Adrian Thompson

It’s a great moment to celebrate milestones at CFS — in more ways than one. Today we announced we’re done manufacturing one of our key magnets and putting it through a rigorous, month-long battery of performance tests — which it passed. 1/4

#PowerMoves

TIL if dealing with

(huge_number - huge_number2)

which can lead to machine precision noise in python computing, while mpmath can help a lot, sometimes just doing

(huge_number.astype('float64') - huge_number2.astype('float64'))

does the job more elegantly!

Absolomb

listening to a banger open.spotify.com/track/49fTxU...

YouTube video by 2swap Graph Theory in State-Space

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGLN...

We've *gotta* revive this as a pet name for future colliders

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perhaps...

After >2 years, it's finally out!

Coffee and paper review

Toying around with some iNSPIRE API - trying to make a bubblemap of activity by subfield (counting papers with keyword in title by institution over the past 15 years)

Image of an optical module that was part of the STRAW apparatus. The module is shown clean shortly after deployment in 2018 (a.). An amount of buildup is visible in the 2020 survey (b.). The final 2023 survey shows a developed macro-fouling population, composed primarily of hydroids (c.)

Cool ocean science work on "biofouling" for the Pacific One Neutrino Experiment :) 🧪⚛️

arxiv.org/abs/2507.09086

Just got back from a visit underground at SURF, where we also heard a little about SABRE. Reminds me of this t-shirt:

Right there with ya Tao 😭
Though as Patrick put it, correlation != causation here, so the numbers shouldn't really change what we do or make us pessimistic - I think we keep writing good papers, talk to people, and apply anyways!

Absolutely, this is a mix of lots of career stages though I was more interested in cut-offs than the high h-index tail. And I think there is a bit of conditional probability here; I might feel less inclined to even apply if I have a low h-index / first postdoc

A histogram of number of faculty shortlists and faculty offers binned by citation count for papers with 10 authors or less, for 2024-2025 data.

A similar effect shows up in citation counts > 500. I've heard that committes don't necessarily impose hard cut-offs, but numbers obviously help to make your case. Perhaps the more optimistic thing I can draw from all this is that you don't need to hit these numbers to get shortlisted.

A histogram of number of faculty shortlists and faculty offers binned by paper count for papers with 10 authors or less, for 2024-2025 data.

Less so is the bias for high paper counts, although no offers were made to candidates with N(papers) < 17

A histogram of number of faculty shortlists and faculty offers binned by author h-index for papers with 10 authors or less, for 2024-2025 data.

Do metrics matter?

Some interesting statistics on faculty hires in hep-ph/th in the past two years, sourced from the rumor mill and inSPIRE data. For instance, there is a clear bias in offers to higher h-index ~ 15

Thanks for saying this part out loud, it's nice to know these practices are appreciated by others!

[W190] Adrian Thompson: The Terrestrial Neutrino Lighthouse YouTube video by lawphysics

I will give a talk on #neutrinos from a #muoncollider and electroweak precision on Lawphysics this morning:
www.youtube.com/live/_fd6w7o...
🧪⚛️

Diagram of the Earth’s core, with an example dark matter density profile superimposed. The solid-liquid boundary at 1200 km is the boundary between the inner core and outer core, while a radius of 400 km is where the seismic data we use loses sensitivity to the core’s structure (see text for details). Dashed arrows denote heat flow away from the center of the Earth.

Fun paper I noticed last night by Chris Cappiello and Tansu Daylan :D

Can a Dark Inferno Melt Earth's Core?
arxiv.org/abs/2505.24070

Nice collection of historical landmarks in Quantum theory from APS: promo.aps.org/quantum-foun...

Goofy is the New Normal

While I'm happy to have a paper out tonight myself, I can't *not* read this one, excited to learn that the author is likely a skateboarder:

arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00099

Duolingo screenshot showing the sentence "Neha's big toes are small"

I just learned that our "big toes" in Hindi are expressed as the "foot's thumbs" (पैर का अंगूठा), amazing 😂

LHCb paper on the first observation of CP violation in baryon decays, looks awesome!

arxiv.org/abs/2503.16954

First constraints on QCD axion dark matter using James Webb Space Telescope observations I present the first constraints on QCD axion dark matter using measurements from the James Webb Space Telescope. By utilizing publicly available MIRI and NIRSpec blank-sky observations, originally col...

Nice! JWST, axions and the 0.1-1 eV window from Pinetti 🧪⚛️

arxiv.org/abs/2503.11753

Have fun and come back with merch!

Wow, bold!

Misconceptions in Neutrino Oscillations in presence of a non-Unitary Mixing Deviations from unitarity of the CKM matrix in the quark sector are considered excellent windows to probe physics beyond the Standard Model. In its leptonic counterpart, the PMNS matrix, these searche...

Looks like a good paper to go through for my own education

arxiv.org/abs/2502.19480

I see - but here the authors study a hypothetical feebly interacting particle that would not get absorbed by the blanket, so in principle you could have a well-shielded detector trying to pick up a signal

Yeah, pretty crazy! Looks like it's all coming the high neutron flux, but I think they key is that they assumed 1 year of data taking = 1 year reactor on...that would take a high duty factor, not just test operations. I'm still reading tho...

I don't know enough about fusion reactors to know if what they assumed was gratuitous, but it looks like most of the sensitivities have a hard time competing with K->Pi+inv. constraints, right?