IoP conference at Liverpool

 It's my first day back at work since being at the IoP HEPP/AP/NP (that's High Energy & Particle Physics / Astroparticle Physics / Nuclear Physics) combined conference.  I was there, talking in the plenary session about quantum computing for nuclear structure, and a lot of Surrey postdocs and students also gave talks and posters.  

Here is a selection of photos from the conference:

My student Sam Sullivan presenting his poster

My student Grant Close presenting his poster

Me giving my talk

My postdoc Bharti giving her talk

My student Isaac giving his talk

The sky looked pretty as I walked to the conference dinner

Conference dinner!

As well as these photos, I had to take one video, as my postdoc Abhishek is a master of making animations, and so a static photo would not have done is presentation justice:

New isotopes project website

For some years Michael Thoennessen at Michigan State University has developed and curated a database of isotope discovery - i.e. when, where, how and by whom was each isotope of each element discovered.   He has just emailed out about a revamp of the website with new design and new features. The site is here. 

 One of the new features (at least, I think this is new) is that you can search discoveries on various fields.  I tried searching for my name ("P. D. Stevenson") and lo and behold you can find the four isotopes that I "helped" discover.  By helped, I mean I was coauthor on the discovery paper, as I contributed to the theoretical analysis.  I didn't set foot in the lab where the experiment actually took place.

Here is the copy-and-paste of the results table:

Search results:found 4 isotopes

In the table below click on an isotope symbol for more information about its discovery. When quoting the abstracts please cite the abstract as: “FRIB Nuclear Data Group, Discovery of Nuclides Project, https://doi.org/10.11578/frib/2279152”.
Newly discovered isotopes will be included after the references are entered in the NSR database.

Isotope	First Author	Lab	Country	Year	Reference
155Ta	R. D. Page	Jyväskylä	Finland	2007	2007PA27
157W	L. Bianco	Jyväskylä	Finland	2010	2010BI03
159Re	D. T. Joss	Jyväskylä	Finland	2006	2006JO10
161Os	L. Bianco	Jyväskylä	Finland	2010	2010BI03

 

Bye bye 12BB03

 Last week I was on a work trip to the USA and on my first day there I got an email from my employer telling me that I have to move offices and I should come and get the key of my newly assigned office.  It came a bit out of the blue and now that I'm back I find some of my colleagues have already moved and I have started the process of clearing out my office.  I'm using the opportunity to get rid of some of the stuff I have accumulated over the 20 years or so I have been in here.  It's a long time in anyone's life, and longer really than almost any other constant in my life - from children to partners to where I live, I'm in a different situation than I was 20 years ago.  In some sense I'm saying goodbye to the longest-lived part of my life that I saw on a near-daily basis.  On the other hand, it's only a room, and my employers can reasonably ask me to move to another room. 

Here are some of the things I have come across and thrown away:

My stash of used train tickets that I kept for no good reason.
Many memories (good and bad) evoked from looking at the journeys.

Once upon a time I used paper diaries from the Institute of Physics
to plan my (work)life.  Here is the week in 2003 where there was going to
be a retirement dinner for Prof Ron Johnson.  I suppose it was moved(?) so
I crossed it out.

I have a bunch of Open University material donated
to me by someone I used to tutor.  After he got his degree
he didn't want to keep the material and I have kept it all in a box
ever since.

RIP Charlotte Froese Fischer 1929–2024

 If Wikipedia is to be believed, then Charlotte Froese Fischer has died, aged 94.  I say "if it is to be believed" because I haven't seen any independent story about it, and the wikipedia author has no profile.  Still, it would be an odd thing to do, to update her page just to change some instances of "is" to "was" and include a year of death.

Like so many of this nearly-gone generation, Froese left eastern Europe due to political upheaval.  Born in what is now Ukraine, in the Donetsk region, her family left the Soviet Union on the last train allowed to depart for Germany in 1929 from where, rather fortunately given what was to come, they were soon granted a visa to go and settle in Canada.  Her scientific career started with her studies at the University of British Columbia where she was interested in mathematics and chemsitry.  She got interested in very early computers and got a PhD position with Douglas Hartree in Cambridge.  As computers got more advanced and portable programming languages, such as Fortran, appeared, she became a leader in computational chemistry, making a famous prediction, which was experimentally confirmed, that calcium can exist as a negative ion.  Normally calcium forms a positive ion by losing one or two electrons, since the outermost two electrons are rather weakly bound.  It turns out that subtleties of the interactions with an extra electron that gets added can lead to a surprisingly stable configuration.  

I don't think I ever met her, but I remember her being mentioned as a kind of guru when I worked at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee in the late 90s and she was at nearby (on an American scale) Vanderbilt University.  I was working with a group who were also very computationally-minded and I think there was some overlap or discussions with her that I was never part of. 

She wrote a nice autobiographical article in the journal Molecular Physics, published in 2000, which can be found online on her personal website at Vanderbilt.

The history of exchange forces

 I almost missed this paper submitted to to the history and philosophy section of arXiv last week, but picked it up when reviewing recent cross-post submissions to the nuclear theory section.  It is called "The development of the concept of exchange forces in the 1930s: close encounters between Europe and Japan and the birth of nuclear theory"

Aside from my general interest in history and the history of physics in particular, the last two words of the title definitely put it on-topic for my interests.  Hopefully I will get round to reading it, but thought it might be of enough interest to post here even before (if) I do read it.

RIP Gottfried Münzenberg 1940–2024

 I copy and past below a press release from the FAIR facility at GSI, Darmstadt, Germany:

Press Release, 22 January 2024

Mourning for Gottfried Münzenberg 
 
GSI and FAIR mourn the loss of an outstanding scientist and pioneer of nuclear physics who shaped nuclear physics research at GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung for decades. The former GSI division head Professor Dr. Gottfried Münzenberg passed away on January 2, 2024 at the age of 83.
 
Gottfried Münzenberg had a major influence on various areas of modern nuclear physics and leaves behind a significant scientific legacy. His diversified research work ranged from the study of exotic, very light nuclei to super-heavy nuclei, touching on both fundamental physical questions and practical applications. He laid important foundations for the extension of the GSI facilities, shaped the scientific program at the Super-FRS, contributed to the design of the new apparatus and initiated the founding of the NUSTAR collaboration at FAIR.
 
During his time at GSI, he made decisive contributions to the discovery of superheavy elements and played a leading role in the design and construction of the SHIP velocity filter at Justus Liebig University in Giessen. He was head of the SHIP experiment group for the synthesis of the new chemical elements bohrium, hassium and meitnerium and, as a member of the discovery team, was closely involved in the synthesis of the elements darmstadtium, roentgenium and copernicium. Münzenberg was also co-discoverer of the double magic nuclei tin-100 and nickel-78 as well as the proton halo in boron-8. Furthermore, his scientific commitment led to the discovery of over 220 new isotopes and more than 350 new mass measurements of various isotopes.
 
Gottfried Münzenberg gained worldwide international reputation as Professor of Experimental Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and head of the Nuclear Structure and Nuclear Chemistry departments at GSI. He initiated and fostered numerous international collaborations and was passionately committed to the promotion of young scientists.
 
For his outstanding scientific achievements, Gottfried Münzenberg has received many high-ranking awards and honors, including the Röntgen Prize of the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, the Physics Prize of the German Physical Society, the Otto Hahn Prize of the City of Frankfurt, the Gold Medal of the Comenius University in Bratislava, the SUNAMCO Medal of the IUPAP, the Lise Meitner Prize of the European Physical Society and the Medal of Honor of the Hellenic Nuclear Physics Society.
 
GSI and FAIR will always remember Gottfried Münzenberg as an outstanding scientist, a valued source of inspiration, and above all as a great person full of warmth and with an incomparable sense of witty humor. His colleagues and friends will keep his wisdom, kindness and friendship in lasting memory. The management of GSI/FAIR extends its deepest condolences to his family.    

This press release with pictures is available on our website:

https://www.gsi.de/en/start/news/details/2024/01/22/trauer-um-gottfried-muenzenberg

@ The Nuclear Physics Community Meeting

 I'm on my way home from the UK Nuclear Physics Community meeting, which takes place every January and gives members of the academic nuclear physics community a chance to get together, update each other on research and community management matters, and to catch up with each other generally.  I've been part of the community since 2000 so I've got to know many of the people well and it was nice to see them.  Getting up to speed with latest new from STFC, from funding panels, and from research projects. If nothing else, I was prompted to send an email to offer collaboration on the calculation of octupole states, following having developed the ability to make the calculations, and then working with experimentalists at Surrey (see here). 

In the evening last night there was a pub reception and meal at a fancy restaurant, but I felt like I had done the socialising I wanted to, and joined my London quiz team for a match.  It was against the league leaders, and though I'm happy with how we did, we didn't manage to beat them.

Meanwhile, it's exam season at University so I've spent part of the last couple of days dealing with questions about Special Relativity for what will be my last time teaching it in its present form, thanks to some rearrangement of modules starting next year. 

Here are some photos from the last couple of days in London

My hotel with St Pancras Station's hotel

On the way to the quiz, the new developments around
King's Cross station