Interactions: Ghina M. Halabi

Posted on December 2, 2021 by Ankita Anirban

Ghina Halabi

Ghina M. Halabi is an astrophysicist and social entrepreneur, whose work lies at the intersection of science, entrepreneurship and education. During her PhD and postdoctoral work, her research was on internal structure and evolution of stars. Now, working at Cambridge Judge Business School Entrepreneurship Centre, she creates and leads impactful opportunities for scientists and academics to thrive beyond the lab. The first person to gain a PhD in astrophysics from a Lebanese university, she is a strong advocate for public engagement, particularly through storytelling. In 2018, Ghina founded She Speaks Science, a multilingual social enterprise for public engagement. Since 2020, she has been a mentor on the United Nations Space for Women Network.

Could you tell us a bit about your research?

There is hardly any region in the Universe less accessible to human investigation than stellar interiors. For more than a decade, my work probed exactly that: the interiors of stars, vital regions of our Universe and the seed to human life. My research looked at the evolution of these enigmatic objects, their interactions with their nearby companions, and the nucleosynthesis processes taking place through their lifetimes. I developed computational codes to model stellar evolution, by tracing the progression of a star’s properties throughout its life cycle and model its structure and element formation. This allowed me to predict the abundances of chemical elements on a star’s surface.

What inspired you to become an astrophysicist?

Unlike many astrophysicists who start marvelling at the mysteries of the cosmos from a very young age, I never thought I’d become one. In the small mountainous Lebanese village where I grew up, an urban legend has it that counting stars causes warts on your fingers. As any child would, I counted stars all the same but not without a creeping sense of thrill and apprehension of the curse that might befall me. The only affliction I ended up with instead is an unshakable spell of always seeking a good challenge.

Born in the 1980s in a country riddled with a raging civil war, the sounds of artillery, missiles and sonic booms were almost a daily reality. I was intrigued about flying, and as a teenager, I wanted to become a fighter pilot. However, to a 15-year-old with no role models breaking clouds, this path seemed cordoned off and even trying seemed like trespassing.

Perhaps when reality disappoints and limitations shackle one’s dreams, defiance becomes a life-affirming act. So I dismissed the thought of becoming a fighter pilot, but not the skyward dreams. I took to studying physics which seemed like a hearty challenge, then worked hard for a PhD in astrophysics. One would think it can only get easier from there. However, no one had attempted that degree in Lebanon before so there was no clear path to tread or role model to aspire to. I had to blaze that trail myself, yet another challenge I daringly accepted.

What was the motivation behind She Speaks Science?

My own experience and the barriers I faced fuel my work on broadening access so that young people don’t miss out on becoming engineers or pilots or astronauts because of lack of mentorship or role models. So I founded She Speaks Science in 2018. Our work aims to promote women and minority scientists in STEM, and create a positive STEM identity among young people.

Why is the idea of storytelling important to you?

My consultancy work in science communication made me realise that not every role model inspires, and not every outreach approach works to promote STEM. On She Speaks Science, we take a storytelling approach for three reasons:

Stories featuring characters, change, struggle and adventure spark imagination and motivate girls and young women to explore science. Girlhood is changing, being an 11 year old these days is different from what it used to be. Girls today are individualistic and socially conscious. They have a message and want to make impact, they want to change the world. Our stories show them how through science they can do that.
Stories help normalise failure. One factor that deters young people from pursuing a scientific career is the notion that to be a scientist, one has to be a “genius”. Our stereotypical role models seem to have enforced a normative idea of who does STEM, overlooking struggle and resilience as essential aspects of being a scientist. A study published in 2016 in the Journal of Educational Psychology finds that students who are exposed to scientists “struggle stories” recorded higher science grades and levels of motivation than those who weren’t. Thus narrating the struggle of a scientist, as a protagonist searching for the truth, is effective in normalising failure and building resilience among young explorers.
Stories help bring about a culture change. They normalise the idea of a woman scientist to boys and young men so they come to view it as commonplace rather than exceptional.

She Speaks Science features writing in many languages, why is that important?

She Speaks Science’s readership now spans more than 180 countries across the globe. Offering our stories in five languages (English, Arabic, Spanish, German and Italian) is crucial to ensure wider accessibility and to cater for a global audience. Although the English language dominates global scientific activities and using a single international language facilitates the dissemination of scientific knowledge across national and cultural borders, the English language shouldn’t be a gatekeeper to scientific discourse. More critically, to face the threats of the coming decades humanity requires the understanding and support of science at a global scale. This makes science communication in multiple languages crucial to ensure a larger reach and effectiveness. That’s what we’re trying to do through our team of dedicated translators.

We will also soon be offering our stories in audio format, as a podcast initially, for an even wider accessibility and inclusivity.

Continue reading →

How you can get involved with Nature Reviews as a PhD student or postdoc

Posted on September 30, 2021 by Ankita Anirban

On 16 September 2021, Nature Reviews Physics and Nature Reviews Earth & Environment hosted a webinar, “How you can get involved with Nature Reviews as a PhD student/postdoc”.

The event featured panellists Louisa Brotherson (University of Liverpool), Franziska Keller (ETHZ) and Zengji Yue (University of Wollongong) alongside editors Erin Scott (Nature Reviews Earth & Environment) and Zoe Budrikis (Nature Reviews Physics).

The panel discussed topics like their experiences with writing Tools of the Trade articles and peer-reviewing as ECRs, how publishing works, and what career advice they’d give.

You can watch the recording of the event here.

Attending the APS March Meeting 2021

Posted on April 26, 2021 by Ankita Anirban

Guest post by Andrea Richaud, recipient of the Communications Physics 2020 Early Career Researcher grant which enabled him to attend a conference or scientific school of his choice.

In December 2020, I had the pleasure to receive the 2020 Training Grant for Early Career Researchers from the journal Communications Physics. After defending my doctoral thesis in February 2020, I joined SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy), where I am now post-doctoral researcher in the Condensed Matter section. The focus of my research is on SU(N) fermionic systems, their possible topological phases, and their possible use as quantum simulators of multiband solid-state models. This is an active research field, as ultracold-atom-based platforms illuminate the intimate physics of strongly-correlated systems, by getting rid of a number of spurious effects (like crystal defects) which are inevitably present in standard solid-state systems.

As an awardee of the ECR training grant, I decided to attend the APS March Meeting 2021, a very important conference which involved more than 11,000 different researchers from all over the world. Despite its virtual form (due to the persistent pandemic situation), attending this conference was a very positive and stimulating experience, as I had the possibility to watch tens of very interesting seminars encompassing several aspects of my current research activity. In particular, I found it useful to attend seminars focusing on experimental aspects of the topics which I investigate at the theoretical level. Even as a theoretician, I think that being up to date with experimental advances is really crucial, as one can get valuable ideas and correctly interpret the open problems.

{credit}Andrea attending the conference{/credit}

In spite of the virtual form of the conference, I managed to have a good interaction with many speakers, asking them questions and sharing ideas about common research topics. This was possible thanks to the presence of “Zoom networking rooms”, which were made available at the end of each session. Of course, they could not fully replace a good traditional coffee break, but l think that they worked well enough for this pandemic situation. Among the advantages of attending such a large meeting virtually, the online platform made switching between rooms pretty easy (compared to running down corridors in a conference centre) and every seminar was recorded and made available to the attendees to re-watch. I am very grateful to the journal Nature Communications Physics for awarding me the prize which allowed me to take part to the APS March Meeting 2021. I definitely think that this experience has been very beneficial for my career as a young researcher.

Hawking Hawking: author Charles Seife on how he cracked the cosmologist’s myth

Posted on April 22, 2021 by Ankita Anirban

The British cosmologist Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) was probably the most recognizable scientist of the last 50 years. Many of his greatest contributions were in the study of black holes. In particular, he discovered in 1974 that black holes emit what came to be known as Hawking radiation — which shows that black holes are not truly black and appears to contradict quantum mechanics.

His public persona was forged by his popularization work, beginning with the wildly successful 1988 book A Brief History of Time and his appearances on television shows such as Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Big Bang Theory. Later, he was the subject of the 2014 biographical film A Theory of Everything.

Part of the public’s fascination with Hawking lay in his stoicism in the face of adversity. When he was 21, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and his doctors gave him two years to live. In the later decades of his life, he was almost completely paralyzed and spoke through a voice synthesizer, which became part of his mystique.

In the media, Hawking was often portrayed as a genius on a par with Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton, but it was an exaggeration that Hawking himself often resisted to. With his new biography, Hawking Hawking: The selling of a scientific celebrity (Basic Book, New York, US$30.00), Charles Seife wants to set the record straight.

Seife is a professor of Journalism at New York University and the author of six previous books. He has covered Hawking the researcher during his year as a reporter for Science.

Davide Castelvecchi, reporter from Nature, interviewed Seife to go behind the scenes. The following was edited for length and clarity.

Charles Seife {credit}Sigrid Estrada{/credit}

What motivated you to write this book?

I never thought of myself as a biographer, even though my first book [Zero: Biography of a dangerous idea] was nominally a biography of a number. But when Hawking died and I saw the outpouring of grief, I was surprised by how little of it was about his science. There was more to the human than the simple picture people had. I had encountered him a few times, and I was tapped into the social circle of cosmology, so I knew how he was assessed. I decided it was worth doing a real, probing biography that got to Hawking as a human, as opposed to Hawking as a symbol.

What did you know before you started researching the book?

It was a complex picture. Perhaps the clearest event where I was watching from the inside was his 2004 announcement in Dublin that he had solved the black hole information paradox [which suggests that Hawking radiation violates quantum mechanics because it erases information from the Universe]. In speaking to people who were there, almost no one was convinced. There was this poignancy I was picking up, that you had this man who was beloved — his students really loved him, and he’d made some major contributions — but then he got up in front of people and no one bought it. People were wondering why he did it.

But for the public at large, he had this status as an oracle, and it really didn’t matter what he was talking about. Continue reading →

Diversity leads to impact: what we learned from running an inclusive and accessible physics webinar series

Posted on March 23, 2021 by Zoe Budrikis

Contributed by the following authors (in alphabetical order): Dr Claudia Antolini, Dr Clara Barker, Dr Kathryn Boast, Dr Izzy Jayasinghe, Dr Caroline Müllenbroich, Dr Clara Nellist

Why we launched a webinar series

2020 has seen an explosion of physics webinars. Many of these came about out of necessity to adapt established seminar series and conferences to suit the restrictions around the COVID-19 pandemic. Others were the realisation of an opportunity to bring together researchers and audiences that would typically be restricted by geographic separation or time commitments.

In this time, it soon became apparent to a number of us in the advocacy group TIGER in STEMM that women, people of colour, people who are LGBTQ+ and people who have disabilities were under-represented in online physics panels and webinars, and that speakers from marginalized demographics and identities were not always afforded the visibility and courtesy that is usually expected in the field. Moreover, considerations for adequate accessibility to the broadcast were often overlooked.

Banner for the TIGER in STEMM 2020 summer webinar series

The six of us, women with a connection to the UK physics landscape from different areas of physics, diverse backgrounds, and identities, were determined to successfully demonstrate a different approach to online physics webinars. Recognising the need to place the same importance on diversity, inclusion and accessibility as on the physics that would be showcased, we set out to create a series of talks that break the mould and establish a precedent of providing an equitable platform for communicating science to academic peers and the general public alike. Within four weeks of initially coming together, we launched the inaugural TIGER in STEMM summer webinar series in physics on the 6th of August 2020. We wanted to celebrate intersectional and marginalised physicists (see Figure 1) and offer them centre stage to talk about their research. Our vision was to demonstrate that incorporating diversity, inclusion and accessibility compromised neither the impact nor the quality of the scientific discussion. More than that, we strived to prove that by placing these values and principles at the core of our enterprise, scientific discussion and dissemination would be enhanced and the impact of this style of communicating science would be amplified.

What we (and you) can learn

Diversity leads to impact. From an event which ran as a brief and self-contained series of webinars, the learnings were rich. With a total audience nearing 1000 people over the duration of the 5 event series, it was clear that prioritising diversity on an equal footing as achievements of the speakers enhanced the engagement with the event. There were no compromises made on the depth of the science presented on this platform, which is evidenced by the recordings of the lectures which are still publicly available for viewing.

A support network is key. A series such as this was only possible with the unwavering support of TIGER in STEMM, particularly through endorsement of the conviction that diversity can only enrich science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields. At a time when online physics conferences and workshops heavily feature speaker line-ups and panels dominated by white men, stepping up to demonstrate impact through a contrasting set of objectives required strength and every bit of support that the six of us could get. Also, the practical support of the group, for example taking advantage of the substantial follower count of the TIGER’s Twitter account and amplification of that advertisement by group members, was fundamental to the success of the physics webinar series.

Accessibility is more difficult but not impossible without a budget.The plan to organise a webinar series came together over a noticeably short period of time and we had no budget. This came with its own set of limitations. TIGER in STEMM do not hold funds so we had to rely on freely available resources. Firstly, we struggled to find free software support for captioning the presentations and Q&A sessions during the webinars. We found that the live subtitles of Microsoft PowerPoint worked best during the live broadcast, however this was subject to the version of software each presenter was using. Irregular captioning was in fact the single most frequent criticism that we received on our approach. Incorporating either live captioning via a scientific captioning service or sign language interpretation would have added a considerable amount of value and accessibility.

Timing and frequency require careful consideration. The decision to schedule the series for consecutive weeks in August and early September when most university academics, school teachers and students are on vacation may have amplified the webinar fatigue among our audience. While it could be due to the unique amount of stress that 2020 has generated, we acknowledge that this was particularly evident from the limited survey feedback that we received after the conclusion of the series. So, timing should be considered as a factor for accessibility and engagement.

Diversity attracts diversity. Webinars and platforms that promote and safeguard diversity and equity are a powerful medium to attract a diverse audience. As clearly shown from our feedback survey, this positive feedback effect yielded an even greater representation of minoritised people in our audience than is seen in the general UK population.

Continue reading →

International Women’s Day

Posted on March 8, 2021 by Ankita Anirban

Women’s Day was originally conceived at the turn of the 20th century and used in many countries as a focal point for the women’s suffrage movement, and other equal rights for women. 8th of March became a national holiday in the Soviet Union in 1917 after women gained suffrage there. It was recognised by the United Nations in 1977 and continues to be celebrated around the world in different ways. Today we commemorate the lives of three inspiring women physicists.

Florence Martin (1867-1957)^1,2

Florence Martin enrolled at the University of Sydney in 1891 and successfully completed a year of physics classes. During her second year, she began working as an unpaid research assistant to Richard Threlfall who was a family friend. In 1893 she wrote her first paper with Threlfall, verifying Maxwell’s equations in magnetic circuits (pictured).

{credit}Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales {/credit}

After this, Threlfall introduced Martin to his old friend, J J Thomson at the University of Cambridge and Martin sailed to England to spend three years working with Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory. Here she took undergraduate practical classes and pursued her own research on the gas expansion caused by electric discharge. When Martin returned to Sydney she worked with Threlfall for another two years, until he left for England. This signalled the end of Martin’s career in physics.

In 1905, Martin met a wealthy American couple and spent the next few years travelling the world with them. When the couple died in 1918, she inherited their estate in Denver, Colorado. She settled there, and spent the rest of her life as a patron of the arts.

Wang Ming-Chen (1906-2010)^3,4,5

{credit}Baidu Bai Jiahao{/credit}

Wang Ming-Chen studied physics at Ginling College, Nanjing and at Yanjing University in Beijing. After receiving her Master’s degree from Yanjing University in 1932, she applied for a scholarship to study abroad. Despite gaining top marks in her class, she did not qualify and had to return to teach in Ginling College. She remained there until the Japanese invasion of 1937, when she fled to Wuhan. In 1938, Wang was able to move to the USA for doctoral work and earned her PhD in statistical mechanics from the University of Michigan in 1942. For the remainder of the second World War, Wang worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory (where wartime radar research was taking place). During this time, she published “On the theory of Brownian motion II” with G.E. Uhlenbeck.

After the war, Wang returned to China and became a professor at Yunnan University in 1946. However, she only stayed for a few years and returned to the USA in 1949 to work at the University of Notre Dame. However, as political tensions between the US and China increased during the period of McCarthyism in the US, Wang was regularly harassed by the FBI. She applied to return home in 1953, but it took two years for this to be approved and she only came back to China in 1955.

Wang became a professor of physics at Tsinghua University in Beijing. At this time there was a strong focus on teaching in China, and Wang stopped her research in order to teach courses on statistics and thermodynamics. During the Cultural Revolution of 1966, she was arrested and imprisoned for seven years, on account of her husband being a political target. Later, she told a friend that she focussed on exercising every day in prison to “remind myself that I can’t die, I must live, and I must restore my innocence.” Released in 1973, she continued working at Tsinghua University until her retirement in 1976.

Carolyn Parker (1917-1966)^6,7

{credit}Who’s Who in Colored America 1950{/credit}

Carolyn Parker graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Fisk University, Tennessee, and went on to receive a Master’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1941. This made her the first African-American woman to receive a postgraduate degree in physics. After her graduation she taught physics and mathematics in various public schools for a couple of years.

In 1943, Parker started working in the Manhattan project, which was developing atomic weapons during the second World War. She was based in Ohio, at the Dayton project, conducting research on using polonium as an initiator for atomic explosions. Due to the secretive nature of the research, not much is known about her work in this period. After the war ended, Parker left the Dayton project and continued further study at the University of Ohio.

Parker earned a second Masters in physics from MIT in 1951 . She continued research, partially fulfilling the requirements for a doctorate, however, she did not go on to defend her dissertation. Parker died at the age of 48, from leukemia, believed to be caused by her exposure to polonium during her time at the Dayton project.

References

Florence Martin, Australian National Dictionary of Biography https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/martin-florence-7504. Accessed 08.03.21.
Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, Biodiversity Heritage Library, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/130154#page/211/mode/1up Accessed 08.03.21.
Ming-Chen Wang, Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan https://rackham.umich.edu/project/ming-chen-wang/ Accessed 08.03.21
Ming Chen Wang, Kai Zhang personal website, https://sites.google.com/site/kaizhangstatmech/chinese-scientists/mcwang Accessed 08.03.21
Wang Ming-Chen, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Ming-chen Accessed 08.03.21
A. Powers, The First African American Woman To Obtain A Graduate Degree In Physics Was Involved In A Top Secret US Mission, Forbes 2020 https://www.forbes.com/sites/annapowers/2020/01/31/the-first-african-american-woman-to-obtain-a-graduate-degree-in-physics-was-involved-in-a-top-secret-us-mission/ Accessed 08.03.21
Carolyn Parker, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Parker Accessed 08.03.21

A number of pictures

Posted on October 28, 2020 by Ankita Anirban

Posted on behalf of Nina Meinzer, senior editor at Nature Physics

The October issue of Nature Physics marks the journal’s 15^th anniversary, complete with a cover on which four experimental images are arranged in such a way to form the number ‘15’. Here Nina Meinzer tells the story of how the images that make the cover were created.

Earlier this year, the Nature Physics editors started to think about ways to mark the journal’s 15^th anniversary. Little did we know then that, by October, we would not be able to come together and raise a glass to the occasion, and so the celebration had to be confined to the pages of the journal. We knew early on that we wanted to give our past and present editors a chance to reminisce about their time at the journal, and that turned into a collection of memories of their favourite papers.

But how do you turn those assorted papers into a visual concept to make a cool cover? Once we started thinking about it, it struck us that it’s not unusual to see experimental methods, especially imaging methods, demonstrated with the help of numbers or letters as simple test objects. So we asked some of our authors if they had any images of a 15 (or a 1 and a 5) on their hard drives that we might use for the cover. We were deeply moved by the response: although nobody had the sort of thing we were looking for on file, they offered to take some data especially for us — in August, in the middle of a pandemic.

Our art editor then took four of these images and arranged them into a collage to create one big number 15. Bringing together methods from different areas of physics reflects the aim of Nature Physics itself to be a platform for the entire physics community.

What are the methods used to create the images that eventually made up the anniversary cover?

Credit: Hugo Defienne, Daniele Faccio and Alex Wing

Quantum holography (Hugo Defienne & Daniele Faccio, University of Glasgow)

“Holography is a widely used imaging technique that can be applied to the full electromagnetic spectrum, from X-rays to radio waves and relies on the coherence properties of these waves to extract information from interference patterns.

We have recently extended holography to the case of intrinsically incoherent waves, so that no phase information can be retrieved from a classical interference measurement. Instead, the phase information is now encoded and decoded using entanglement. Entangled photon pairs are used to probe complex objects of which amplitude and phase components are retrieved by imaging the spatial structure of entanglement. As an example, the image on the cover shows the quantum holographic image of the number 15 imprinted onto a spatial light modulator. See also the preprint for more details”

Self-assembly (Serim Ilday, Bilkent University – UNAM)

Credit: Serim Ilday and Alex Wing

Credit: Serim Ilday and Alex Wing

“These are microscopy images. Each dot forming the number ‘15’ is a laser beam. Laser pulses that get absorbed by the liquid heat it. The rest, untouched by the laser pulses, remains cold. The liquid starts flowing from the hot to the cold regions, just like in a steam engine. The flows carry polystyrene spheres (red image) and E. coli bacterial cells (green image) towards the beam spots. When they exceed a threshold number, particles and cells slow down the flow the same as the water slows down when you drain it over a sieve. Then, their numbers grow further and write ‘15’.

The recipe? Couple an ultrafast laser to a microscope through a series of optical elements, including a spatial light modulator, which divides a single beam into multiple beams. Cinema projectors have at least one of these for precisely the same reason. Sandwich a thin liquid layer containing the material of interest between two glass slides. Put it under the microscope and shine the laser. Record using a camera. Enjoy!”

Quantum gas microscope (Immanuel Bloch, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics)

Credit: Immanuel Bloch and Alex Wing

“The ‘birthday candles’ forming the ’15’ are individual atoms fluorescing in ultra-high vacuum. Lithium-6 atoms are cooled down to around a billionth of a degree above absolute zero and trapped using laser beams. By interfering three pairs of beams, an optical lattice is created which forces the atoms onto a micrometre-spaced regular grid.

An additional custom-shaped laser-pattern coaxes them into the shape of the ’15’. Visible light is then scattered off the atoms and collected with a microscope objective and a single-photon sensitive camera. During illumination, the atoms need to be hindered in heating up via continuous laser cooling. The resulting black-and-white photo is finally coloured. When the atoms are not sending special birthday greetings, they simulate the quantum mechanical behaviour of complex many-body systems.”

Five inspiring women

Posted on October 13, 2020 by Ankita Anirban

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), was an English mathematician and is regarded as the first person to recognise the potential of computing power and programming. Since 2009, the second Tuesday of October has been commemorated as Ada Lovelace day, an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). Here we celebrate the stories of five pioneering physicists.

Caroline (Lili) Bleeker^1,2 (1897-1985)

University Museum Utrecht / Public domain

Caroline Bleeker was a Dutch physicist and entrepreneur. She earned her PhD in 1928 from the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Her thesis was on spectral measurements of alkali metals. After her PhD, she started a consultancy to advise companies on scientific instruments. This project then evolved into opening her own factory to produce equipment, particularly focussing on optical components.

During the German occupation of the Netherlands in the second world war, Bleeker hid Jewish people in her factory. In 1944, the factory was raided by German troops, but Bleeker, who spoke fluent German, was able to distract the soldiers while those who were hiding escaped through the garden. After this, the factory was closed down by the Germans and Bleeker herself had to go into hiding for the remainder of the war.

After the war, the factory reopened and Bleeker worked with her long-term friend Fritz Zernike to produce the world’s first complete phase contrast microscopes. They filed the patent on this together, and in 1953, Zernike won the Nobel prize for this invention.

Elizaveta Karamihailova³ (1897-1968)

Physmuseum / Public domain

Elizaveta Karamihailova was a nuclear physicist and the first woman to become a professor in Bulgaria. She earned her PhD in 1922 from the University of Vienna in Austria. After this, she worked at the Institute of Radium Studies in Vienna with Marietta Blau. Together, they observed a previously unknown radiation from polonium in 1931. Later, this was confirmed by James Chadwick as neutron radiation, which led to him winning the Nobel prize in 1935.

After further postdoctoral work at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, UK, Karamihailova returned to Bulgaria in 1939, where she set up the first atomic physics course at the University of Sofia. She no longer had the equipment to continue her previous work on ionisation, and so she turned to studying cosmic rays using photographic plates. In 1944, a left-wing uprising took place in Bulgaria and the authorities labelled Karamihailova “unreliable” due to her anti-communist views. She could no longer travel abroad and spent the rest of her career in Bulgaria.

湯浅年子, Toshiko Yuasa⁴ (1909 –1980)

朝日新聞社 / Public domain

Toshiko Yuasa earned a degree from Tokyo Bunrika University in 1934 to become the first female physics graduate in Japan. She started teaching there and began her research career in molecular spectroscopy. In 1940, Yuasa moved to France to continue her research, despite the beginning of the second world war. She worked with Frederic Joliot-Curie (son-in-law of Marie Curie) on radioactivity, earning her PhD in 1943.

After the Allied liberation of France in 1944, Yuasa had to leave for Berlin, where she built a double-focussing beta spectrometer. In 1945, Soviet troops ordered Yuasa to return to Japan. She made her way back through Siberia, carrying the spectrometer on her back, arriving in Japan just before it surrendered. However, the US occupying forces in Japan would not allow her to continue her research in nuclear physics, so she could only teach. In 1949, she returned to France as a researcher for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), where she remained for the rest of her career.

سميرة موسى‎, Sameera Moussa^5,6,7 (1917–1952)

Al Ahram Daily news Paper / Public domain

Sameera Moussa was an Egyptian nuclear physicist who worked on atomic energy and was the first women to be a lecturer at the University of Cairo. In the 1940s, Moussa discovered a way to split up atoms of cheap metals, such as copper, which would make the medical applications of nuclear technology much more affordable. However, against the backdrop of the second world war and the detonation of the first nuclear bombs, Moussa was keen to advocate for the regulation of nuclear technology. In 1952, she organised a conference on “Atomic Energy for Peace” which inspired the US program “Atoms for Peace”.

Moussa received a Fulbright scholarship and travelled to the University of California for further research. She was the first non-US citizen to be given access to the top-secret US atomic facilities, which caused some controversy. In 1952, she died when her car was driven off a cliff. Moussa is believed to have been assassinated as the driver was not found, and it is thought that he jumped out of the car. Raqia Ibrahim, an Egyptian-Israeli actress, was accused of murdering Moussa on behalf of the Israeli Mossad who were concerned at the idea of Egypt acquiring a cheap atomic bomb.

পূর্ণিমা সিনহা, Purnima Sinha^8,9(1927–2015)

https://www.livehistoryindia.com/herstory/2019/05/26/dr-purnima-sinha-pioneering-physicist / CC BY-SA

Purnima Sinha studied physics at the University of Calcutta in the late 1940s. During her time as an undergraduate, she was taught by Satyendra Nath Bose, who encouraged her to join his research group and undertake a PhD in X-ray spectroscopy. Sinha became the first Bengali women to receive a doctorate in physics in 1956. The PhD students worked together to collect scrap army surplus equipment which was readily available after the second world war to build equipment for their research. Sinha studied the structure of clay; later, she joined a biophysics department at Stanford University and found structural similarities between the geometries of clay and of DNA.

In addition, to her scientific pursuits, Sinha was an accomplished musician, painter and translated many science books into Bengali. In 1970, she published an anthropology book on Indian folk music. Sinha was actively involved in Bengali Science Association, which had been set up by Bose. After retirement, she also created an informal school for children of ethnic minorities.

References

Dr. Caroline Emilie Bleeker, physicist and businesswoman. Accessed 12.10.2020
Lili Bleeker, Wikipedia Accessed 12.10.2020
Elizaveta Karamihailova, Wikipedia Accessed 12.10.2020
Toshiko Yuasa, Wikipedia Accessed 12.10.2020
Sameera Moussa, Wikipedia Accessed 12.10.2020
Abdulaal, M. The Story of Sameera: World-Renowned Egyptian Nuclear Scientist, Egyptian Streets (2018) Accessed 12.10.2020
Al-Youm, A. Raqia Ibrahim: Egyptian Jewish actress recruited by Israel to prevent Egypt owning nuclear bomb. Egypt Independent (2014) Accessed 12.10.2020
Purnima Sinha, Wikipedia Accessed 12.10.2020
Katti, M. Dr Purnima Sinha: Pioneering Physicist. Live History India (2014) Accessed 12.10.2020

Achieving a Bose–Einstein Condensate from my living room during lockdown

Posted on October 6, 2020 by Ankita Anirban

During the COVID-19 lockdown which led to the closure of many labs around the world, Dr. Amruta Gadge, a postdoctoral researcher in the Quantum Systems and Devices group at the University of Sussex*, made headlines for remotely setting up a Bose–Einstein condensate from her living room. Here, she tells us her story.

When the UK government announced the national lockdown on 23^rd March due to the pandemic, my lab at the University of Sussex was forced to temporarily close its doors. We of course had a strong inkling this was coming, and rushed to get ourselves in order before it happened. In my laboratory, we were determined to keep our experiments going as best we could although we had never run them remotely before. Without being able to set foot in the labs, bar a few essential maintenance visits, the only way to continue working on our experiments was to use dedicated remote control and monitoring technology.

Dr Amruta Gadge adjusting a laser pre lockdown{credit}Rebecca Bond{/credit}

Pre-lockdown, I was part of a team building an apparatus to produce Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). A BEC consists of a cloud of hundreds of thousands of rubidium atoms, which have been cooled down to nanokelvin temperatures using lasers and magnetic fields. At such temperatures the cloud suddenly takes on different characteristics, with all atoms behaving together as a single quantum object. This object has such low energy that it can be used to sense very low magnetic fields, a property we are making use of to probe novel materials such as silver nanowires , silicon nitride nano membranes or to probe ion channels in biological cells.

We had started assembling this system just a few months before, and were looking forward to reaching a big milestone in the lab – producing our first BEC. Time was short! To run such an experiment from home was no easy feat, with large and complex laser and optics set-ups in state-of-the-art labs – which couldn’t just be transported. In the days leading up to lockdown, equipment, chairs, and computers were being ferried to various homes, deliveries of equipment were diverted and protocols for remote access and online control were put in place.

Ultra-cold atom experiments are very complex. Obtaining a BEC involves a large amount of debugging and optimising of the experimental sequence. When not in the lab, at times it felt almost impossible to debug. We set up software control for the equipment, such as oscilloscopes, vacuum pumps, and others. However, the tool that played the most important role was our environmental monitoring system. Trapped cold atoms are extremely sensitive to any variations in the environmental conditions. Changes in the ambient temperature of the lab, humidity, residual magnetic fields, vacuum pressure, and so on, result in laser instability, polarisation fluctuations or changes in the trapping fields. All of these effects lead to fluctuations of the number of trapped atoms, as well as their position and temperature.

Debugging the system is a long process, but this can be greatly helped by monitoring the environmental conditions at all times. This may sound elaborate, however with the rising popularity of time series databases and data visualisation software, it is possible to develop a convenient monitoring system. We made use of cheap and easily programmable microcontrollers for data collection, and two popular open source platforms, InfluxDB and Grafana, for storing and visualising the data, respectively. We set up a large network of sensors throughout the labs, aimed at monitoring all the parameters relevant to the operation of the experiments. If atom numbers fluctuated, or something wasn’t performing well, we could quickly narrow down the problem by looking at our Grafana dashboards. This meant that our experimental control sequence could be quickly tweaked from home for compensating the environmental fluctuations, and the monitoring system proved to be an extremely useful tool in achieving BECs remotely.

Dr Amruta Gadge working from home with an image of her BEC on screen{credit}Amruta Gadge{/credit}

We were installing a new 2D magneto-optical trap atom source in the lab, and managed to see a signal from it just the day before the lockdown. I remember clearly that I was very worried that lockdown was going to delay the progress of our experiment significantly. . However, thankfully we could keep operating remotely, and managed to achieve our long-awaited first BEC from my home.

I was very excited when I saw the image of our first BEC. I had spent the whole day optimising the evaporation cooling stage. It was past 10pm, and I was about to stop for the day and suddenly the numbers started looking promising. I continued tweaking the parameters and in just few attempts, I saw the bimodal distribution of the atoms — a signature of a BEC. It was strange to have no one there to celebrate with in person, but we instead got together to hold celebrations virtually — something we are all getting used to now. I was really hoping to get the first BEC of our experiment before moving to my next post-doc, and having it obtained remotely turned out to be even more gratifying.

*Dr. Amruta Gadge is now a post-doctoral researcher in the cold atoms and laser physics group at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.

Return to the lab

Posted on September 14, 2020 by Ankita Anirban

As coronavirus restrictions have been easing over the past few months, increasing numbers of researchers are starting to return to labs and begin experimental work again. Nature Reviews Physics organised a photo competition, inviting submissions of photos which depict lab-life in the era of COVID-19.

Here are some of our favourite entries:

Safety first – particles from outer space second! In this picture you see Claire Antel (left) and Lydia Brenner (right) in the lab of the FASER Experiment at CERN. This new dark matter detector will be installed 100 meters underground before the end of this year. This picture was taken on the 10th of July when we for the first time managed to test the detector by measuring cosmic ray particles. You can see the normal protective gear we always have to wear, such as steel-reinforced work boots and helmets, as well the face-masks that are now mandatory in all indoor work areas at CERN. You can also see that we have to maintain distance at all times, which makes working on the same small machine, between us in the picture, slightly more complicated, but we managed. Submitted by Lydia Brenner

Luca Naticchioni (INFN) and Maurizo Perciballi (INFN) working on the installation of a new underground seismic station at the candidate site for the Einstein Telescope in Sardinia, Italy (Sos Enattos – Lula, August 2020). Submitted by Maurizio Perciballi.

Marco La Cognata is mounting experimental set-up for a Nuclear Astrophysics experiment at INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Sud (in Catania, Italy). The 27Al beam for this experiment was the first delivered in Italian laboratories after the lock-down. Taken in May 2020. Submitted by Sara Palmerini.

Part of the SMOG2 group installing, in front of the LHCb detector, the first gas fixed target at the LHC. LHC will have not only beam-beam but also beam-gas interactions. A new frontier for quantum chromodynamics and astroparticle physics, LHCb cavern, CERN 6th of August 2020. Submitted by Pasquale di Nezza.

And finally, our winning photo is:

Optical alignment of microscopy setup at IIT GENOVA. Immediately after Italy announces a little relaxation (mid of May 2020) for the researcher to continue their research activities following the strict norms and regulation advisory. Submitted by Rajeev Ranjan

Congratulations Rajeev! Rajeev will be receiving a one-year personal subscription to Nature Reviews Physics. Stay tuned for our next photo competition which will announced soon via Twitter – follow us @NatRevPhys for more information!

Strike4BlackLives

Posted on June 9, 2020 by Zoe Budrikis

Post compiled by Ankita Anirban.

10 June 2020 is #Strike4BlackLives and we urge you to participate in this strike. Organised by a group of physicists, led by Brian Nord and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, this is a day to #ShutDownAcademia and #ShutDownSTEM in solidarity with Black colleagues, Black students and Black people who are excluded from academia. Learn more about the strike here.

“As researchers, teachers, students, and staff we devote an immense amount of our time and mental energy to learning more about the world and ourselves within the framework of our own discipline. The strike day gives us the space and time to center Black lives, show solidarity with academics with marginalized ascribed identities, to educate ourselves about the ways in which we and our institutions are complicit in anti-Black racism, and to take concrete action for change.” – Particles for Justice call to action.

Thousands have pledged to join the strike, including the arXiv and the American Physical Society. Today, take time to pause your academic work and reflect on your role within the academic institution. Talk to your colleagues, organise within your department and work to become anti-racist.

The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be an anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it’s the only way forward.

— Ijeoma Oluo (@IjeomaOluo) July 15, 2019

In the UK, just 1.7% of first year physics undergraduates in 2016 were Black and an IOP report from 2012 shows that for PhD- holding researchers, the number is even lower at 0.1%. If you are not Black, take a moment to count how many Black physicists you have come across in your academic career.

Source: https://cx.report/2020/06/02/equity/

It is clear that academic institutions are in need of radical structural change. Yet with so few Black voices within the system, there is an urgent need for non-Black allies to take an active role in campaigning for change.

Here we provide some starting points we have found useful for learning more about racism in academia, how racism and science are inextricably linked and the case for a more inclusive and pluralist science.

Being Black in physics

For non-Black academics, the first step to understanding the extent to which racism pervades academic life is to hear the stories of Black academics. One place to start is the #BlackintheIvory hashtag on Twitter which has been used to share experiences of Black academics.

Op-ed: The ‘Benefits’ of Black physics students by Jedidah Isler, New York Times, 2015

News: Why are there so few Black physicists? by Ryan Mandelbaum, Gizmodo, 2020

Perspective: Curiosity and the end of discimination by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Nature Astronomy, 2017

Blog: Ain’t I a woman? At the intersection of gender, race and sexuality by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Women in Astronomy blog, 2014

Addressing the inequalities and discrimination within academia requires structural change. As an individual, you can campaign within your department to recognise the need for this change and enact it in policies regarding hiring, mentoring and support for Black students. When organising a conference or a new collaboration, reflect on your choice of participants and strive to include more Black voices in the conversation.

500 Women Scientists – Black History Month

Fellows of the National Society of Black Physicists

Who are the Black Physicists? A historical list

Science and colonialism

Modern science as we practise it today has inextricable links to empire, colonialism and the slave trade. Here are some accessible resources which introduce how colonialism has shaped science:

Podcast: BBC Radio 4 In Our Time – on astronomy and the British empire

Blog: Black Women Physicists In the Wake by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, 2017

Reading list: Decolonising science reading list compiled by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Building a more inclusive science

In addition to recognising the historical impact of colonialism on science, it is also important to acknowledge the influence it continues to wield within scientific practice today. Here are some resources that re-centre Indigenous science:

Australian Indigenous Astronomy

Blog: The fight for Mauna Kea and the future of science by Sara Segura Kahanamoku, Massive Science, 2019

Comment: Towards inclusive practices with indigenous knowledge by Aparna Venkatesan et al., Nature Astronomy, 2019

Article: Challenging epistemologies: Exploring knowledge practices in Palikur astronomy by Lesley Green, Futures, 2009

Article: ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ and ‘Science’: Reframing the Debate on Knowledge Diversity by Lesley Green, Archaeologies, 2008

Long Reads:

Superior by Angela Saini.

Reaching for the Moon: The Autobiography of NASA Mathematician by Katherine Johnson

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Beyond Banneker: Black Mathematicians and the Paths to Excellence by Erica N. Walker

A different kind of dark energy: placing race and gender in physics, BSc thesis by Lauren Chambers, Department of African American Studies, Yale University

Behind the paper: CP violation in neutrino oscillations

Posted on May 12, 2020 by Zoe Budrikis

In 1967, Andrei Sakharov proposed conditions required in the early universe for generating
matter and anti-matter at different rates, to explain the abundance of matter in our universe
today. Charge-Parity (CP) violating processes are essential under these conditions.
Measurements of the CP violation in quarks, first performed in 1964, are too small to explain
the difference, and finding other sources of CP violation is an ongoing quest in the physics
community. In April 2020, the T2K collaboration published a paper in Nature suggesting
large CP violation in the leptonic sector, namely in neutrino oscillations. Some of the
researchers involved in the project tell us their story.

A guest post by Ciro Riccio (Scientist, Stony Brook University), Patrick Dunne (Scientist,
Imperial College London), Pruthvi Mehta (Ph.D. student, University of Liverpool), Sam
Jenkins (Ph.D. student, University of Sheffield), Tomoyo Yoshida (Graduated Ph.D. student,
Tokyo Institute of Technology), Clarence Wret (Scientist, University of Rochester)

The oscillation analysis, whose results were recently published in Nature, is the last link in a
long chain of work. It amalgamates the effort of the entire collaboration, from those designing
and constructing the experiment 20 years ago, to the countless hours of detector operations
taken by people all over the world, to the development of the analyses.

The project
There are over 400 people working on T2K, in 12 countries, at 69 institutes. Many of us have
spent years building our bit of the experiment, from physical objects like detector or beamline
instrumentation, to abstract items like data analysis frameworks. Looking at the author list,
you’ll see that T2K consists of collaborators from all over the world. Our daily
communications happen online; in video meetings, emails, and chats. It’s sometimes a
challenge to find good time-slots for connecting people over 16 time zones, and it’s not
uncommon to sign-off from a meeting with a good-night, only to be met with a good-morning,
and vice versa.

Our international collaborators frequently fly to Japan to spend a week or two monitoring the
experiment in Tokai—on the east coast—where the neutrino beamline and Near Detectors
are, or Kamioka—just west of the Japanese alps—where the Far Detector is. In addition to
the flashing computer screens and sounding alarms, we get to witness a very different side
of Japan from the bright lights of Tokyo, from the beautiful mountains and rivers of rural
Japan, to the delicious local specialities. Avoiding the risk of data loss often occurs at the
cost of sleep for the operations experts (as the contributors to this blog post can attest)—but
all is forgotten after a morning visit to the local onsen (hot-spring).

It’s impossible to overemphasise the fantastic experience of Japanese culture as an added
bonus of partaking in T2K. Many of the restaurants in the Tokai and Kamioka areas are
familiar with members of the collaboration, and are very accommodating to international
collaborators. The owner of one particular restaurant in Tokai often recognises Sam and
remembers that he can speak a small amount of the language (chotto), and indulges him to
order in broken Japanese (we like to think it’s good for practice, and not solely their
entertainment). A favourite annual event is the sweet potato festival (imo matsuri), a
community event in Tokai held in November to celebrate the root vegetable that the Ibaraki
prefecture is renowned for.

T2K collaboration meeting, Paris 2019, Credit: Pieyre Sylvaineat

The measurement
The Super-Kamiokande Far Detector started construction in 1991 in Kamioka, and operates
24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so as not to miss rare astrophysical events, such as
supernova bursts. The neutrino beam and the Near Detectors started construction 2001
(beam) and 2007 (Near Detectors) in Tokai, and are continuously operating when we have
pre-allocated beam time, sometimes up to seven months per year.
To make our measurement we not only need the neutrino beam and the detectors, but also a
computer-simulated model of the entire experiment, painstakingly quantifying how we think
each component behaves and how certain we are of that description. This includes
everything from the neutrino beam (and the proton beam collisions that creates it), to the
neutrino interactions in our detectors, to the density of the Earth between Tokai and
Kamioka, to how good our detectors are at measuring the neutrinos.

To characterise the neutrino beam, we have two detectors (“ND280” and “INGRID”) 280m
from the neutrino source, which have a staggering amount of neutrinos passing through
them. Occasionally these neutrinos interact at the Near Detectors, occasionally they interact
300km later in Super-Kamiokande, but most of the time they continue out through Earth’s
atmosphere, propagating deep into space. To put things into perspective, this analysis used
about 3×10²¹(3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) proton interactions to create the neutrino
beam. Roughly one neutrino is created per proton interaction, but due to their rare interaction rate with matter, we observe a mere 120,000 neutrino events at ND280 (60,000
of which were used in our analysis) and about 500 at Super-Kamiokande over the course of
nine years. In the early neutrino beam experiments of the 1970s, the data are often on less
than 500 neutrino events, with the experiments sitting right next to the neutrino source for
tens of years. Today we have about the same number of neutrino events in a similar amount
of time, but sitting 300km away from the source at Super-Kamiokande. It’s only recently that
we have the technology, international funding support from governments, and scientific
community in place to produce such powerful neutrino beams, which are the backbone of
these precise measurements.

Presentation of final results of the oscillation analysis. Credit: Pieyre Sylvaineat

Once the neutrinos are characterised at the Near Detector, the oscillation analysis takes all
the models of the neutrino beam, the detectors, the neutrino interaction, and neutrino
oscillations, combines them with their constraints, and blends them together to describe our
observations. The analysis and all of its inputs turns PhD students’, scientists’ and
professors’ daily work into many cycles of communication-implementation-validation, over
the course of more than a year. When validations and tests are satisfied, we finally get to
look at the data and make our measurement of the neutrinos’ oscillations. That last link in
the long chain has the privilege to see the final result first in the collaboration. The moment
when the plot pops onto your screen and you’re the only person who knows what it shows is
pretty special. For this result, published in April 2020, we first saw the results internally in
Autumn 2018, and spent the time between then and now extensively validating and testing
alternate explanations.

Looking ahead
T2K is currently in the process of updating the analysis using more data taken during
2019/2020, and using better models of the experiment, all thanks to the continuing dedicated
work of all our collaborators. Many of us are also working on upgrades of the neutrino
beamline, the Near Detectors and the Far Detector, to squeeze out more science from the
neutrino beam. Our results published in Nature are the strongest constraint on the CP
violating phase in neutrinos to date, but we have only taken about half of our allocated data.
There is much more to come and the prospects are truly exciting for all of us. As we
continue, we’re including the work of even more people than the analyses that came before;
new students, scientists and professors. We hope they, like us, get their share of the
pleasant, stressful, lovely, frustrating, and ultimately rewarding experience of being on an
international science collaboration such as ours.

Party at Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay. Credit: Pieyre Sylvaineat

What’s the difference between a supernova and a fork?

Posted on March 23, 2020 by Zoe Budrikis

Francesca Chadha-Day is a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, studying particle astrophysics and axion phenomenology. She is also a comedian. Here, Fran writes for us about her experience of stand-up comedy.

My first stand-up comedy performance was an unfortunate side effect of a promise I made to myself. I used to be an atrocious public speaker and, at the start of my PhD, vowed to do something about it. I promised myself I would say yes to every public speaking opportunity that came my way for the next few months. I deeply regretted this promise when I opened an e-mail from Bright Club – a comedy night where academics do stand-up about their research. According to my self-imposed rules, I had to do it.

{credit}Steve Cross{/credit}

For the next month, most of my free time was devoted to writing and meticulously memorising my set. I was terrified. When my time on stage finally arrived, it was 20 seconds of blinding fear, followed by eight minutes of pure joy (and relief). Making a room full of people laugh is absolutely brilliant.

My first set asked and answered the question “what do theoretical particle physicists do all day?” My answer is that we spend our time figuring out what the universe would look like if the laws of physics were just a little bit different than what we currently think. For example, what if there were new particles, new interactions between particles, or even new dimensions? Comparing these calculations to data helps us discover what the laws of physics really are. In other words, we write fan fiction for the universe. This first short set formed the basis of my first solo show, Physics Fan Fiction, which I took to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016.

I believe that science comedy is a great addition to the landscape of public engagement with science. It appeals to people who might not want to come to a more traditional science talk, and it’s a perfect medium for communicating how science works. Rather than focusing only on the facts and figures of physics, my comedy explores the scientific method, the challenges of making progress in particle physics, and day to day life as a theoretical physicist. I even have a set on quantum field theory.

This kind of science communication really appeals to me because I have never been that excited by how large space is, or how fast the protons can go at the Large Hadron Collider. I am excited by the fact that the laws of physics which make a star explode into a supernova are the same laws of physics that make celery. The immense variety of phenomena that arise from the interactions of 18 or so fundamental particles is what physics is all about. This is the subject of my recent show “10 key differences between a supernova explosion and a fork”.

Writing a stand-up comedy show is a highly creative endeavour – and theoretical physics is just as creative. My creative process is more or less the same, whether I am writing a set, thinking up a new method to discover dark matter, or even debugging some code. For me, it’s all about asking stupid questions, and then doing my best to answer them. “What are the main differences between a supernova and a fork?” is a pretty stupid question. Einstein’s question, “how come the speed of light is a constant in Maxwell’s equations” might well have seemed stupid initially, but it led to one of the most beautiful and revolutionary theories in physics.

So, what are the key differences between a supernova and a fork? The first difference is that a supernova lasts for a few weeks, whereas forks are stable more or less indefinitely. The last is that no-one knows what happens if you put a supernova in a microwave.

Interactions: Nell Freudenberger

Posted on March 10, 2020 by Zoe Budrikis

Ankita Anirban interviews Nell Freudenberger about her book `Lost and Wanted’ whose protagonist is a theoretical physicist.

`Lost and Wanted’ is a novel about friendship, grief and parenthood. Helen, the protagonist, is coming to terms with the death of her best friend, Charlie, when she begins to receive mysterious texts from her friend’s phone. Her son later claims to have seen Charlie in their house. The story unfolds as Helen tries to explain these seemingly `supernatural’ phenomena, while reflecting on her friendship with Charlie and continuing her academic work.

What is perhaps unusual about this plot is that Helen is a theoretical physicist. Explanations of physics concepts are threaded throughout the narrative, but the execution is not heavy-handed. Rather, physics is a focus of the book only as it is central to Helen’s life and worldview. I found Helen compelling and convincing and it was refreshing to be able to relate to a character, not necessarily in terms of feelings, but simply in her daily routines and concerns as a researcher.

When I finished the book, I wanted to learn about the author and was surprised to find that she did not have a physics background and her previous work was not about science at all. Curious to find out more about her motivation to write this novel and how she found the process, I reached out to her.

What inspired you to write a novel about a physicist?

I wanted to write a book about women and work; about the commitment of a woman to a career that demanded sacrifices of her. In my first draft (which I threw away completely) the narrator was a writer. The problem was that I got bored thinking about something I knew so well, and the writing reflected that. I have a friend from college who is an astrophysicist, and I wrote to him to ask whether he could recommend an introductory undergraduate cosmology textbook. He did, and reading it made me wonder if my female narrator could be a physicist. That idea was terrifying at first because I don’t have a background in science. Usually though, the idea that scares you is the one that’s worth pursuing. I wonder if that’s true in science as well.

Credit: Elena Seibert

The physics metaphors are `entangled’ with the plot and structure of the book. Which came to you first, the metaphors or the plot?

Characters always come first, followed by plot. I resisted using the science in the book metaphorically at all, at least at first. I really wanted readers to see Helen doing science `onstage’ in the novel, rather than simply throwing in technical jargon to make the reader believe she was a scientist. I thought Helen would be very impatient with scientific metaphors like gravity used to describe romantic attraction, or entanglement for friendship. In talking to physicists though, I started to change my mind. One LIGO experimental physicist told me that our 3D brains have a lot of trouble understanding certain phenomena without leaning on analogies (he was talking about describing black holes quantum mechanically as opposed to classically at the time) and that he wasn’t opposed to them. He said that the trick was to make those metaphors as accurate as possible. I thought that by really trying to understand the work that Helen was doing myself, I might be able to make the scientific concepts in the book more complex and evocative than they normally are in casual conversation.

How did you go about doing your research – both on the technical aspects of the science and also about the daily rhythms of life as a physicist?

To begin with, I read a lot. I’m lucky that many physicists consider it worth their time to write for a general audience. Books by David Kaiser, Lisa Randall, Kip Thorne, Janna Levin, Steven Weinberg, and Louisa Gilder, as well as a sociology of LIGO by Harry Collins and Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein, were especially helpful. My reading gave me the confidence to approach some physicists myself and I was fortunate that they were all so generous with their time. I was struck by how passionate these physicists were about their work, and how willing they were to put it in simple terms for a novice. I once had an amusing conference call with two LIGO physicists from the interferometer at Livingston, where they helped me brainstorm violent disasters that might occur in a LIGO lab. (For the record, their ideas were bloodier than mine.) I also visited labs at Columbia and MIT to see some of the equipment that appears in the novel, as well as small details like the objects that might sit on a physicist’s desk, for example, a cosmic microwave background stuffed toy. You can’t make this stuff up …

Did you have any preconceived notions about the life of a physicist which you reconsidered after your research?

I kept trying to find some dramatic way in which physicists saw the world differently. I was thinking about that especially in terms of grief because Charlie’s death is the center of the book. I asked every scientist I spoke to, “Is there something that makes you different from other people because you’re a physicist?” Their answers were very boring; one physicist told me that he’s not afraid of flying, because he understands the way the plane operates. I came to the conclusion that physicists are more like the rest of us than we think, and that Helen should react to loss the same way anyone else would, with some magical thinking—what the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt calls “irrational expectations of recovery.”

As far as preconceived notions go, I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know sexual harassment was as prevalent in the science departments of universities as it is in the humanities. I think I got that wrong because most of my friends in college were liberal arts majors, and because female students in STEM are so underrepresented in popular culture.

How much do you relate to the way Helen sees the world? Does she have a life you think you would enjoy?

I loved learning about Helen’s work. I don’t like the idea that science and the humanities require different types of brains, and the wonderful physicist-writers I read while researching the novel disprove that theory anyway. That said, it seems unlikely that I would’ve made it as a physicist. But if you could build me a theoretical model in which I could have done physics at Helen’s level (or even a less elevated one) I think I would have loved her life. Some readers have said that Helen is cold, or that she sees the world in a strange way; if that’s true, those are qualities I share. I do often feel sort of removed from other people, more of an observer than a participant. I won’t speak for scientists, but I think this is probably true of most writers.

Courtesy of Knopf

What’s in our browser tabs? October 2019

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Zoe Budrikis

As editors of physics journals, we love reading the latest research papers, but we also love a bit of lunch-break science-related browsing. Here are some pieces that caught our eyes in October:

Nature and physics. In Physics Today, Melinda Baldwin recounts the highs and lows of physics research published in Nature over the past 150 years.

At APS News, Preprints make inroads outside of physics. “Recently, however, the tide has begun to shift. Since 2013, dozens of preprint servers in fields such as biology, chemistry, and sociology have popped up and garnered tens of thousands of submissions.”

Football’s concussion crisis is awash with pseduoscience, reports Christie Aschwanden in Wired. “Products that offer a “seatbelt” or “bubble wrap” for the brain claim to reduce head trauma. If only the laws of physics worked that way.”

Check out the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics 36th annual Gallery of Fluid Motion and an accompanying editorial explaining how winners were picked and giving some stats on which fluid dynamics phenomena get awarded the most.

Review with care. Writing in Science, Adriana L. Romero-Olivares gives good advice for when, and how, to comment as a referee on the level of written English of a scientific paper.

Athene Donald asks, What do we know about the research ecosystem? “There is a need for more understanding of the decisions that are taken where and by whom in the research ecosystem and what the implications of these decisions are as they ripple through higher education and far beyond. A new research institute – the Research on Research Institute, or RoRI for short – was launched this week at the Wellcome building (a key partner) in London , with a wealth of snappily short talks to illustrate the range of issues RoRI might elect to study.”

What’s in our browser tabs? August 2019

Posted on August 29, 2019 by Zoe Budrikis

Welcome to our new monthly link round-up! As editors of physics journals, we love reading the latest research papers, but we also love a bit of lunch-break popular science reading. Here are some pieces that caught our eyes in August:

Ready, set, bake — Physics World. Rahul Mandal, 2018 Great British Bake Off winner — and metrologist — writes about the science of baking. (PS: if you like cake, check out Rahul’s instagram)
Nathalie Walchover’s account in Quanta magazine of the latest developments in the Hubble constant saga. This summer the tension between different measurements of H0 got more dramatic with new papers coming out and a dedicated meeting at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.
There are some stunning images in the shortlist for the RPS 2019 science photographer of the year award.
How Ancillary Technology Shapes What We Do In Physics.Why is the definition of the second based on cesium atoms? Why do MRI scanners use such large magnets? Partly because of physics, but largely because of technology and history, as Chad Orzel explains.
We can’t believe we only just discovered this gem from 2017: Twelve LaTeX packages to get your paper accepted by Andreas Zeller. Examples include “The significance package. Alters your experiment settings until results become statistically significant, repurposing LaTeX’s built-in formatting algorithm for advanced p-hacking. Use as \usepackage[p=0.05]{significance}.” and “The award package. Makes your paper win an award, as in \usepackage[bestpaper]{award}.”
The physics professor who says online extremists act like curdled milk. Over at The Guardian, Julia Carrie Wong talks to Neil Johnson about his work analyzing online extremism and hate in terms of gelation.

Rivalry, crystal structure prediction and discovery of new materials

Posted on April 5, 2019 by Giulia Pacchioni

Post by Artem Oganov.

The review in Nature Reviews Materials can be read here.

The story of our review started in 2006 when my group and the duo of Chris Pickard and Richard Needs published papers that changed the view of the scientific community in an important way. Prior to this, it was widely believed that crystal structures are, in general, not predictable: the number of possible structures is just way too large, and going through all of them is impossible. Our works showed that this problem can be handled, and this opens a way for computational materials discovery. I developed an evolutionary approach, while Pickard and Needs used random sampling. Within a few years we found ourselves in an increasingly intense competition which drove us to develop our methods and explore new applications for them, which, of course, is good for science.

At some point it became clear that if the intensity of this competition was allowed to develop further it could slip into bitterness, and potentially outright hostility. Did I need to win such a fight, if it brought me nothing positive in the end? The question was how to change this. I knew two things: first, that every problem has a solution. Second, I knew that with the right approach every problem can be turned into an advantage. At some point Qiang Zhu, my former PhD student and now Assistant Professor, found a brilliant solution: to write together a review. First, we felt that the community really needed such a review of many years of hard work, now not just of two groups, but also of many others who joined this field later. Second, writing a review with your rivals makes the review actually better: reviews have to be balanced, and rivals are the best people for ensuring this balance! Third, working on something together helps to build bridges. So, with this in mind, after a thorough discussion with Qiang Zhu, Chris Pickard and Richard Needs, I talked to Giulia Pacchioni, an editor at Nature Reviews Materials, and convinced her that we could write something important for the community.

We began working on the review from a position of low trust. We had countless debates, and the writing initially went very slowly. This delay risked us losing the invitation. However, the editors were very patient and encouraging. However, the editors were very patient and encouraging. The first skeleton, basically, a set of bullet points, was sketched by Richard Needs, and then each of us expanded these points, transforming them into a more or less coherent text (I think I took the most bullet points, Chris Pickard took many as well). We tried different ways of co-writing, experimenting with Google-docs and Overleaf, but there was not one technical solution that everyone liked, so eventually we just created our own versions of the review and let Qiang Zhu merge and edit them all. Much later he told me that he quietly cut a lot of text which had a potential for igniting arguments; funny that at the time no one noticed this, which I guess shows that our differences of opinion are actually of little importance. Once we had a complete draft, everyone started editing the text written by everyone else. By the end of this process we were all on the same wavelength. After submission we had one round of peer review and quite a bit of proofreading, mostly handled by me. The end result is one we can be proud of: a nice review of a field that we were fortunate to catalyze. But also a human victory. Rivals becoming friends and gaining a shared understanding is so much more important than winning a competition.

Artem Oganov
Center for Energy Science and Technology
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia.

The International Physicists’ Tournament: a shortcut to research for undergraduate students

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Anastasiia Novikova

Guest post by David Collomb, PhD student at the university of Bath

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Interactions: Chen Fang and the Materiae database

Posted on March 1, 2019 by Zoe Budrikis

Post by Anastasiia Novikova.

In theory, many ordinary materials can have exotic topological phases. But how can we find them? In 2018 a research group from the National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics in Beijing scanned 39519 materials to predict which phases of the already-known compounds might exhibit topological properties. These materials were summarised into an interactive database Materiae, where you can browse compounds containing particular elements, check if they have any topological phases and visualise their band structure.

We asked Prof. Chen Fang — one of the team members who worked on Materiae along with Prof. Hongming Weng — to give us more details of the project, which has now been published in Nature.

When did the database start? What were the main challenges of this project? What goals do you have for the future?

The database has been online since 23 July 2018; it appeared simultaneously with the posting of the corresponding paper on arXiv. By now there have been over 10000 unique visitors (1=ip*day). The most difficult part is, naturally, the calculation that was done to obtain the topological properties of about 30000 materials. The theory, the underlying work was accomplished back in late 2017 (arXiv:1711.11049 and 1711.11050), but even so, it was an effort to implement the fully automated algorithm shown in the flowchart. Currently we have the band structures plotted for topological materials only, and in the future we will add the band structure plots for all materials, topological and non-topological.

Using your algorithm, you scanned 39519 materials. How much time did the whole calculation process take?

We didn’t track the CPU hours used on this, but if we count the time spent on debugging small bugs now and then, it took us about three to four months in total for the bulk results to come out.

You mention that 8056 materials from your database are actually topological. How many of these materials were experimentally studied?

All materials have been reportedly synthesized in literature, but most of them were not studied from a “topological perspective”, but were studied for superconductivity or ferroelectricity, for example. I think at most few hundreds of these materials have been studied for potential topological properties.

What is the most “underestimated” material?

One example is Tl₂Nb₂O₇. Oxides are seldom considered as topological materials in literature, yet our database registers it as a topological semi-metal. Surprised by this result, we further looked into this material, and realized that the mixed-valence nature of Tl ion is the origin of the nontrivial topology.

Another is Ba₃Cd₂As₄. The layered structure made us expect it to be a weak topological insulator, but our database shows it to be a new type of topological crystalline insulator (having so-called C2-anomalous surface states). Shortly after the prediction, experimental groups have started synthesizing this material.

We expect the study of certain materials, like the ones above, may be “revived” by what we show in the database.

The database contains only non-magnetic materials. Is it possible to envision a similar type of database for magnetic materials?

The entire prediction is based on first-principle calculation, but magnetism is notoriously difficult to predict/include in any first-principle calculations. Therefore, while some theoretical work on the mapping between symmetry data and topological data has been out there for a while (arXiv:1707.01903), I do not think a similar material database can be obtained in near future because of the inherent difficulty of DFT mentioned above.

Interactions: Anastasiia Novikova

Posted on December 17, 2018 by Iulia Georgescu

Anastasiia Novikova will join Nature Reviews Physics in January after a PhD at Synchrotron SOLEIL and a postdoc at CEA Saclay in France.

What made you want to be a physicist?

I was always curious to understand natural phenomena, and physics seemed to explain how almost everything worked in the Universe. Besides, I enjoyed the scientific approach used in physics: experiment and demonstration.

If you weren’t a physicist, what would you like to be (and why)?

If not a physicist, I would definitely be an artist. As a child, I was passionate about drawing and painting (and I still am). Shapes and colours of nature were always hypnotizing me.

Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?

I have a whole list of historical figures but the one I would really like to meet is Richard Feynman. To me, he is a person remarkable for his manner of popularizing physics and capturing the audience. The first thing I would ask him: “What is your secret? “

Which is the development that you would really like to see in the next 10 years?

I would like to see the development of Artificial Intelligence in the domain of Genetics to help us understand such issues as genetic disorders.

What’s your favourite particle?

While studying the Physical Chemistry module at Pierre and Marie Curie University, I was fascinated with how the electronic structure of a compound could influence its colour. In this regard, my favourite particle is, definitely, the electron.

What would your dream conference be like?

The conference I dream of would be dedicated to the greatest discoveries of all time. And being imaginary, it would be organized by the pioneers, with, for example, Isaac Newton giving a Welcome speech.

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