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.
Meme matter
Ultra-cold atoms have plenty of important applications REEEEEEEEE
>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.
Now that is some actually useful advice!
Are you being sarcastic?
Nope that was actually a good pointer
Thanks.
I have seen many graduate students go to an LHC experiment (or other large collaboration) and become disenchanted with HEP because they are just a tiny piece in an enormous machine. An entire university could fall off an experiment like CMS and no one would even notice. But being a part of a small collaboration that is actually doing important research leads to a whole slew of opportunities those LHC-slaves will never see.
Happen to know of anyone with research oriented toward BEC? :V
Off hand, yes.
Cass Sackett of the University of Virginia does work on condensates:
phys.virginia.edu
Normally the everything you see in the quantum regime is described with integers and half-integers, but describing these vortices requires irrational numbers. Chapman at Georgia Tech told me about it, and that's all I know about it.
To your other question, no BEC research is not constrained by logistics in the way HEP is. You can make and measure BECs with a few people and modest lab equipment.
Well where you say, "No you have to make your own filter," that is what I call pressing enter on the software someone else wrote to analyze the data someone else collected.
Also now you're saying that you are given a serious problem, but that is already a downgrade from your previous statement that you would come up with your own problem. No you agree with my assessment that the adviser tells you what to do. If the adviser tells you to believe the thing he gave you so serious that it ceases to be cog-like then you can believe, but I chose not to believe it since was patently untrue.
Also if you compare the number of HEP PhD students at any one time to the the total number of serious problems in HEP, you will see that almost none of those students are working on serious problems, even they take themselves very seriously while they cog away at them.
>The key is to be part of a groundbreaking experiment that you build from the ground
This is just a fundamental difference in our viewpoints. You think the best thing is to be a cog in the coggiest experiment but I want to have my own ground-breaking research, and I was able to obtain that by being what you describe as "a shitty grad student." In my view, almost everyone who works on those big collaborative projects you admire is nothing but a glorified electronics technician.
Are you seriously incapable of reading comprehension?
At no point have I glorified the large LHC experiments; because I had agreed with you that those are the 'cog' experiments. I have been advocating for the small collaborations that one builds from the ground up.
Making your own filters and analysis code IS writing your own code. You can't rename it just to suit your own idiotic view.
I said I was given problems as a post-BS collaborator to solve. Things like 'we need to measure beam extinction', so I design a particle telescope to measure beam extinction within some technical specification. I write the simulations and analyze the detector design, which then moves to physical protyping and testing.
As a doctoral candidate I have talked with my advisor in coming up with a thesis topic of my own design.
The only thing I have gathered from your posts is that you're a total cunt that thinks just because you have some twisted view of something it has to be true.
Surprise, it's not.
I believe my experiences in physics are representative of physics as a whole and if I had had your experiences, I likely would have felt the same way because what you describe sounds, to me, like what I described.
>I believe my experiences in physics are representative of physics as a whole
That right there tells me you are a shit physicist, if I can even call you one.
Even non-physicists know that a sample size of 1 is piss-poor statistics. So assuming your single experience projects to all of physics is foolhardy and truly, truly brainless.
My sample size consists of one experimenter collecting very many samples, like the Millikan experiment.
t. the world's most successful living physicist