Anyone have experience working with these?
Is this a niche field of study which will result in over specialization and (if lucky) a job as a cog-in-the-machine like high energy / particle physics would? Or is there potential for independent research outside of huge conglomerations like CERN or 100 personnel teams at top universities?
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>cog-in-the-machine like high energy / particle physics
Your understanding of what HEP is really like is obviously severely lacking.
There are many HEP experiments to work on outside of the LHC. Similarly, these experiments provide the greatest room for achievement and the acquisition of skills which can propel you into a vast number of private industry positions, beyond the realm of physics.
Still, it's quite a bit harder to secure funding and especially work independently compared to optics wouldn't you say?
Sorry for my over-generalization but the main question stands as to whether or not someone who studies BEC is likely to remain studying BEC or get fucked off to "beyond physics" and into finance?
The vortices on the surface of a BEC are one the very few places in quantum physics that you can observe geometry that has to be described with irrational numbers
>pretty fancy
>>cog-in-the-machine like high energy / particle physics
>Your understanding of what HEP is really like is obviously severely lacking.
Idk whose understanding is lacking here, but everyone should know that you can get PhD in HEP just by pushing enter to run the software someone else wrote on the data someone else collected. Given... you may have to push enter very many times, and maybe even install the software on your local machine and write the output into paragraph based thesis form, but being a cog is very much the reality.
>you can get PhD in HEP just by pushing enter to run the software someone else wrote on the data someone else collected
Not really, no. You come up with something interesting to do, like measure ttbar coupling to the higgs, and then you need to write the analysis code/triggers for finding events you are interested to perform your measurement. Granted your analysis is being performed on data collected by the collaboration shifters, it is still your own code you have to write to get your doctorate.
>being a cog is very much the reality
That is only on LHC experiments. There are plenty of Non-LHC experiments doing very good research. Don't be an ignorant fool and assume the energy frontier is the only frontier of HEP that exists, because at this point, the energy frontier experiments are beginning to stagnate as they are trapped in a particle desert. They are searching for supersymmetry, with no real signs of it existing (yet). It is up to intensity frontier experiments to indirectly probe higher mass scales, looking for rare or interesting decays, to hint at new physics; which would give either hope or despair to those searching for supersymmetry.
>You come up with something interesting to do
No you don't. Your adviser gives you something to do and says you can fuck off if you think he's going to spend his grant on your research idea.
>That is only on LHC experiments.
Wrong again. It was also that way on IceCube.
>this suddenly turns into a HEP thread
Thanks for the BEC reply I agree they are interesting as hell, but do researches in this field suffer from the same restrictions that HEP may or may not have according to the bickering in this thread?
> that you can observe geometry that has to be described with irrational numbers
Tell me more
Just because you were a shitty grad student with some shitty adviser doesn't mean everyone is/does.
You keep assuming that because you were a cog on IceCube or some LHC experiment, everywhere must be identical to your experience, but I can assure you that is not the case.
On the experiment I am on (first as a post-BS collaborator, personally invited by the director of the laboratory, and again as a doctoral candidate at a collaborating university) I have had the pleasure of working very closely to the top-physicists on the experiment and treated as an equal among them. There was no "here work on this menial task while the rest of the machine chugs along", it has been "here is a serious problem, solve it"; which means identifying the problem, developing a plan to solve said problem, developing the hardware and software to implement said plan, and convening with the other collaborators for statusing and input.
The key is to be part of a groundbreaking experiment that you build from the ground up, not join something that has already been built so all you do is data analysis. It's your poor choice, not everyone else's.