Category: Event

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Becoming a Faculty Member

I am in the process of becoming a faculty member at Southern Methodist University. Well, to be fair, I am a faculty member; that was a digital title change that happened on Aug. 1. What I mean is that I am in the process of settling into faculty life at SMU. This involved a lot of paperwork: setting up healthcare, retirement, and other benefits, filling out faculty information forms, setting up computing accounts, etc. It was a slow roll-out over the week.

The benefits paperwork got done almost entirely in Monday, which led to me getting entered into the payroll system at SMU. This was followed by the choice of one of two offices in the physics department; I chose the basement office, and Jodi took the first floor office. My office is right by a main entrance to the Fondren Science building, so there can be times of traffic during during the day. But I like being in a higher traffic area; I can litter my door with physics propaganda, from recent results to magazine articles touting the benefits of particle physics.

Computing accounts, particularly the main SMU accounts, took a little longer. The highlight of the computing setup was gaining access to our newly expanded SMU high-performance computing cluster, which I intend to stress-test over the next week.

I got my books unpacked and setup my furniture, started thinking about other furniture needed for my office (like a working chair), went to SMU surplus and tagged a whiteboard for my own (thanks to Jodi for helping me with that!). Next week, the grant writing will start again full force. The bread and butter of faculty life – teaching – won’t start for me until second semester. Still, I am eager to meet students and sit in on classes. I am eager to feel more like a faculty member in the SMU community.

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To CERN: messages from today, messages from 1980

Next week (June 2-6), I will be at CERN for the first time in many years (and to kickoff my many visits to come!). I am attending the ATLAS Collaboration Physics Week, a four-day event centering on ATLAS physics analysis. I am excited to be heading to the new Mecca of particle physics, the new global hub that will soon define the frontier of collider physics.

In the spirit of that new frontier, I had a very interesting conversation today at lunch. A senior SLAC theoretical physicist started discussing the very interesting evidence that he thinks is mounting for significant contributions to the proton from charm and bottom quarks. Called “intrinsic charm” or “intrinsic bottom”, these contributions mark the ultimate in quantum mechanics. In the classical physics view of the proton, the quarks rattle around inside glued together by the strong force. Quantum mechanics, which accurately described the proton and crushes the classical picture, instead tells us that the proton is mostly NOT the three quarks that define it. It’s mostly gluons, and in fact those gluons are constantly producing pairs of virtual particles that flit in and our of existence and contribute significant structure to the proton. Even in that latter picture, the basis of all computation, there are assumptions about how much you can ignore charm and bottom that may be proving to be wrong.

That more common view sees the contribution of intrinsic charm and bottom as negligible. But, in the high energy environment of leading hadron colliders – the Tevatron and soon the LHC – that picture may be incorrect (c.f. [1,2]). In fact, a recent D0 preliminary result [3] suggest that the proton/anti-proton collision debris close to the beamline (at large rapidity) exhibit behavior that greatly differs from the leading calculations of these collisions. These calculations are provided in the Coordinated Theoretical-Experimental QCD (CTEQ) parton distribution functions (PDFs) [4]. The D0 authors state that the version of CTEQ PDFs used in their comparison do not include the Tevatron Run II data results, so they represent a pre-Run-II picture of QCD at hgh energy. Their data suggests that picture needs updating.

The picture painted at lunch today was of this rich universe of phenomena lurking just inside this deceptively simple picture of the proton. Looking back at some papers on this, I also realize that we are entering an era where these ideas that seemed, perhaps, so far off in 1980 (ala [1]) are on our doorstep now, demanding attention. In the fight to understand the Standard Model, so that we can see beyond it, such issues will become more and more critical.

[1] S.J. Brodsky, P. Hoyer, C. Peterson and N. Sakai. Phys. Lett. B 93 (1980)

[2] http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0508126

[3] http://www-d0.fnal.gov/Run2Physics/WWW/results/prelim/QCD/Q14/

[4] http://www.phys.psu.edu/~cteq/

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Physicists in Washington

This year has been a remarkable one in many respects. A Nobel-prize-winning physicist heading the Department of Energy, a physicist acting as science advisor to the President – have there been as many physicist so sought after for science policy leadership since just after World War II?

What has driven physics, and all other sciences, to the forefront is not the Herculean efforts of a team of scientists to develop a weapon to end a war. What has driven science to the forefront is the recognition that it plays a key role in keeping the U.S. economically competitive. It creates opportunities to attract young people along a superhighway that starts in grade school and ends at some great and unknown discovery, with many on and off-ramps along the way to accommodate the interests and expectations of those on the highway. It creates new technologies and advances the general body of knowledge about ourselves and the cosmos. In doing so, it lights the way to understanding our influence on the cosmos, and its consequences. Science shapes medical treatments – even physics has its hand in this – and it provides opportunities for public-private partnerships that advance the interests of both parties.

Next week, about 45 physicists who conduct research using the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the Large Hadron Collider will travel to Washington D.C. They will thank over 200 members of Congress for supporting science – passing the America COMPETES Act (ACA), supporting increases for science in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus plan), supporting increases for the base budget of fundamental science in the FY09 Appropriations Act, signing “Dear Colleague” letters to the chairs of appropriations subcommittees to encourage them to grow science in line with the ACA vision. They will also encourage those members to stay the course – invest more in science until we achieve the goals of ACA, engage in science policy and engage with scientists about their work, encourage their Congressional colleagues to do the same.

SLAC, Fermilab, and of late the US LHC users have been sending physicists to Washington for almost a decade. Each spring, the population of active research physicists in Washington jumps by a significant fraction as dozens of us go to DC and meet our Congressional representatives. This year, there are several more physicists who already spend most of their time as part of the government. This year, more than any in recent memory, there will be more physicists in Washington.