Blog of the Isotopes

The organisers of the meeting in Rome last week just sent through the group photos we had taken, so I thought I'd share them here for posterity. The first, from Thursday 16th April, shows those present at the Nuclear Science Symposium, organised as a satellite meeting to the IUPAP WG9/C12 AGM (don't ask me what all that means).  Those scheduled to attend the Friday meeting (including me), were in…

I missed posting about this last month, but I have been reminded about the recent death of Günther Rosner as part of the chair's presentation in the NuPECC committee meeting I am attending today. Günther was a professor in the UK (at Glasgow) when I started working at Surrey back in 2000, and I remember coming across him at various meetings over the years he was in the UK.  I never knew him perso…

I'm at a meeting at the CREF - Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi - in Rome.  The building is inside a government compound shared with the Italian Interior Ministry, so is slightly bureaucratic to get into, but the centre is here as it is the building where Enrico Fermi worked.  There is a museum here which I hope to go to later, but as proof that this place has some nuclear physics history, here's a p…

My University produced a press release yesterday highlighting three of my colleagues and their industry in discovering nuclear isomers. Isomers (for nuclear physicists) are long-lived excited states of nuclei that decay with different properties (such as half lives) to the ground states or other excited states in the same nucleus. The industriousness of my colleagues comes from a league table of …

I got forwarded a press release from the GSI / FAIR facility in Germany describing a "major fire" which happened there yesterday. The fire happened in the "GSI" part - the longstanding facility which has been conducting research in nuclear physics for many years (the SI in GSI is Schwerion = heavy ion). FAIR is the linked site where they are building a new facility, which is apparently unaffected…

The last week has seen the outcome of the recent UK government spending review trickle down through all the levels of the science funding structure. From the STFC council came a headline announcement for many doing "curiosity-driven" research in Nuclear Physics, Particle Physics, and Astronomy: That there will be a ~30% reduction in the budget for such activities, at least in the grant lines that…

I've just returned from the British Film Institute where I went with my brother to watch Eric Rohmer's 1969 film My Night at Maud's. It's a supremely French film of love, relationships, philosophy and religion. The protagonist has, among other habits, an interest in mathematics. Early on there was a quick glimpse of a textbook he was looking at. I tried to read the subfield of mathematics as we g…

It's my first day back in the office since the Christmas / New Year break and I am a combination of raring to go and slightly filled with trepidation about just how busy the upcoming couple of months are going to be. For one thing, it is the time of the eyar when I have the most intensive teaching activity, giving two courses in semester 2 on quantum computing. It's fun, but busy, and it doesn't …

All about nuclear physics - research, news and comment. The author is Prof Paul Stevenson - a researcher in nuclear physics in the UK. Sometimes the posts are a little tangential to nuclear physics.

I have not posted at all this month. I'm not quite sure why I have not been moved to do so, but it's that gloomy time of year as the clocks change, and it's the busy time of year when children's activities seem to ramp up towards Christmas. As usual, some of my kids are involved in the pantomime on ice at the local ice rink, and this year I have signed up as a volunteer chaperone, so I spent some…

With the start of October the new academic year has started, and it brings with it the start of my 26th year at the University of Surrey. I started here 25 years ago. In some ways it doesn't feel like very long, but if I look back to those days when I started, they seem sufficiently shrouded in the veils of memory to count as a long time ago. I suppose these days it is getting increasingly unusua…

I was on 6music radio earlier today on their "The Chain" segment, in which listeners pick a song which links to the previous one on The Chain. It started quite a while ago and a website shows the complete history of choices. The previous song was Running in the Family by Level 42, and I chose Sade's Your Love is King. Mark King is the frontman of Level 42 and so King makes the link between the tw…

For many of my colleagues in low-energy nuclear physics, Physical Review C is the default journal for most of their research. The default publishing model of Physical Review C is via subscription in which the author gives the article to the journal for free, handing over copyright, with the journal then charging people to read. They also do allow authors to pay an "article processing charge" whic…

I am at day 5 of 5 at the European Nuclear Physics Conference in Caen, France. It's the first time I've been at one of the conferences in this series, and I've enjoyed the broad range of talks, attending not only the sessions very close to my own activity, but also those on applications and distant parts of the field. Caen seems like a nice enough place, though I can't say I have explored it very…

It's that time of year when my children enter a new school year. In the case of one of them, it's a new school, too, as she enters year 7 and so secondary school. The school uses an app called Bromcom, named after the genre of male romantic comedy films for reasons that escape me. In the homework section of the app, parents and children can keep an eye on any homework assignments set. Since we're…

It is getting near the end of the summer holidays. Literally at the end for school kids with mine going back today and tomorrow, while university undergraduates have a couple more weeks to go before they are back in classes. There is no automatic summer holiday for university-based academics in the UK, though summer is, for many of us, the easiest time to take the bulk of our annual leave allowan…

I am on holiday for the week in Oberstdorf, Germany. It's a mountain resort in the very far south of the country and we are here because there is a short track speed skating summer camp which one of my kids is attending. I am here with him, and two of my other children, trying to keep everyone entertained while doing all the training activities for my 8yo. It's very pretty here. The town is in a …

A year and a bit ago I had to move office at the University, after about 20 years in my previous office. I moved from 12BB03 to 02AA04 – so up a level to the 4th floor, and across buildings from BB to AA. My new office was pretty hard to work in with a constant drone coming from the plant room of Senate House outside it. I am unable to filter out such noises and so I spent a year finding it prett…

Since working in the field of quantum computing, I've had to get used to seeing the word unitary used as a noun to mean a unitary object such as an operator or matrix. Such a usage has yet to make it into any English dictionary that I've checked - not OED, Chambers, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster. Of those, only OED do list one kind of nounal usage, with the definite article, meaning "that which is u…

Since I seem to be using this blog to document general cultural activity that I engage in, let me record my trip last night to the Scala near King's Cross in London to see Horsegirl play. At the start of the year I had not heard of Horsegirl, but I came across an advert on social media for their new album and thought they sounded like they'd be up my street. Listening to the album confirmed that,…