Act to eradicate racism in academia and science! June 9, 2020
Posted by apetrov in Education, Near Physics, Particle Physics, Physics, Science.1 comment so far
A lot has been said about ethnic and racial disparities in academia. As my friend and former postdoc advisor Adam Falk eloquently pointed out “the sin of silence is worse than the sin of inadequacy.” I think the sin of inaction is probably even worse. So I would like to act. I would like to see my actions, however insignificant, have immediate positive impact and lead to actual improvement of the situation.
I donated my today’s salary to the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP). I hope that my small act will support scholarships for African American physics majors at Universities across the country. But one small act repeated many times can result in something big. Please join me and donate your today’s salary to NSBP!
Please go to https://www.nsbp.org/support-nsbp/nsbp-donations and support the organization that seeks to increase opportunities for African Americans in physics education and research. I would be very grateful if you then tell me about it in the comments!
Join the Snowmass Frontier on Rare Processes and Precision Measurements! May 31, 2020
Posted by apetrov in Particle Physics, Physics, Science.add a comment
As you might know, I was appointed as one of the leaders (aka conveners) of the 2021 Snowmass Frontier for Rare Processes and Precision Measurements. Snowmass is a code word for a community exercise to plan the future of the US High Energy Physics. Well, at least the near future: for the next 10 years. We’ll try to see what experiments, accelerators, or theoretical ideas are worth pursuing in the next decade.
But we can not do it without the physics community. So, please, join us! Please see the message below.
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We’d like to invite the physics community to participate in the activities of 2021 Snowmass Frontier for Rare Processes and Precision Measurements (FRPPM). We would also like to extend our welcome to the international Particle Physics community to take part in the development of the roadmap for the future of the US efforts in the studies of rare processes and precision measurements at the currently running and future experimental facilities as well as development of relevant theoretical tools.
FRPPM activities are linked on the wiki page (https://snowmass21.org/rare/start). The organization of the Frontier for Rare Processes and Precision Measurements consists of six Topical Groups, each of which is led by two conveners:
- RF1: Weak decays of b and c quarks
- RF2: Weak decays of strange and light quarks
- RF3: Fundamental Physics in Small Experiments
- RF4: Baryon and Lepton Number Violating Processes
- RF5: Charged Lepton Flavor Violation (electrons, muons and taus)
- RF6: Dark Sector Studies at Low Energy
We would like to invite submissions of Letters of Interest (LOIs) relevant to the future experimental and theoretical activities of the Frontier for Rare Processes and Precision Measurements.
Each FRPPM Topical Group is organizing its own schedule and full information will soon be available on their wiki pages. Please subscribe to their mailing lists and SLACK channels to keep up to date with news, meeting arrangements, and physics discussions. The subscription information is available on our wiki page and also given below.
The first general kick-off Zoom Meeting of the Frontier for Rare Processes and Precision Measurements will take place in July, we will announce the exact dates shortly. Please remember that all Frontiers will come together for the first general Snowmass 2021 community meeting to be held on Nov. 4-6 at Fermilab. We are also planning an (in-person) FRPPM Meeting in March 2021. If you are interested in hosting this meeting, please contact us with information on venue capacity, funding, organizing team, and other available resources.
We are looking forward to working with you!
Marina Artuso, Bob Bernstein, Alexey Petrov
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There are several ways to get in touch with us:Meetings:
- Meetings are via Indico. Go to this Indico link for our Frontier to find agendas.
- All your slides should be uploaded first in docdb with the following keywords: list them here
- Your docdb link for this Frontier is https://projects-docdb.fnal.gov/cgi-bin/ListBy?topicid=648
- Then provide the direct link on Indico to the slides which reside on docdb
Mailing lists and SLACK channels:
- Join the Rare and Precision Frontier email list: SNOWMASS-RP-FRONTIER@fnal.gov(instructions below)
- RP conveners and Topical Group convenors: SNOWMASS-RPF-TOPICAL-GP-CONVENERS@fnal.gov
- Topical Group e-mail lists, please subscribe to the one or more of your choice (see instructions below):
- SNOWMASS-RPF-01-HEAVY-QUARKS@FNAL.GOV
- SNOWMASS-RPF-02-LIGHT-QUARKS@FNAL.GOV
- SNOWMASS-RPF-03-FUNDAM-SMALL@FNAL.GOV
- SNOWMASS-RPF-04-BLNV@FNAL.GOV
- SNOWMASS-RPF-05-CLFV@FNAL.GOV
- SNOWMASS-RPF-06-DARK-SECTOR@FNAL.GOV
- For joining the Snowmass mailing lists
- Send an e-mail message to listserv[at]fnal.gov
- Leave the subject line blank
- Type “SUBSCRIBE SNOWMASS FIRSTNAME LASTNAME” (without the quotation marks) in the body of your message. You’ll get a Slack invitation when that subscription is approved.
SLACK channels
- Slack channels for topics common to the entire Rare & Precision Frontier:rare_precision_and_darkprod_frontier_topics , and rare_precision_frontier_meetings
- Slack channels for topics specifics to the individual RPF Topic Groups:
- rpf-01-heavy-quarks
- rpf-02-light-quarks
- rpf-03-fundamental-small
- rpf-04-blnv
- rpf-05-clfv
- rpf-06-dark-sector
- For joining the R&P SLACK channel
- Go to https://snowmass2021.slack.com/ If your institution’s domain is on the list, join in.
- If your institution is not on the list, send an email to any of the Frontier’s conveners to get an invitation.
CP-violation in charm observed at CERN March 21, 2019
Posted by apetrov in Near Physics, Particle Physics, Physics, Science.add a comment
There is a big news that came from CERN today. It was announced at a conference called Recontres de Moriond, one of the major yearly conferences in the field of particle physics. One of the CERN’s experiments, LHCb, reported an observation — yes, observation, not an evidence for, but an observation, of CP-violation in charmed system. Why is it big news and why should you care?
You should care about this announcement because it has something to do with how our Universe looks like. As you look around, you might notice an interesting fact: everything is made of matter. So what about it? Well, one thing is missing from our everyday life: antimatter.
As it turns out, physicists believe that the amount of matter and antimatter was the same after the Universe was created. So, the $1,110,000 question is: what happened to antimatter? According to Sakharov’s criteria for baryonogenesis (a process of creating more baryons, like protons and neutrons, than anti-baryons), one of the conditions for our Universe to be the way it is would be to have matter particles interact slightly differently from the corresponding antimatter particles. In particle physics this condition is called CP-violation. It has been observed in beauty and strange quarks, but never in charm quarks. As charm quarks are fundamentally different from both beauty and strange ones (electrical charge, mass, ways they interact, etc.), physicists hoped that New Physics, something that we have not yet seen or predicted, might be lurking nearby and can be revealed in charm decays. That is why so much attention has been paid to searches for CP-violation in charm.
Now there are indications that the search is finally over: LHCb announced that they observed CP-violation in charm. Here is their announcement (look for a news item from 21 March 2019). A technical paper can be found here, discussing how LHCb extracted CP-violating observables from time-dependent analysis of D -> KK and D-> pipi decays.
The result is generally consistent with the Standard Model expectations. However, there are theory papers (like this one) that predict the Standard Model result to be about seven times smaller with rather small uncertainty. There are three possible interesting outcomes:
- Experimental result is correct but the theoretical prediction mentioned above is not. Well, theoretical calculations in charm physics are hard and often unreliable, so that theory paper underestimated the result and its uncertainties.
- Experimental result is incorrect but the theoretical prediction mentioned above is correct. Maybe LHCb underestimated their uncertainties?
- Experimental result is correct AND the theoretical prediction mentioned above is correct. This is the most interesting outcome: it implies that we see effects of New Physics.
What will it be? Time will show.
David vs. Goliath: What a tiny electron can tell us about the structure of the universe December 22, 2018
Posted by apetrov in Blogroll, Particle Physics, Physics, Science, Uncategorized.add a comment
Roman Sigaev/ Shutterstock.com
Alexey Petrov, Wayne State University
What is the shape of an electron? If you recall pictures from your high school science books, the answer seems quite clear: an electron is a small ball of negative charge that is smaller than an atom. This, however, is quite far from the truth.
Vector FX / Shutterstock.com
The electron is commonly known as one of the main components of atoms making up the world around us. It is the electrons surrounding the nucleus of every atom that determine how chemical reactions proceed. Their uses in industry are abundant: from electronics and welding to imaging and advanced particle accelerators. Recently, however, a physics experiment called Advanced Cold Molecule Electron EDM (ACME) put an electron on the center stage of scientific inquiry. The question that the ACME collaboration tried to address was deceptively simple: What is the shape of an electron?
Classical and quantum shapes?
As far as physicists currently know, electrons have no internal structure – and thus no shape in the classical meaning of this word. In the modern language of particle physics, which tackles the behavior of objects smaller than an atomic nucleus, the fundamental blocks of matter are continuous fluid-like substances known as “quantum fields” that permeate the whole space around us. In this language, an electron is perceived as a quantum, or a particle, of the “electron field.” Knowing this, does it even make sense to talk about an electron’s shape if we cannot see it directly in a microscope – or any other optical device for that matter?
To answer this question we must adapt our definition of shape so it can be used at incredibly small distances, or in other words, in the realm of quantum physics. Seeing different shapes in our macroscopic world really means detecting, with our eyes, the rays of light bouncing off different objects around us.
Simply put, we define shapes by seeing how objects react when we shine light onto them. While this might be a weird way to think about the shapes, it becomes very useful in the subatomic world of quantum particles. It gives us a way to define an electron’s properties such that they mimic how we describe shapes in the classical world.
What replaces the concept of shape in the micro world? Since light is nothing but a combination of oscillating electric and magnetic fields, it would be useful to define quantum properties of an electron that carry information about how it responds to applied electric and magnetic fields. Let’s do that.
Harvard Department of Physics, CC BY-NC-SA
Electrons in electric and magnetic fields
As an example, consider the simplest property of an electron: its electric charge. It describes the force – and ultimately, the acceleration the electron would experience – if placed in some external electric field. A similar reaction would be expected from a negatively charged marble – hence the “charged ball” analogy of an electron that is in elementary physics books. This property of an electron – its charge – survives in the quantum world.
Likewise, another “surviving” property of an electron is called the magnetic dipole moment. It tells us how an electron would react to a magnetic field. In this respect, an electron behaves just like a tiny bar magnet, trying to orient itself along the direction of the magnetic field. While it is important to remember not to take those analogies too far, they do help us see why physicists are interested in measuring those quantum properties as accurately as possible.
What quantum property describes the electron’s shape? There are, in fact, several of them. The simplest – and the most useful for physicists – is the one called the electric dipole moment, or EDM.
In classical physics, EDM arises when there is a spatial separation of charges. An electrically charged sphere, which has no separation of charges, has an EDM of zero. But imagine a dumbbell whose weights are oppositely charged, with one side positive and the other negative. In the macroscopic world, this dumbbell would have a non-zero electric dipole moment. If the shape of an object reflects the distribution of its electric charge, it would also imply that the object’s shape would have to be different from spherical. Thus, naively, the EDM would quantify the “dumbbellness” of a macroscopic object.
Electric dipole moment in the quantum world
The story of EDM, however, is very different in the quantum world. There the vacuum around an electron is not empty and still. Rather it is populated by various subatomic particles zapping into virtual existence for short periods of time.
Designua/Shutterstock.com
These virtual particles form a “cloud” around an electron. If we shine light onto the electron, some of the light could bounce off the virtual particles in the cloud instead of the electron itself.
This would change the numerical values of the electron’s charge and magnetic and electric dipole moments. Performing very accurate measurements of those quantum properties would tell us how these elusive virtual particles behave when they interact with the electron and if they alter the electron’s EDM.
Most intriguing, among those virtual particles there could be new, unknown species of particles that we have not yet encountered. To see their effect on the electron’s electric dipole moment, we need to compare the result of the measurement to theoretical predictions of the size of the EDM calculated in the currently accepted theory of the Universe, the Standard Model.
So far, the Standard Model accurately described all laboratory measurements that have ever been performed. Yet, it is unable to address many of the most fundamental questions, such as why matter dominates over antimatter throughout the universe. The Standard Model makes a prediction for the electron’s EDM too: it requires it to be so small that ACME would have had no chance of measuring it. But what would have happened if ACME actually detected a non-zero value for the electric dipole moment of the electron?
AP Photo/KEYSTONE/Martial Trezzini
Patching the holes in the Standard Model
Theoretical models have been proposed that fix shortcomings of the Standard Model, predicting the existence of new heavy particles. These models may fill in the gaps in our understanding of the universe. To verify such models we need to prove the existence of those new heavy particles. This could be done through large experiments, such as those at the international Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by directly producing new particles in high-energy collisions.
Alternatively, we could see how those new particles alter the charge distribution in the “cloud” and their effect on electron’s EDM. Thus, unambiguous observation of electron’s dipole moment in ACME experiment would prove that new particles are in fact present. That was the goal of the ACME experiment.
This is the reason why a recent article in Nature about the electron caught my attention. Theorists like myself use the results of the measurements of electron’s EDM – along with other measurements of properties of other elementary particles – to help to identify the new particles and make predictions of how they can be better studied. This is done to clarify the role of such particles in our current understanding of the universe.
What should be done to measure the electric dipole moment? We need to find a source of very strong electric field to test an electron’s reaction. One possible source of such fields can be found inside molecules such as thorium monoxide. This is the molecule that ACME used in their experiment. Shining carefully tuned lasers at these molecules, a reading of an electron’s electric dipole moment could be obtained, provided it is not too small.
However, as it turned out, it is. Physicists of the ACME collaboration did not observe the electric dipole moment of an electron – which suggests that its value is too small for their experimental apparatus to detect. This fact has important implications for our understanding of what we could expect from the Large Hadron Collider experiments in the future.
Interestingly, the fact that the ACME collaboration did not observe an EDM actually rules out the existence of heavy new particles that could have been easiest to detect at the LHC. This is a remarkable result for a tabletop-sized experiment that affects both how we would plan direct searches for new particles at the giant Large Hadron Collider, and how we construct theories that describe nature. It is quite amazing that studying something as small as an electron could tell us a lot about the universe.
Alexey Petrov, Professor of Physics, Wayne State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
And the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to… October 8, 2013
Posted by apetrov in Particle Physics, Physics, Science, Uncategorized.1 comment so far
Today the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to François Englert (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium) and Peter W. Higgs (University of Edinburgh, UK). The official citation is “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.” What did they do almost 50 years ago that warranted their Nobel Prize today? Let’s see (for the simple analogy see my previous post from yesterday).
The overriding principle of building a theory of elementary particle interactions is symmetry. A theory must be invariant under a set of space-time symmetries (such as rotations, boosts), as well as under a set of “internal” symmetries, the ones that are specified by the model builder. This set of symmetries restrict how particles interact and also puts constraints on the properties of those particles. In particular, the symmetries of the Standard Model of particle physics require that W and Z bosons (particles that mediate weak interactions) must be massless. Since we know they must be massive, a new mechanism that generates those masses (i.e. breaks the symmetry) must be put in place. Note that a theory with massive W’s and Z that are “put in theory by hand” is not consistent (renormalizable).
The appropriate mechanism was known in the beginning of the 1960’s. It goes under the name of spontaneous symmetry breaking. In one variant it involves a spin-zero field whose self-interactions are governed by a “Mexican hat”-shaped potential
It is postulated that the theory ends up in vacuum state that “breaks” the original symmetries of the model (like the valley in the picture above). One problem with this idea was that a theorem by G. Goldstone required a presence of a massless spin-zero particle, which was not experimentally observed. It was Robert Brout, François Englert, Peter Higgs, and somewhat later (but independently), by Gerry Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, Tom Kibble who showed a loophole in a version of Goldstone theorem when it is applied to relativistic gauge theories. In the proposed mechanism massless spin-zero particle does not show up, but gets “eaten” by the massless vector bosons giving them a mass. Precisely as needed for the electroweak bosons W and Z to get their masses! A massive particle, the Higgs boson, is a consequence of this (BEH or Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble) mechanism and represents excitation of the Higgs field about its new vacuum state.
It took about 50 years to experimentally confirm the idea by finding the Higgs boson! Tracking the historic timeline, the first paper by Englert and Brout, was sent to Physical Review Letter on 26 June 1964 and published in the issue dated 31 August 1964. Higgs’ paper, received by Physical Review Letters on 31 August 1964 (on the same day Englert and Brout’s paper was published) and published in the issue dated 19 October 1964. What is interesting is that the original version of the paper by Higgs, submitted to the journal Physics Letters, was rejected (on the grounds that it did not warrant rapid publication). Higgs revised the paper and resubmitted it to Physical Review Letters, where it was published after another revision in which he actually pointed out the possibility of the spin-zero particle — the one that now carries his name. CERN’s announcement of Higgs boson discovery came 4 July 2012.
Is this the last Nobel Prize for particle physics? I think not. There are still many unanswered questions — and the answers would warrant Nobel Prizes. Theory of strong interactions (which ARE responsible for masses of all luminous matter in the Universe) is not yet solved analytically, the nature of dark matter is not known, the picture of how the Universe came to have baryon asymmetry is not cleared. Is there new physics beyond what we already know? And if yes, what is it? These are very interesting questions that need answers.
Higgs mechanism for electrical engineers October 7, 2013
Posted by apetrov in Particle Physics, Physics, Science, Uncategorized.Tags: higgs boson
2 comments
Since the Higgs boson’s discovery a little over a year ago at CERN I have been getting a lot of questions from my friends to explain to them “what this Higgs thing does.” So I often tried to use the crowd analogy that is ascribed to Prof. David Miller, to describe the Higgs (or Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble) mechanism. Interestingly enough, it did not work well for most of my old school friends, majority of whom happen to pursue careers in engineering. So I thought that perhaps another analogy would be more appropriate. Here it is, please let me know what you think!
Imagine Higgs field as represented by some quantity of slightly magnetized iron filings, i.e. small pieces of iron that look like powder, spread over a table or other surface to represent Higgs field that permeates the Universe. Iron filings are common not only as dirt in metal shops, they are often used in school experiments and other science demonstrations to visualize the magnetic field. It is important for them to be slightly magnetized, as this represents self-interaction of the Higgs field. Here they are pictured in a somewhat cartoonish way:
How can Higgs field generate mass? Moreover, how can one field generate different masses for different types of particles? Let us first make an analogue of fermion mass generation. If we take a small magnet and put it in the filings, the magnet would pick up a bunch of filings, right? How much would it pick up? It depends on the “strength” of that magnet. It could be a little:
…or it could be a lot, depending on what kind of magnet we use — or how strong it is:
If we neglect the masses of our magnets, as we assumed they are small, the mass of the picked up mess with the magnets inside is totally determined by the mass of the picked filings, which in turn is determined by the interaction strength between the magnets and the filings. This is precisely how fermion mass generation works in the Standard Model!
In the Standard Model the massless fermions are coupled to the Higgs field via so-called Yukawa interactions, whose strength is parametrized by a number, the Yukawa coupling constant. For different fermion types (or flavors) the couplings would be numerically different, ranging from one to one part in a million. As a result of interaction with the Higgs field (NOT the boson!) in the form of its vacuum expectation value, all fermions acquire masses (ok, maybe not all — neutrinos could be different). And those masses would depend on the strength of the interaction of fermions with Higgs field, just like in our example with magnets and iron filings!
Now imagine that we simply kicked the table! No magnets. The filings would clamp together to form lumps of filings. Each lump would have a mass, which would only depend on how strong the filings attract to each other (remember that they are slightly magnetized?). If we don’t know how strong they are magnetized, we cannot tell how massive each lamp will be, so we would have to measure their masses.
This gives a good analogy of the fact that Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field (the fact that was pointed out by Higgs), and why we cannot predict its mass from the first principles, but need a direct observation at the LHC!
Notice that this picture (so far) does not provide direct analogy to how gauge bosons (W’s and Z bosons) receive their masses. W’s and Z are also initially massless because of the gauge (internal) symmetries required by the construction of the Standard Model. We did know their mass from earlier CERN and SLAC experiments — and even prior to those, we knew that W’s were massive from the fact that weak interactions are of the finite range.
To extend our analogy, let’s clean up the mess — literally! Let’s throw a bucket of water over the table covered with those iron filings and see what happens. Streams of water would pick up iron filings and flow from the table. Assuming that that water’s mass is negligible, the total mass of those water streams (aka dirty water) would be completely determined by the mass of picked iron filings, just like masses of W’s and Z are determined by the Higgs field.
This explanation seemed to work better for my engineering friends! What do you think?
LHCb reports observation of CP-violation in charm. Welcome New Physics? Or not? November 14, 2011
Posted by apetrov in Particle Physics, Physics, Science.4 comments
One of CERN collaborations, the LHCb, has reported observation of direct CP-violation in the decays of charmed mesons at the Hadronic Collider Physics Symposium 2011 (HCP 2011) in Paris today. This is a fantastic news! While I am not at HCP 2011, kind folks at LHCb let me know about this fantastic measurement — since charm physics is my specialty.
So, what are we talking about here?
First things first. CP (or Charge Parity) is a set of (discrete) transformations performed on a theory’s Lagrangian — a function that describes what particles we have in a theory and how they interact. If your Lagrangian is symmetric under this transformation, then particles and antiparticles — matter and antimatter — have the same properties. If not — interactions of matter particles are different from interactions of antimatter particles. This possible difference is a crucial property of a theory because, according to three Sakharov criteria, the Universe could evolve in what we see around us only if matter and antimatter have different interaction properties. Otherwise, at best, we’d have big chanks of antimatter floating around — or at worst would not not exist at all.
This is why many huge experiments built to study CP violation. Big national labs’ flagship experiments were designed to search and study CP-violation (BaBar at SLAC, Belle at KEK, LHCb at CERN), with hopes to see glimpses of New Physics that could explain matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe. This new result from LHCb can in principle provide one.
So, what did LHCb see? The reported analysis looks at the difference of a difference — i.e. a difference of CP-violating asymmetries in kaons and pions. The CP-violating asymmetry is defined as the difference between decay widths (roughly speaking, decay probabilities) of a neutral D-meson to decay into a final state, say positive K-meson and a negative K-meson and the same quantity for the D-anti-particle to decay to the same final state. This quantity is also defined for the final state of two pions — and it is CP-violating!
The structure of this CP-violating asymmetry, aCP, is not that simple. Because D0 is a neutral particle it can, in principle, mix with its antiparticle (see here) — and this antiparticle can also decay into the same final state! This process can be also CP-violating (this type of CP-violation is called indirect CP-violation). So the result would depend on both types of CP-violation!
Moreover, experimentally, the asymmetries like this are not easy to measure — there are experimental systematics associated with D-production asymmetries, difference of interactions of positive and negative kaons with matter, etc. For this reason, experimentalists at LHCb decided to report the difference of CP-violating asymmetries, in which many of those effects, like productions asymmetries, would cancel. So, here is the result:
ΔaCP = -0.82 ± 0.21 (stat) ±0.11 (syst) %
In other words, this quantity is 3.5 sigmas away from being zero. The first question that one should ask is whether this quantity is consistent with previous measurements. The biggest question, however, is whether this quantity is consistent with Standard Model expectations.
There is a bunch of previous measurements available for aCP (KK) and aCP (ππ) separately. The thing is that
aCP (KK) = – aCP (ππ)
or approximately so. So by subtracting those quantities we not only subtract the experimental uncertainties, but also enhance the signal! However, looking at the table on page 6 of the talk, one can immediately realize that this measurement is at least consistent with the previous ones.
Is it a sign of something beyond the Standard Model? This one is hard to answer. I usually put an upper bound on the SM value (that is, absolute value) of asymmetries like aCP (KK) at 0.1% — which would make ΔaCP to be about 0.2%. Is it consistent with LHCb findings? Maybe. The size of this asymmetry is notoriously difficult to estimate due to hadronic effects. Maybe it is a sign of New Physics — this could be an exciting conclusion, as we have never seen CP-violation in up-quark sector.
It is interesting that the first “big” result from LHC comes in the realm of charm physics, not Higgs searches. Moreover, all “big” results in the last decade were from the experiments searching for New Physics indirectly, in the “intensity frontier” (this is lingo of US Department of Energy) — with most of them coming from charm physics. Maybe at the very least LHC-b should be renamed as LHC-c?
We have a job… or two! October 21, 2011
Posted by apetrov in Particle Physics, Physics, Science.3 comments
Depending on how the budget for the new year looks like, we (the high energy particle theory group at WSU) will have two new postdoc positions. Please apply, if you are interested! Here is the ad.
—————————————————————————-
The high energy theory group at Wayne State University ( http://www.physics.wayne.edu/heptheory ) anticipates making TWO postdoctoral research appointments to start September 1, 2012, subject to budgetary approval. The initial appointments will be for one year, and may be extended for one or more years depending on the performance and availability of funding.
The group consists of faculty Gil Paz and Alexy A. Petrov, as well as a postdoc and several students. Research interests of the group include particle phenomenology, physics beyond the Standard Model, effective field theori es, heavy quark physics, CP violation, Dark Matter phenomenology and particle astrophysics. The group has close ties to the nuclear theory group of Sean Gavin and Abhijit Majumder. The WSU Department of Physics and Astronomy offers a unique opportunity of close interaction with experimental high energy particle and nuclear physics groups.
Applications including CV, a list of publications, a brief statement of research interests and three letters of recommendation should be submitted to Academic Jobs Online at http://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/1128
or by mail to
Prof. Gil Paz
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Wayne State University
Detroit, Michigan, 48201
or
Prof. Alexey A. Petrov
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Wayne State University
Detroit, Michigan, 48201
or electronically to gilpaz@wayne.edu or apetrov@wayne.edu. The deadline for application is January 15, 2012. Later applications will be considered until the positions are filled. Informal inquiries are welcomed.
Wayne State University is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer. Women and members of minority groups are encouraged to apply.
Why do physicists go to Aspen? September 1, 2011
Posted by apetrov in Near Physics, Particle Physics, Physics, Science.add a comment
While the most obvious answer to this question is “to ski”, it is, nonetheless, not the correct one. Yes, skiing is great here in the winter (and hiking is great in the summer), but most of the time physicists come here to work. The reason is Aspen Center for Physics. I write “here” because I’m currently participating in one of the programs organized by the Center (the program is called “Flavor Origins” — it brought together theorists working on the problems of neutrinos, heavy and light quarks, CP-violation, etc.). The Center, which exists here since 1961, organizes workshops and conferences. But the main reason that theorists (and occasional experimentalists) come here is to talk to other theorists. In short, it is as if you are visiting a huge theory group — you can work individually or with your c
olleagues, but you can always knock on an office door and bounce your ideas off someone else visiting the Center, etc. It is great to have such a concentration of theorists of different trades. And it leads to breakthroughs and simply good papers. As it is said on the Center’s website:
“Many seminal papers have been written in Aspen, which has grown to be the largest center for theoretical physics in the world during its summer sessions. Among many other subjects, the theories of superstrings, chaos, evolution of stars and galaxies, and high temperature superconductivity have all made large strides in recent Aspen seasons.”
There is almost always someone with an expertise in a subject that you have a question about. And that makes this Center great. And, of course, hiking and skiing is also good. The only “downside” (note the quotes) is that you can meet a real bear (even at the Center) or other wildlife. Today a snake came to check out a lecture on conformal field theories…
P.S. Also check out my blog on Quantum Diaries…
Congratulations Dr. Yeghiyan! July 26, 2011
Posted by apetrov in Near Physics, Particle Physics, Physics, Science, Uncategorized.1 comment so far
Today my third graduate student at WSU, Gagik Yeghiyan, defended his Ph.D. thesis. Congratulations Dr. Yeghiyan! Good luck to you in your new life as an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University!
Symmetry factor 
