Well, you already know "bremsstrahlung", "eigenvalue", "gedankenexperiment", and "ansatz", so you are farther along than you think!
19.01.2026 19:57
π 3
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Well, you already know "bremsstrahlung", "eigenvalue", "gedankenexperiment", and "ansatz", so you are farther along than you think!
Three plots from the LZ paper showing the new results.
Exciting new results from the LZ experiment: new constraints on DMβnucleus scattering, a 4.5Ο detection of the solar neutrino flux, and a measurement of the weak mixing angle. lz.lbl.gov
Iβm giving a public talk on magnetic monopoles at Book Club Bar in Manhattanβs East Village on January 20 at 8 pm. No physics background needed β it should be a lot of fun, and itβs guaranteed to attract a good crowd! π§²
More info here: bookclubbar.com/events/39753...
Finally got to check out the IBM quantum computer next to the Brachiosaurus at O'Hare. Thanks to @kylecranmer.bsky.social ky.social for the tip!
Is it the name of a cat or the name of a particle physics experiment?
forms.gle/f3mGxKjt6jAe...
Great question. People who've used the site heavily from the start seem to largely attribute the initial pre AI drop-off to poor management and a hostile moderator culture that grew a bit too quick to shut down new questions.
Credit to this GitHub thread where I found the data query code and supplemental discussion: gist.github.com/hopeseekr/f5...
Furthermore, do we risk running into a kind of cannibal's dilemma where the abandonment of traditional Q&A forums means less good training data for LLMs? I suppose we'll soon know the answers to all these questions.
I try to be optimistic about new tools, and I've personally found AI amazingly useful for assisting with code. Yet the risk of over-reliance can't be ignored. What happens when students who grow dependent on AI reach a technical level that AI really struggles with, e.g. when they start research?
What does this mean? We are clearly undergoing a profound change in the way students (and when it comes to Stack Overflow, even researchers) seek answers to their technical questions.
The number of monthly questions asked on Stack Overflow is down by about 90% from when ChatGPT was first introduced. The decline is about 50% over the same time period for Physics Stack Exchange.
βΌοΈ Stack Overflow and Physics Stack Exchange are in steep decline β largely due to the rise of LLMs. I plotted out the data π #LLMs #Physics #StackExchange #StackOverflow
On a personal note, this was the longest-running project of my PhD, so I am thrilled that it is finally out! Iβm excited about the field-theoretic and phenomenological potential of these non-perturbative objects, and I hope our work sparks further exploration! π
We construct Euclidean U(1) dyon loop field configurations and show that they carry Abelian instanton number. We UV complete these βAbelian instantonsβ using the Georgi-Glashow model, in which we show that dyon loops are a continuous deformation of (small) BPST instantons.
π New paper out!
"Dyon Loops and Abelian Instantons" w/ Isabel Garcia Garcia and Ken Van Tilburg
π arxiv.org/abs/2506.14867
This was a lot of fun!
It was great watching the SPHEREx launch from @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social! It's not every day you get to see an instrument relevant to your own science get blasted into space.
Took a while to go through this material. Highly recommend reading even just his papers with 1000+ citations. A phenomenal legacy.
On first meeting him as starry eyed grad student remember wondering where the bodyguards were π§ͺβοΈ
Cool! I highly recommend checking out the CERN animal shelter while you're there! It's a short walk from the antimatter factory. computer-animal-shelter.web.cern.ch/index.shtml
A model image of what our home galaxy, the Milky Way, might look like face-on: as viewed from above the disc of the galaxy, with its spiral arms and bulge in full view. In the centre of the galaxy, the bulge shines as a hazy oval, emitting a faint golden gleam. Starting at the central bulge, several glistening spiral arms coil outwards, creating a perfectly circle-shaped spiral. They give the impression of someone having sprinkled pastel purple glitter on the pitch-black background, in the shape of sparkling, curled-up snakes.
A model image of what our home galaxy, the Milky Way, might look like edge-on, against a pitch-black backdrop. The Milky Wayβs disc appears in the centre of the image, as a thin, dark-brown line spanning from left to right, with the hint of a wave in it. The line appears to be etched into a thin glowing layer of silver sand, that makes it look as if it was drawn with a coloured pencil on coarse paper. The bulge of the galaxy sits like a glowing, see-through pearl in the shape of a sphere in the centre of this brown line
The ESA #Gaia mission has delivered the best Milky Way maps to date and taken its last starlight before spacecraft retirement π
www.esa.int/Science_Expl...
2024 was yet another exhausting year keeping track of updates on our quest to find the axions. I have been trying my best to collect the exponentially growing literature on my GitHub AxionLimits: github.com/cajohare/Axi...
The Simons Foundation, which funds Quanta as an editorially independent magazine, created this video to honor the life of mathematician, investor and philanthropist Jim Simons. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvjG...
Endowed my gingerbread houses with a softly broken Z2 symmetry this year. Happy holidays!
This is really nice, especially the physical picture! The coset construction has also recently been picked back up in the context of counting goldstones for spontaneously broken higher-form symmetries, e.g. arxiv.org/abs/2007.15901. Although I don't think there's a nice picture in the same way.
Chris Dessert @nyuphysics.bsky.social bringing us the thermal axion background in the axiverse
I guess your blue sky is still in beta.
