the LHC is on-track for the promised  start of operations in the summer of 2008. Incidentally, my WSU experimental particle physics colleagues are at CERN this week, talking to CMS collaboration about future collaborative work. Our nuclear experimentalists are already part of the ALICE collaboration, so in the nearest future WSU would be one of the handful of US universities with participation in both high energy particle (CMS) and heavy ion (ALICE) physics activities at CERN. Very exciting!