The hype is over, let the physics begin

So after physicists today managed to guide a beam of protons around the 27 km Large Hadron Collider (LHC) it seems like the world didn't end. But after all the wide ranging press coverage I am not sure if I wish it probably did.
(photo credit: CERN)

There is no doubt that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a marvelous machine that will possibly shed light on what gives particles mass or even breath life into theories such as a "sypersymmetric" world, a theory which predicts a new array of heavy particles that mirror those of the standard model. It is also a magnificent machine in terms of the scale of the engineering, guiding protons 100 m underground at near the speed of light as they whizz around at temperatures colder than space itself to collide in detectors the size of cathedrals.

But there is also a chance that the LHC will see nothing. Some argue that this could be an even more interesting result, but I doubt the politicians will concur. Costing around $10bn the LHC doesn't come cheap. I know some researchers in other areas of physics such as in condensed matter physics who would scoff at the huge price. It also probably wont provide any directly applicable spin-off technologies. But what it will do is ask fundamental questions about the constituents of matter which push back the barrier of our ignorance, and that is worthwhile enough. As Robert Wilson, the first director of Fermilab (The US center for particle physics) said when he was asked by Congress to justify spending millions of dollars on a particle accelerator, “it has nothing to do directly with defending our country, except to make it worth defending.”

The media coverage of the LHC has been quite incredible, something that I have never experienced in physics before. No doubt they have caught on to the numerous lawsuits thrown at CERN to stop it from operating. Ranging from a lawsuit filed at a US district court in Hawaii to an injunction sought from the European Court of Human Rights. This also gives the press enough ammunition from researchers who say that turning it on will cause the end of the world.

Although this nonsense is usually the realm of the Sun, which we all come to expect, but it has also creept into almost all the more respectable papers. Today The Telegraph had on its front page, "If you are reading this at 8.30... then Stephen Hawking was right." No doubt Stephen Hawking probably said it is impossible for the LHC to create a black hole and that is why we are still here. But it's a shame that the LHC is such a spectacular enough machine not to warrant such nonsense. It is probably a sign of our culture that to get a science story on the front page it has to be something which will directly be a threat to our lives. My main problem with this headline was that the LHC wasn't even performing collisions today, and it wont even be doing them at full energy (14 TeV) until March next year, so why wouldn't we still be here?

It is probably on the whole good that physics is being put at the front pages and on the news bulletins (it was lead story on the nightly news in the UK; the second news item was the onset of recession in the euro zone). But when its focus is on the end of the world and doomsday scenarios -- probably what most people will take away -- rather than the science, then it makes you wonder if it is worth it.

Probably the most humorous story about the LHC was in The Sun itself. After reading their story, it seems like they had properly understood that the doomsday scenarios are indeed nonsense and poked their usual fun at it. They latched onto the "LHC rap" that first appeared on YouTube around a month ago. They stated that boffins "have worried sceptics further - by posting a RAP SONG about the procedure on YouTube. " Supposedly the "procedure" is what the LHC how the LHC will work, nonsense, but good fun all the same. I emailed Kate McAlpine who made the video to ask when she made of all the press coverage of her rap, it seems like she had obviously learned a thing or two from her time as a CERN press contact.

Does coming first mean gold?

China will be very much in focus as we are about to be inundated by 24/7 media coverage -- the BBC is supposedly taking 470 people -- of the Olympic games less than a few days away in Beijing. But as the recent furore over the Chinese authorities restricting internet access for journalists escalated and then retreated, one thing is for sure: reporters may be writing about China's many gold medals at the events, but it may be in Research and Development (R&D) where China will be more satisfied about surpassing the US.

When I was a PhD student -- seemingly a long time ago -- at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) in Stuttgart, many of the seven main departments were brimming with Chinese researchers. At one point, the group meetings seemed to contain more Chinese scientists than German. Indeed, the MPI's are quite international centers for research, which are are geared around cutting edge facilities, high levels of funding and under the provision that no-one is required to do any teaching. Perfect places to quickly increase your knowledge of a myriad of experimental techniques and practices.

When I asked most of the Chinese researchers, who usually stayed on average around 2 years at the MPI, were they would be going next. Rather than saying going to the US or even staying in the research intensive environment of the MPI, most said they are going back to China, even some armed with government incentives such as a rent free house or a car.

But if this was a real government initiative to pull some of the researchers back from going abroad, it seems to be working. Productivity -- loosely defined as the number of papers with at least on researcher based or with formal affiliation to China -- has rocketed in the past few years. In physics more than 22 000 papers were published with one Chinese author, a five-fold increase from 2000. This figure has already surpassed the UK, France and Germany, and on the current trend will overtake the US in 2012 -- or in time for the next Olympics if you like.

Some research areas that I looked into for a recent article in this month's PhysicsWorld showed that China was racing ahead in nanoscience, publishing almost 13 000 articles in 2007, quantum information and high temperature superconductivity. Indeed, recently in the case of the latter, this rise has been most obvious. Ever since Japanese researchers found superconductivity at 26 K in an iron-based material in March, Chinese researchers have been at the forefront experimentally, having many of the breakthroughs themselves, such as increasing the transition temperature -- the temperature at which the material loses its electrical resistance -- to 55 K.

But the rise in quantity is not a loss in quality. The number of Chinese researchers publishing in Physical Review Letters, Nature and Science has also been increasing in the last few years. Particularly in Nature it has exploded, almost a ten fold increase from around 10 articles per year in the 1990's to 111 in 2007 -- though this may, or may not, reflect the tendency for Nature to publish a good fair share of papers in nanoscience.

But with China aiming to increase its spending on R&D from 1.4 % to 2.5 % in 2020, its not only going to be quick off the starting blocks, but seems to be in for the long distance.

The final outcome

I remember going on a trip to Manchester University earlier this year to do a profile for PhysicsWorld on the particle physicist Robin Marshall. It was over lunch that we began to talk about topics other his career and onto the hot issue of the day: the funding rumblings in a major research council in the UK.

Being my first encounter with a funding disaster, I was not too sure how bad it all sounded, but it was something that the 68 year old physicist said that always stuck in my mind: "there is something about this one, something really nasty about it," he said. Given his experience, I took note.

There was a lot of anger in January when the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) announced, without any consultation with the community, that the UK would pull out of the International Linear Collider as well as the Gemini telescopes in Hawaii and Chile as well as potentially cutting research grants by 25%.

Even though the government had given above inflation increases to each funding council, at the launch of the science budget in January, the public relations fanfare turned into a disaster. Question after question about the STFC's £80m black hole came from members of the community and the media to the panel, containing a nervous looking science minister, Ian Pearson, and John Denham the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

I was at that meeting in January and I was also in attendance of the meeting in London a few weeks ago where the STFC made the announcement of the final programmatic review into which projects it will now fund after a major consultation exercise. The two meetings couldn't have been any more different.

Or the one a few weeks ago couldn't have been more dull. This was mainly because of two reasons. One, the final programmatic review was released a week before the meeting, so most people found out whether their projects would be funded anyway. The resulting turn-out was minimal; probably most people who attended were actually based in London. I doubt the STFC had travel budgets in mind when they put the pdf of the review on their website.

The second reason is the rather disappointing statement from Richard Wade at the beginning of the meeting who asked if the media could wait until afterwards to put their questions to the panel members, consisting of STFC CEO Keith Mason, director of science programmes John Womersley and Peter Knights science-board chair. It probably turned out that the media would have added more fire to the question and answer session. Most people in the community were praising the STFC's consultation exercise -- the fire seemed to have been extinguished.

When we have been covering stories about the saga, we always tried to get to the bottom of how all this came about. Various proposals had been given: merging of two councils into the STFC, currency fluctuations, bad bookkeeping (probably a mixture of all three). So I guess the only memorable part of the meeting for me was when a member commented that he still didn't understand why the physics community had to go through it all for the last half a year. Mason reponded, rather discouragingly, that he didn't know either.

So is the saga at an end? Or is that the end of the beginning?

All for one, one for all

Research in physics is mostly done via multi-national collaborations. Have we reached the end of the road for European nations going it alone to build the next generation large scale facilities?

Much is still being made of the budget crisis at one of the UK's leading funding council -- The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). The reason for the cock-up still seems not to be fully known -- subscriptions to big international experiments increasing, currency fluctuations or the political wranglings of merging the previous two councils together.

In particle physics experiments are truly multi-national. If you take the case of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, near Geneva, -- due to come online after scientists have finally managed to cool 27km of magnets -- one country alone could never afford to build such a machine. Indeed, CERN was an early success of European co-operation after the second world war, people thought that it was only a token of European collaboration, but it turned out to be thriving success. The LHC, 23 years in the making and costing billions of dollars, will smash protons together at huge energies to search for theoretically predicted particles. These huge machines that operate on the TeV (approx 0.0000001 J) scale no-one alone can afford alone. So should we put all our eggs in the same basket and only have a few instruments in the world which can do similar science?

A derivation of these large particle smashers are synchrotron's that use electromagnetic radiation, such as X-rays to probe the structure of materials (rather than accelerate particles to smash each other and study the constituents). As electrons travel around 300m diameter circles (compared to the 27km circumference at the LHC) it is made to irradiate X-rays that can be used to study matter. These machines operate at a few GeV (a few orders of magnitude less than TeV) and are used in condensed-matter and biology.

The three top sources of GeV synchrotrons are in Japan, US and Europe (France). Japan and the US have gone alone and built their respective machines, while the ESRF is mostly a successful collaboration between Germany, UK and France. But the latest synchrotron to be built in Europe is the Diamond light source in Oxfordshire, less powerful (in terms of energy) than the ESRF. When much of the STFC saga broke out Diamond seemed to have been made a scapegoat for the cause of the 'black hole' at the STFC with most reports centered on its running costs which were apparently wildly underestimated (which was denied by the Diamond management).

Was Diamond a step in the wrong direction in terms of funding European science? Wouldn't it have been better to have pooled money to have a successor to the ESRF that would have made it the most intense synchrotron in the world?

There is a danger; probably due mostly to bureaucracy at European level. Take neutron science, previously Europe was the world leader with the Institute Laue Langevin in Grenoble (funded principally by UK, Germany and France) as well as with ISIS in Oxfordshire (geographically next to Diamond, funded by the UK). Plans were afoot to increase this lead with the European Spallation Source (ESS) which would be funded at European level from partner countries.

However, some countries pulled funding after most of the plans had been made. Germany went off and upgraded the FRM reactor in Munich (named FRMII), and ISIS got an upgrade (named the second target station, due to come online this summer). The plans were put on hold, and in the meantime the US had built the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) in Tennessee, which is now the world leader in terms of neutron flux. Japan also has built a new neutron facility at J-PARC, a massive $1.5bn experiment park, which means the focus is shifting away from Europe taking the forefront of neutron science. The ESS is back on track at the moment, but many would say a few years overdue.

The ESRF and the ILL have been a great success of European collaboration, being -- at the time -- the best instruments in the world to do X-ray and neutron science respectively. Europe seems to be going back to individually funded machines such as with FRMII, ISIS second target station and Diamond. To be once again at the forefront, maybe it is time for Europe to go back and collaborate to fund the 'smaller' facilities together rather than go it alone.

Resistance is futile

If you mentioned to people what they remember about 1986, what would they say? You may get answers such as the challenger space shuttle disaster which killed all seven crew; Argentina winning the World cup with the help of Diego Maradona or maybe the year when the European flag was adopted by the European Union. Probably one answer you wouldn't get (unless you happened to ask a physicist) is the discovery of high temperature superconductivity.

Superconductivity is one of those weird effects in nature: if you cool a metal such as lead or tin to low temperatures then all of a sudden its resistance will fall to zero, meaning that below this temperature, a current flowing through a wire of this material will incur no resistance and therefore persist indefinitely.

The discovery by Bednorz and Müller of superconductivity at 30 K was important for a number of reasons, one was that the standard model of superconductivity didn't allow superconducting transition temperatures this high (lead and tin are 7 and 4 K respectively) thus leading to a potential new mechanism for superconductivity. Two, it opened up a variety of related materials which pumped up the superconducting transition to 138 K at standard pressure in 1995 (applying an external pressure makes it go even higher). The discovery was so important that even by the next year Bednorz and Müller were awarded the Nobel prize in physics.

These materials, known collectively as the cuprates, are a double edged sword. One they enable very high superconducting transition temperatures to be achieved by chemical substitution and/or doping, but this delicate parameter space has meant getting a coherent experimental and theoretical picture of high temperature superconductivity has become cloudy.

A few years after the discovery, there were around 8000 papers per year being churned out, that fell to around 5000 in 2005 (still a high number nonetheless). Indeed, someone new to the field has to either spend a decade reading every publish paper or only select papers in the top journals. Grants were being pulled on research in high temperature superconductivity, researchers were thinking about other topics, a theory, and new materials seemed elusive.

but maybe that's about to change..

At the end of February a group of researchers in Tokyo reported a new Iron based superconductor at 26 K. Now, 26 K is still far less than the record, but already a few theoretical papers came out predicting that this was not a standard 'low' temperature superconductor - another high temperature superconductor has hit the scene.

Not only did it take a few days later before the first experimental paper on arxiv came out, by today there has already been around 20 papers on this material on arxiv. With chemical substitution the superconducting transition temperature has already increased to 52 K in a related material.

Are there similarities between the cuprates? Probably in more sense that one. The ability to substitute elements and also to tweak the amount of oxygen or other halogens means the parameter space is large. The 'first to the finish line' approach in superconductivity research in terms of finding a new superconductor with an even higher superconducting transition temperature is likely to make a splurge of papers to come out shortly.

Maybe this material gives us a chance to find out the mechanism for high temperature superconductivity or puts the elusive room temperature superconductor in sight. An explanation will need experimentalists to produce careful measurements that give theorists a clear view.

Tracking trends

I recently came across a new website from Thomson Scientific called sciencewatch. It is an interesting attempt to provide researchers with lists of hot papers, topics, countries and institutions all in terms of citations (bibliometrics), and nicely self-contained within a neatly branded website.

Sciencewatch seems to have started a few months ago based on using the results from Thomson's Essential Science Indicators that provide quantitative analysis of research performance. The website contains lists of hot researchers, topics, emerging fields of research, top trends in subject areas and covers a range of science fields, such as materials science, physics, medicine and chemistry.

I personally believe that you can infer a lot from these statistics, if one looks over long time periods (i.e. more than a few years; better still about a decade). But by the very nature of citations, however, I have to question the principle of sciencewatch pushing this analysis to detect 'emerging' topics, or 'hot' researchers (though there may be some level of hypocrisy here).

Many of the lists that define hotness, such as the hottest researchers, on sciencewatch look over a two year time period or even less. This causes a few problems; a two year period is probably just when your paper is starting to generate citations. In a quite noddy explanation, it may be that Thomson adds your paper to its database around 5-6 months after publication (this is variable of course). If someone then sees your paper by searching Thomson's database and then duly cites it, by the time the citation is tagged in Thomson's database it could be another six months before this happens. So it could take one year minimum to start gaining citations since your paper was published. If a paper is generating citations before quite soon then it is probably due to 'self citations'.

My problem is that the rankings which try to define something as hot, do not provide a very transparent method, or I at least have no idea how they defined these hot papers or topics. On the other hand if you look at the list of top countries in physics that are also provided on sciencewatch, you find a table with the total number of papers, total number of citations, and citations per paper over a timescale from 1997 - 2007 for each country in the top 20. This is very transparent, a nice large time period, and clearly defined table, indeed you can even start to infer your own analysis. In my view, citations per paper, is probably a good indication of quality. Although the US is highest in terms of citations, Switzerland is number one if you look at citations/paper - although it has only around a tenth of the papers the US publishes, these are on average, cited more.

For example, I just came across the hottest researchers for 2006 - 2007, the top three are all physicists -- each with 12 'hot' papers. Taking it further, the top three are all high energy physicists. Particle physics is renowned for its large author sets, could this just be due to the authors belonging to large collaborations, with many papers and thus many self-citations?

Most of the analysis for new hot researchers, such as the "rising stars," use rolling two month intervals to judge the output of researchers: "that have achieved the highest percentage increase in total citations" from a two month interval. This sort of thing reminds me of fantasy football, something I used to do as a teenager (not that long ago...) when you pick a team and then week in week out, after they have played, the players get ranked on goals scored, assists etc, and you build up point for your team. I couldn't help but notice a similarity, maybe you can start a physics dream team, put together a team of 10 researchers and then see how they compare month in month out, though I doubt such a thing would catch on with today's youths.

Looking at the hot papers, a new 'hot' paper listed in March (which happened to be published in 2006) is a paper in review of modern physics, on electronic structure calculations. It is well known that review articles are highly cited, but does that make them 'hot'? It is probably the case that review papers are supposed to consolidate an area of research and do not contain new results, so I wouldn't say they contain hot research.

It is also confusing on sciencewatch to have different sections entitled: "emerging research fronts", "Fast moving fronts," and "hot topics" I don't quite get the subtle difference between them, which all give different results for what is emerging, fast moving or hot in physics. These are also given on a monthly basis, I am not sure how this can change rapidly from month to another. One emerging research field in physics given in February 2008 is 'environment-induced sudden death', apparently.

A website such as this has a useful purpose, if only at the moment it seems to be a little confused about what data to show and how to analyze it (definitely the more tricky part). Using citation analysis for short term intervals is a tricky business and to start comparing researchers and topics is something difficult to do using only a search program on a database.

Off to the APS

This week I will be in New Orleans for the 2008 American Physical Society March meeting, which is basically the biggest condensed matter meeting worldwide, probably only the German physical Society meeting comes close, but with more than 7000 participants and a conference handbook that has a worse carbon footprint than a coal fired power plant, the APS is on another scale.

I already arrived in New Orleans last night, or more like this morning. The trip from Heathrow was pretty trouble free, apart from sitting down on the plane in Chicago, only to be told of a braking problem and thus the need to change planes.

Walking around today, mostly in the French quarter, there was no obvious impression left from the devastation that hurricane Katrina caused, though apparently many people are still waiting to be re-housed. On the way from the airport we did drive past the superdome, which was the home for many people during and after the hurricane had passed.

I wont be reporting most of what goes on here, but you can keep close tabs on the PhysicsWorld blog www.physicsworld.com/blog to keep up with the going's on.