This is a good write up of the Nature anisotropy paper debacle. But while Sawala is right that it's unfair to the referees to expect them to have caught the big "elemental" mistake in the paper, he's also being very generous - there is another important error that the referees *should* have caught.

We just ended a weeklong, very constructive XLZD collaboration meeting in the beautiful main building of the University of Zurich. This year, we also welcomed 11 new Canadian groups who joined the project, strengthening our double beta decay expertise!

Cosmic rays can be a window into exciting experiments in physics, astrophysics, and atmospheric science. Cheap, easy-to-use muon detectors are bringing cosmic-ray studies to high schools and colleges worldwide.

Interesting read: arxiv.org/abs/2605.17534

Baryon Asymmetry xkcd.com/3263/

I am "Shifter 2" this long and sunny weekend (fortunately for me. together with a nice postdoc who knows everything) and so far, Xenoscope is behaving (& I wake up several times per night to peek at the temperatures and pressures ;-)

Very happy to be back in New York and visit Columbia University for a colloquium and discussions with my XENON colleagues

🎉The 163rd NAS Annual Meeting starts today!🎉 Join us online as we welcome new members, spotlight their research, explore the future of ocean health, & celebrate scientific achievement. Follow our coverage + tune into live webcasts all weekend: www.nasonline.org/annual-meeti... #NAS163

I met a smart guy here in DC ;-)

New paper in PRC: with data from XENONnT, we measured the 214-Bi β-decay spectrum to the ground state of 214-Po, a first-forbidden non unique decay. The prediction based on the conserved vector current (CVC) hypothesis yields the best description of the data: journals.aps.org/prc/abstract...

Bartlomiej Grzywacz in Poland captured #Comet R3 PanSTARRS low above the horizon on Thursday. Thank you, Bartlomiej! ☄️🔭📸 buff.ly/ROtbCaj Have you seen #Comet R3 PanSTARRS yet? See more pics of the comet and a finder chart: buff.ly/0iBbMTv

If you're in Zurich, join us for today's physics colloquium, by Marie-Cécile Piro, on detecting the invisible! colloquium.phys.ethz.ch/programme/cu...

The black hole information paradox has puzzled researchers for a half century. Cosmologist and science communicator @clairelamman.bsky.social illustrates the paradox and its implications in a new scrollable comic. #astronomy #comic #blackholes

The finer details of neutrino oscillations were outside the sensitivity of @icecubeneutrino.bsky.social—until now. The recently upgraded experiment has a new mission to determine neutrino mass ordering, one of the highest priority questions in particle physics. #physics #icecube

Preparations for the next run (with LArS, for Legend)

We searched for x-rays in XENONnT's low-energy data, as predicted from dynamical quantum collapse models, and improved upon previous constraints by up to two orders of magnitude: journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

🧪 🇨🇭 #IgNobel awards come to Switzerland as US unsafe for scientists #HoppSchwiiz www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

My way to work this week crossed one of my favorite parks in Tokyo ;)

Teaching is a good excuse to read old Nobel lectures: “Most often experiments in physics are long and difficult. It takes some special tweaking of interest to make the commitment to a new area of research. The original motivation is, in the end, apt to appear naive.” Val L. Fitch, 1980

If you're in the Zurich area, join us for a special Schrödinger Colloquium on Monday. “From Atoms to Cosmos” will celebrate 100 y of Schrödinger equation, bridging chemistry, physics and cosmology. A surprise quantum dance event will follow in the Lichthof, with Priscilla Roeck & Killian Haselbeck

So far so good

Yes I should prepare my lectures for next week (semester start), I should read a PhD thesis, among others… but this was my main project for today - happy valentines ;)

Nice article, by Adam Begley, about Julian Barnes and his new book, Departure(s), in the @theatlantic.com “We must believe in love, just as we must believe in free will and objective truth.”

A new run with Xenoscope, a 2.6 m tall, two-phase xenon tome projection chamber, will start soon. Now the TPC is being reassembled and it looks almost like new ;-)

Muons are wonderful particles. Happy to be part of the new National Centre of Competence in Research "Muoniverse" www.muoniverse.ch, hosted by PSI & UZH. Muoniverse is one of the six funded new centres (www.wbf.admin.ch/en/newnsb/JE...), connecting science, engineering and arts. More details soon!

The first LEGEND-200 results are now published in @physrevlett.bsky.social journals.aps.org/prl/abstract... No evidence for neutrinoless double beta decay, with a lower limit on the 76-Ge half-life of 1.9 x 10^26 y. This corresponds to an upper limit on the Majorana ν mass of m_ββ < 75 - 200 meV

Using the Hubble Space Telescope 🔭, a team of astronomers have discovered a starless, gas-laden dark matter cloud believed to be a relic from the dawn of galaxy formation - the first verified discovery of its kind anywhere in the Universe ☁️. Check it out: https://ow.ly/e0WV50XT9Og #astronomy

It moves! We can watch as the Kepler supernova remnant changes over a quarter of century in X-rays from Chandra. #aas247 chandra.si.edu/photo/2026/k...

This spectacular image of the planetary alignment of Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter above the Sydney Opera House was taken in the early morning around April 21, 2022, and featured as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on April 26, 2022

Our colleague Katherine Wright, who began as an editor for PRL and went on to explore her passion as a great writer for @physicsmagazine.bsky.social, passed away this fall from cancer, far too young. Here is a tribute to her: physics.aps.org/articles/v18...

If you're in Zurich, join us for today's Physics Colloquium at the @ethz.ch campus: Prof. Teresa Montaruli, from Université de Genève, will talk about "The Future of the Highest Energy Astrophysics with Gamma-Rays and Neutrinos" colloquium.phys.ethz.ch/programme/cu...

Beautiful day in Zurich for the start of the 10 Years of mesoSPIM workshop at the Careum this morning: www.ema.uzh.ch/en/register/... - organised by @mesospim.bsky.social

Study for life

Reading another famous Nobel Lecture, from 1961, for my introductory lecture to electron-nucleus and electron-nucleon scattering this morning (#KT-I) www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physi...

Congratulations to my wonderful colleague John Clarke! And to Berkeley, and to UC. And to everyone who still believes that foundational research is worth investing in

Congratulations to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis! Very good news for quantum sensor based dark matter experiments :)

With XENONnT we reached a very low radon level, equivalent to about 430 222-Rn atoms per tonne of xenon. For the first time, the radon induced background rate is similar to the event rate due to solar neutrinos (via neutrino-electron scattering): link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/...

If you’re in Zurich, support the students’ demo against budget cuts in education - October 1, Helvetiaplatz www.vauz.uzh.ch/de/News/01.1...

CEνNS: an “act of hubris” fifty years ago, now observed by several experiments with neutrinos from stopped pion beams, nuclear reactors and the Sun: cerncourier.com/full-coheren...

Fresh from the underground: the third argon fill at DEAP-3600 is now complete ✅. The detector is filled to full capacity and ready for the next steps! Work continues at @snolabscience.bsky.social #teamwork #darkmatter

You can access the full article here: journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

Very nice result from a combined analysis of the data from the ANAIS and COSINE experiments: no annual modulation in their NaI(Tl) detectors is observed

Apply for the new PhD school at GGI in Arcetri, “Theory Meets Experiments 2025 - Direct Detection across Dark Matter mass ranges” www.ggi.infn.it/showevent.pl... Deadline is October 5.

WE LONG TO SEE / WHAT CANNOT BE SEEN - this was a fun project with UZH’s Arts x Science Office and the artist Andrea Mettler. First show at Mode Suisse at the Kunsthaus on September 1, next show in Osaka in late September. If I only knew how to breakdance ;-) www.art-science.uzh.ch/de/ausstellu...

Wavefunction Collapse xkcd.com/3134/

💥How can light-sheet help reveal dark matter?💥 Join Prof. Laura Baudis @lbaudis.bsky.social at #mesoSPIM Symposium, Oct 13–15 in Zurich or online, to see how light-sheet fluorescence microscopy 🔬 is used to image nuclear ☢️ recoil tracks to detect elusive particles! Register now: t.uzh.ch/1Ss

Dracula is nowhere to be seen, nor Vlad Țepeș, who never lived here. But beautiful interiors and surroundings

Only 1000 m to go ;-)

True then, and now “Dr. Gaillard’s appointment showed that physicists did not have to be arrogant or aggressive to succeed, said Marjorie Shapiro, who was then a physics graduate student at Berkeley and who in 2004 became the first woman to chair the physics department at Berkeley.”