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

TIL if dealing with (huge_number - huge_number2) which can lead to machine precision noise in python computing, while mpmath can help a lot, sometimes just doing (huge_number.astype('float64') - huge_number2.astype('float64')) does the job more elegantly!

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

We've *gotta* revive this as a pet name for future colliders en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perhaps...

After >2 years, it's finally out!

Coffee and paper review

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

Cool ocean science work on "biofouling" for the Pacific One Neutrino Experiment :) 🧪⚛️ arxiv.org/abs/2507.09086

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

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

Fun paper I noticed last night by Chris Cappiello and Tansu Daylan :D Can a Dark Inferno Melt Earth's Core? arxiv.org/abs/2505.24070

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

While I'm happy to have a paper out tonight myself, I can't *not* read this one, excited to learn that the author is likely a skateboarder: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00099

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

LHCb paper on the first observation of CP violation in baryon decays, looks awesome! arxiv.org/abs/2503.16954

Nice! JWST, axions and the 0.1-1 eV window from Pinetti 🧪⚛️ arxiv.org/abs/2503.11753

Looks like a good paper to go through for my own education arxiv.org/abs/2502.19480

Nice paper on the possibility of LLP searches from fusion reactors: arxiv.org/abs/2502.12314

toying around with an idea: athompson-git.github.io/experiments.... Keeping a searchable database of my table of past, current, and future experiments here, will be finishing it over the next few weeks. Might make it fancier if it's useful

"Home has a different meaning for different people. For a select few graduate students, home was a building and a set of portakamps in the fixed-target area at Fermilab: Lab E." I'm thankful for this little snippet of physics history still up on the CCFR page: www.nevis.columbia.edu/ccfr/history...

I'm going through iNSPIRE's 2024 hep-ph papers, with 10 authors or less, sorted by citation count. It's somewhat elucidating - you can see where a lot of the action was this past year (a lot on the DESI results, for instance). It might be nice to have a year-in-review spotlight of some kind...

Throwback to a fun read: "The fluid dynamics of canine olfaction: unique nasal airflow patterns as an explanation of macrosmia" Studied how the complex structure of dog nasal cavities create vortex flows of air that help odorant collection 🐶🧪 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

This could be cleaned up and organized a bit better, but… www.desmos.com/calculator/9... Click the arrow to the left of ‘Q’ to move the red X to a random location. Click the arrow next to ‘P’ to see how my algorithm finds the nearest point on the golden spiral to the red X. 1/2

Figure of the day: the Super Daisy from "Effective potential and first-order phase transitions: Beyond leading order" Arnold, Espinoza '93 ⚛️

Last view of SF before heading back to Chicago

Nice explainer on the Super-K accident ⚛️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoBF...

Question on #muon colliders is revealed - mean expectation 2050 (I will be 58 👴). Any bets? ⚛️ www.metaculus.com/questions/31...

New paper! Learning Broken Symmetries with Approximate Invariance Led by HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT Seth Nabat, with Aishik_Ghosh, Ed Witkowski and GregorKasieczka. arxiv.org/abs/2412.18773

Taking bets? www.metaculus.com/questions/31...

Here's a cool paper that's given me a glimpse into massive gravity ⚛️🧪: arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14282 Blas, Carlton, McCabe study how adding a mass term to gravity, letting the graviton act as dark matter, could be detected by atom interferometers under various assumptions. Interesting subtleties...

idk what is happening in this paper, but I like it 🙂⚛️🧪 arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19709

www.metaculus.com/notebooks/31... Prediction markets for a number of open questions for 2025 ^^

Dec 15 - Scattering amplitudes and Navier-Stokes arxiv.org/abs/2010.15970 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Cheung & Mangan (building on an old paper by Wyld) study fluid dynamics through the lens of scattering amplitudes. They find new structures in fluids, particularly the double-copy

FYI @inspirehep.net is on 🦋 INSPIRE is like google scholar, but highly curated for high-energy physics, but it's been around since the beginning of the web. It was literally the first website in the US.

🧪⚛️ For fun, I've been going through this recent preprint (Kehagias, Riotto 2024): arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12428 "Can We Detect Deviations from Einstein’s Gravity in Black Hole Ringdowns?" The answer per Hinchliffe’s Rule / Betteridge's law of headlines appears to be "No!"

Scientist Achievement Unlocked: Wrote a paper about something that appeared to me in a dream. arxiv.org/abs/2411.18758

Wanted to read papers on slime mold algorithms...is it just me, or is this one complete BS? Why is a vector equal to a dot product, or does that arrow mean something else? Why are the figures so complicated and ambiguous? And >2000 citations? doi.org/10.1016/j.fu...

Got a few candidate books to start for holiday reading next month, any suggestions or favorites?

🧪⚛️ Talk on ancient cosmic #neutrinos tomorrow

Tomorrow, our guest at LAWPHYSICS will be Jack Shergold (IFIC Valencia), who will talk about the cosmic neutrino background. Join us! Wednesday, November 27, 15:00 UTC (9:00 am Chicago). www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_5H...

The sun has politely burped away from us 🧪 www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/news/view...

1) the MiniBooNE, LSND anomalies and new physics explanations that could be tested very soon at MicroBooNE, SBND, and CCM 2) what signals can come out of charged black hole mergers?

I was raised on these streets.

A cloud chamber or a Wilson chamber is a particle detector for tracking the passage of ionising radiation. Combining the cloud chamber, Feynman diagrams and the calculations of the scattering amplitude, I created this abstract painting in acrylic on canvas. 🧪

hey everybody, I'm Kevin if you don't already know me. I'm a particle physicist interested in all things beyond-the-Standard-Model. Neutrinos will always have my heart, but I also love studying dark matter, cosmology, etc. I'm excited to explore Bluesky and make more connections here!