Beijing and Quarks

My Chinese colleague (Q) came back from Beijing, China. He is a close collaborator with Professor Close. After the seminar, we went for a glass of beer to celebrate the success of the first departmental seminar.

It was a beautiful English day, which proved that finally Spring has come. This year the arrival of Spring was very late, unusually late so that may people wrote articles about it. (This is ironical because people recently tend to do worry about too early arrival of Spring due to the global warming...)

We sat on the safa near the bright window, and started to have a chat. From it, I learned that the current hadron research centre is moving from the US to China, particularly, Beijing. The large, high-quality particle collider was launched several years ago in Beijing, and now it is running. According to Q, the tremendous amont of data are now produced from this fascility, and wait to be analysed. In his seminar, Professor Close also quoted several experimental works from Beijing. Probably, we need to pay attention to Beijing if we are interested in Quarkonium and Glueballs.

Thankfully, Q teaches me many things about the quark model. I hope I can do some work on this field soon. My attention is on Charmonium and Bottomonium, mesons consisting of two heaviest quarks. I hope non-relativistic approaches can be applied to these systems.

Departmental Seminar

The first departmental seminar, for which I am in charge, has finished. The number of audience was not so great, but at least, 40-50 people kindly came to listen to the seminar. I and some of my colleagues had been worrying this number, because the speaker was Professor Frank Close, OBE, a fellow at Exter College, Oxford University. In this sense, today's number is perhaps "OK" level.

For your information, today's speaker was also a Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London. This position was once held by Chirstopher Wren, an architect who designed the current St Paul's Cathedral in the central London. (Wren is also known as a freind of Robert Hooke, a scientist who wrote "micrographia" and discovered the Hooke law (for a harmonic oscillator); and was the enemy of Isaak Newton.)

Professor Close is a very famous particle physicist in the UK, mainly for his contribution as a science communicator to the public. His Chirstmas lecture at the Royal Institution, "The Cosmic Onion", is widely known and the book and TV programmes were released based on this lecture, later on.

His talk was very interesting (about the quark model, especially on glueballs), but a question was whether the audience appreciated it or not.... Our university is a technology- and appliciation-oriented university, so that many (both students and academics) may not find this kind of basic physics interesting.Having said that, some of the audience today did very good questions in the seminar. It would be better if there were more questions from students.

I believe that the cultural level should be maintained high in universities. They should not simply seek for money by selling technologies and education. The achievement in the high cultural level ultimately attracts good studnets and researchers all over the world. In this sense, I would like to thank Professor Close for his intellectural talk. We cannot beat Oxford now for the culcural level (and the any others...), but this first departmental seminar might be the first small step to go....maybe...

Quantum and classical Chaos

There was a seminar given by a cond-mat physicist from the university of St. Andrews. The topic was about the optical lattice for BEC. It was interesting in general, but for me, his approach to tackle this problem was particularly interesting. He used the semi-classical quantization technique, based on the chaotic dynamics. I know there is a textbook example of sepratrices using the Duffing model, a double-well potential. But this speaker extended to a periodic potential!

Motivated by this talk, I started to learn Quantum and Classical Chaos, which I did about 10 years ago when I just started my master course in Tokyo. Actually, my original plan was to obtain my PhD degree based on Quantum Chaos. Thanks to advice from one of the lecturers in nuclear physics group in Komaba, I switched my interest to nuclear structure physics (mainly, mean-field theory). I agree that his advice was correct because I was able to write a nice PhD paper on nuclear high -spin structure that ultimately earned me the present permanent position as a nuclear physicist here in Surrey. However, my burning enthusiasm to study something exciting and new (rather than relatively old and well-established fields such as nuclear theory) are not completely extinguished in my mind yet.... I know this is a bad sign to build a fast track record. But it is also true that I have more freedom now. at least, in comparison to Post-docs who are pressured to write just a number of papers... I know it is the best thing to do what one can first thought of in the begining of the carrer. To me, Chaos was the one.

I tried Gutzwiller 10 years ago, and read most of the chapters. But, frankly speaking, my understanding is not so deep, unfortunately. Remebering that I also bought Reichl, this time I decided to go for it first., although this book is somewhat contravertial (typographical errors and misunderstanding of some physical concepts....). But, at the same time, this is a good introductory book for beginners to browse what are discussed among contemporary physicists in the field of Chaos.

I am in the twist map now, and found this topic is more interesting than I previously thought. You know, I spent the full 10 years as a phenomenological physicist, so it is sometimes difficult to comprehend mathematical models without good physical pictures... The twist map was one such example... at least in the begining, but I started to gain my old feeling about how to enjoy mathematical physics. Of course, I can understand deeper now by comparing with/introducing what I know in/learned from nuclear structure physics.