After a very busy week, it’s time once more for another Saturday update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further five papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 194 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 642. As explained at the end of this post, one of the five publications is a correction of an earlier paper.
I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper. The Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too.
The first paper this week was published on Monday 31st August 2026 in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics: “Modeling Carbon-Based Planets with MAGRATHEA” by Robert L Royer (U. Nevada, USA), David R Rice (U. Wisconsin-Madison, USA) and Jason H Steffen (U. Nevada, USA). This describes a modification of the planetary interior solver MAGRATHEA to include Carbon-based mantles to enable it to understand more fully the range of possible planet structures.
The overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Modeling Carbon-Based Planets with MAGRATHEA" by Robert L Royer (U. Nevada, USA), David R Rice (U. Wisconsin-Madison, USA) and Jason H Steffen (U. Nevada, USA)
The second paper for this week, published on Tuesday 1st September in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena is “SCAT Data Release 1: 1812 optical spectra of 1331 transients” by Michael A Tucker (Ohio State University, USA) and 21 others from around the world. This is the first data release of the Spectroscopic Classification of Astronomical Transients survey includes 1812 spectra of 1331 transients, offering valuable insights for photometric/light curve classification pipelines.
The overlay looks like this:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "SCAT Data Release 1: 1812 optical spectra of 1331 transients" by Michael A Tucker (Ohio State University, USA) and 21 others from around the world.
The third paper of the week is “The neighboring stars of N6946-BH1 and the observational characteristics of failed supernovae” by Raquel Forés-Toribio and C. S. Kochanek (Ohio State University, USA). This study, published on Wednesday 2nd September 2026 in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, re-analyzes images of potential failed supernova N6946-BH1, finding four unrelated near-infrared neighbors. It also compares the luminosity of failed supernova remnants to stellar merger remnants, noting significant differences.
The overlay is here:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The neighboring stars of N6946-BH1 and the observational characteristics of failed supernovae" by Raquel Forés-Toribio and C. S. Kochanek (Ohio State University, USA)
The fourth paper of the week is “How similar are narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies and high-z type 1 AGN?” by Marco Berton (ESO, Chile), Emilia Järvelä (Texas Tech. U., USA), Alessia Tortosa (INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Italy) and Chiara Mazzucchelli (Universidad Diego Portales, Chile). This was published on Thursday 3rd September 2026 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This paper reviews the properties of local narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies and compares them with high-redshift active galactic nuclei, aiding understanding of early black hole evolution.
The overlay is here:
The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "How similar are narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies and high-z type 1 AGN?" by Marco Berton (ESO, Chile), Emilia Järvelä (Texas Tech. U., USA), Alessia Tortosa (INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Italy) and Chiara Mazzucchelli (Universidad Diego Portales, Chile)
CORRECTION issued at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "CORRECTION – DESI Data Release 1: Stellar Catalogue" by Koposov et al. (2026) (DOI:10.33232/001c.155260)
In the past when we have had minor correctionsto make we have simply asked the authors to create a new version, then when it has been checked, to place it on arXiv with a comment on the correction made. We then change the overlay to point to the new version with a comment on the change. I was recently advised, however, that best practice is to create a specific entry in Crossref for the corrected version, linked to the old one. Our Scholastica platform now has a mechanism to do this so from now on we will adopt this approach.
The last time STFC had a financial crisis was in 2009 and e-Merlin might well have been cut then but survived thanks to political intervention at the highest level. I suppose that could happen again, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
It looks like it has indeed happened again. The exact quote from Andy Burnham is:
There must be a way to save Jodrell Bank, and I give a commitment today, at this despatch box, we will find it.
That sounds like an unequivocal commitment, but it raises quite a few questions. One of these is that STFC was actually planning to cut funding to the e-MERLIN project and it is by no means clear that the £2.8 million needed for e-MERLIN will actually be reinstated in the STFC budget. It may transpire that Jodrell Bank Observatory emerges as more of a heritage site than a world-class research facility, which is what it will be if e-MERLIN disappears.
And if £2.8M is found to keep e-MERLIN going without changing the overall STFC budget, then the axe will just fall elsewhere in STFC. Jodrell Bank is a special site with special arguments for keeping it open, but other targets can no doubt be found that are equally excellent from a scientific point of view, but can’t mobilize political forces to mount such a strong defence. This is no way to perform a scientific prioritization exercise. In any case it is important to remember that there are cuts and cancellations elsewhere too; see here for a full list.
I think that there needs to be a complete review of funding across all the UKRI agencies. It is deeply unfair that physics and astronomy have to bear the brunt of cost overruns at facilities which are largely used by researchers in other scientific areas. Surely their funding councils should contribute. I can accept that belts might need to be tightened, but that shouldn’t just apply to STFC.
Today’s the start of this year’s Irish National Astronomy Meeting (INAM), which is being held in Maynooth. There’ll be a series of talks over the next three days covering all areas of astronomy. I’ll be chairing a session tomorrow but will generally popping in and out because I have various other commitments that clash with some of the sessions, but I’ll post updates whenever I can.
To start with, though, let me welcome all the participants who are arriving this morning!
One of the candidates for the dark matter that seems to pervade the cosmos is a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP, for short). Such particles are hypothetical but, if they exist they could have been produced in large numbers in the early Universe. Among the possible WIMPs are supersymmetric particles, but there are alternative candidates. Whatever their nature it is possible that they could be directed directly in collisions with regular matter but, because they are weakly interacting, the cross-section for such events is low and potentially masked by background events caused by radioactive decays. So far these experiments have drawn a collective blank (and a number of false alarms).
One experiment trying to detect dark matter directly is LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ for short) which is based at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota in the USA but is a collaboration of 30 institutions worldwide, including the the UK, Portugal and South Korea as well as the USA. This experiment tries to detect WIMPs using an ultra-sensitive detector made of 7 tonnes of liquid xenon to hunt for signals of their interactions with atomic nuclei.
Today there was a potentially exciting announcement that LZ may have seen a WIMP, in a preprint with the following abstract:
There is also a scientific presentation by Sam Eriksen from which I have extracted the crucial figure(s):
The event causing the excitement was detected over three years ago, on 16th June 2023. You can see it as the little black dot towards the upper right of the dashed square in the left hand panel. The LZ signal does appear unlikely to have been generated by known background events, but that does not necessarily mean that it is likely to be WIMP. The statistical significance quoted is not sufficiently high for it to be regarded as a clear detection; the implied odds are roughly the same as the odds that you, the reader, have a birthday on 16th June…
Just a quick note to mention that tomorrow sees the launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This is a survey telescope in some respects like ESA’s Euclid but with a larger aperture and different instrumentation, particularly a coronagraph which can block starlight to directly image exoplanets and planet-forming disks. Its larger mirror (2.4m versus 1.2m) will enable it to see fainter objects than Euclid, but its survey will be a much smaller fraction of the sky so in its cosmological applications it is complementary to Euclid rather than a direct competitor for it.
NASA have produced this sort of “cheat sheet” comparing the two observatories:
The Launch is due tomorrow (August 30 2026), at 7:26 am EDT which is 12.26 local Irish Time (same as BST). If you’re so inclined you can watch the launch on YooToob here:
Update: all seems to be well, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now on its way to L2.
After a very busy week, it’s time once more for another Saturday update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further twelve papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 189 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 637. As I pointed out on Wednesday this week is the first during which we have published at least one paper in each of the six categories on astro-ph.
I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper. The Mastodon account has regular updates and announcements from OJAp too.
In the past on these posts I have included the article keywords as tags, but this is quite a lot of effort to do for little benefit so I’ve decided just to tag the arXiv category (i.e. folder) and arXiv ID for each paper as well as the lede from the journal platform.
The first one up this week was published on Monday 24th August 2026 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. “Energy-Space Analysis of Tidal Stripping in Stellar-Dark Matter Systems“, by Bradley Arias (UC Berkeley, USA), Nicole E. Drakos (U. Hawaii, USA) and James E. Taylor (U. Waterloo, Canada), uses simulations to explore how tidal stripping shapes the stellar distribution of dwarf galaxies, also suggesting a pathway for the formation of galaxies deficient in dark matter
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Energy-Space Analysis of Tidal Stripping in Stellar-Dark Matter Systems" by Bradley Arias (UC Berkeley, USA), Nicole E. Drakos (U. Hawaii, USA) and James E. Taylor (U. Waterloo, Canada)
The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 24th August but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Second Order Closures for the Radiative Transfer Equation: Some Are Unstable” by Nickolay Y. Gnedin and Harley Katz (U.Chicago, USA). This study explores higher-order closure relations in cosmic reionization simulations, finding that direct generalizations of M1 and OTVET are physically unstable, limiting second-order closure options.
The overlay looks like this:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Second Order Closures for the Radiative Transfer Equation: Some Are Unstable" by Nickolay Y. Gnedin and Harley Katz (U.Chicago, USA)
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Differentiable Forward Modeling for Efficient and Accurate Shear Inference" by Ismael Mendoza and 7 others on behalf of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "BLG723.31.34651 as an eclipsing Roche lobe-filling sdOB+WD binary" by Alekzander Kosakowski, Charles E. Derbyshire, Sydney Jetton and Brad N. Barlow (University of North Carolina, USA)
The fifth paper of the week is “Differentiable Halo Mass Prediction and the Cosmology-Dependence of Halo Mass Functions” by Jim Buisman, Florian List and Oliver Hahn (U. Vienna, Austria). This was published on Tuesday 25th August in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics; it presents a novel approach using a differentiable neural network model for predicting dark matter haloes abundance and their cosmology dependence, achieving competitive accuracy in identifying protohalo regions.Abstractfor Differentiable Halo Mass Prediction and the Cosmology-Dependence of Halo Mass Functions.
The overlay is here:
The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Differentiable Halo Mass Prediction and the Cosmology-Dependence of Halo Mass Functions" by Jim Buisman, Florian List and Oliver Hahn (U. Vienna, Austria)
The sixth paper of the week is “An astrometric search for planets in debris disk systems” by Elisabeth M Penderghast & Benjamin C Bromley (U. Utah, USA), Scott J Kenyon (Smithsonian Astrophys. Obs., USA) and Joan R Najita (NSF NOIRLab, USA). This was published on Tuesday 25th August 2026 in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. This study uses Gaia astrometric data and machine learning to identify stars with debris disks that may host undiscovered planets, providing potential subjects for future analyses.
The overlay is here:
You can find the officially-accepted version of the paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "An astrometric search for planets in debris disk systems" by Elisabeth M Penderghast & Benjamin C Bromley (U. Utah, USA), Scott J Kenyon (Smithsonian Astrophys. Obs., USA) and Joan R Najita (NSF NOIRLab, USA)
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Precision Spectroscopy for 1.7 Million Galaxies from SDSS-IV: Improved Spectral Measurements and Catalogs for eBOSS" by Owen Matthews Acuña (U. Wisconsin Madison, USA) and 8 others based at various instititions in the USA.
The eighth paper of the week, published on Wednesday 27th August in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena is the one that completed our full house for the week. This study presents XRISM observations of the merging cluster Abell 2034, revealing the broadest emission lines yet seen in a galaxy cluster, indicating potential turbulence and core disruption.
The overlay is here:
You can find the official version on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The major cluster merger in Abell 2034 as seen by XRISM: Strong turbulence and spectral anomalies?" by Annie Heinrich (U. Chicago) and 7 others based in the USA and Europe.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Visualizing Disequilibrium: Tracing Two-Point Correlations to Specific Spatial Structures in the Milky Way" by Austin Hinkel and Josephine Vanzant (Thomas More U. USA)
The tenth paper of the week is “Assessing Self-Absorbed Molecular Lines as Tracers of Gravitational Collapse” by Lillian Y. Cai (Priinceton U., USA) and Felix D. Priestley & Sarah E. Ragan (Cardiff U., UK). This paper, reveals that traditional observational techniques probably underestimate true infall velocities and mass accretion rates in collapsing prestellar cores due to non-uniform radial velocity profiles.
The overlay for this one is here:
The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here and here is the fediverse announcement:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Assessing Self-Absorbed Molecular Lines as Tracers of Gravitational Collapse" by Lillian Y. Cai (Priinceton U., USA) and Felix D. Priestley & Sarah E. Ragan (Cardiff U., UK)
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The Impact of Non-Gaussian Line Spread Functions on Stellar Kinematic Recovery: Consequences for Dynamical Models" by David A. Simon (Oxford U, UK)
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Impact and interplay of ΛCDM analysis choices for LSST cosmic shear" by Naomi Clare Robertson and 11 others for the FLAMINGO Team and the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration
In my recent weekly updates of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics, the latest of which is here, I’ve remarked that we had built up quite a backlog of papers accepted but yet to be published. This is no doubt due to August being a holiday for many researchers. Well, we seem to be catching up rather rapidly. So far this week we have published eight new papers, and it’s only Wednesday!
The recent burst of activity has led to us establishing a first, a week in which we have published a full house of at least one paper in each of the six sections of astro-ph on the arXiv. As a reminder, these are they:
astro-ph.GA – Astrophysics of Galaxies. Phenomena pertaining to galaxies or the Milky Way. Star clusters, HII regions and planetary nebulae, the interstellar medium, atomic and molecular clouds, dust. Stellar populations. Galactic structure, formation, dynamics. Galactic nuclei, bulges, disks, halo. Active Galactic Nuclei, supermassive black holes, quasars. Gravitational lens systems. The Milky Way and its contents
astro-ph.CO – Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. Phenomenology of early universe, cosmic microwave background, cosmological parameters, primordial element abundances, extragalactic distance scale, large-scale structure of the universe. Groups, superclusters, voids, intergalactic medium. Particle astrophysics: dark energy, dark matter, baryogenesis, leptogenesis, inflationary models, reheating, monopoles, WIMPs, cosmic strings, primordial black holes, cosmological gravitational radiation
astro-ph.EP – Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. Interplanetary medium, planetary physics, planetary astrobiology, extrasolar planets, comets, asteroids, meteorites. Structure and formation of the solar system
astro-ph.HE – High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. Cosmic ray production, acceleration, propagation, detection. Gamma ray astronomy and bursts, X-rays, charged particles, supernovae and other explosive phenomena, stellar remnants and accretion systems, jets, microquasars, neutron stars, pulsars, black holes
astro-ph.IM – Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. Detector and telescope design, experiment proposals. Laboratory Astrophysics. Methods for data analysis, statistical methods. Software, database design
astro-ph.SR – Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. White dwarfs, brown dwarfs, cataclysmic variables. Star formation and protostellar systems, stellar astrobiology, binary and multiple systems of stars, stellar evolution and structure, coronas. Central stars of planetary nebulae. Helioseismology, solar neutrinos, production and detection of gravitational radiation from stellar systems.
As of yesterday we had published in five of the six categories and were only missing a paper (in Number 4 – High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena). Today, right on cue, from the queue, came this paper to complete the set:
There’s still a couple of days to go and we have more papers in the pipeline so it looks like I’ll have a busy time on Saturday morning when I do the next update!
Later than usual, it’s time once more for another Saturday update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further six papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 177 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 625.
I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper. In the past on these posts I have included the article keywords as tags, but this is quite a lot of effort to do for little benefit so I’ve decided just to tag the arXiv category (i.e. folder) and arXiv ID for each paper.
The first one up this week was published on Tuesday 18th August in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The article “Ghostly DLAs in SDSS DR16” by Patrick Petitjean (Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France). This study revisits the origin of proximate damped Lyman-alpha absorbers (PDLAs), associating most with the AGN or quasar host galaxy environment..
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
The second paper for this week, also published on Tuesday 18th August in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies is “Dust in the Average Galaxy: Attenuation, Emission, and Opacity from 0<z<7” by Caitlin M. Casey (University of California Santa Barbara, USA) and an international cast of 45 others. This study analyzes over 500,000 galaxies to understand dust emission and attenuation properties. Findings reveal UV/optical attenuation underestimates IR luminosity, and dust constraints are crucial for understanding star-forming galaxies.
The overlay looks like this:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Dust in the Average Galaxy: Attenuation, Emission, and Opacity from 0<z<7" by Caitlin M. Casey (University of California Santa Barbara, USA) and an international cast of 45 others.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "First Light And Reionization Epoch Simulations (FLARES) XXI: The UV Indices of Galaxies in the Early Universe" by Connor Sant Fournier (University of Malta, Malta) and 7 others based in Malta and the UK.
The fourth paper of the week is “White dwarf + M dwarf Detached Binaries in Long Period Radio Transients: Observed Binary Parameters, Evolution, and Population Constraints” by Antonio Rodriguez (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA, USA), Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA), Iris de Ruiter (U. Sydney, Australia), Kaustubh Rajwade (U. Oxford, UK), Edo Berger & Liam Connor (CfA) and Natasha Hurley-Walker (Curtin U., Australia). This was published on Wednesday 19th August in the folder Solar and Stellar Astrophysics. This article presents new findings on long period radio transients (LPTs), slow-pulsing radio sources, associated with M dwarf-white dwarf systems., suggests these systems are part of a significant Galactic population of such objects.
The overlay is here:
The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "White dwarf + M dwarf Detached Binaries in Long Period Radio Transients: Observed Binary Parameters, Evolution, and Population Constraints" by Antonio Rodriguez (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA, USA), Kareem El-Badry (Caltech, USA), Iris de Ruiter (U. Sydney, Australia), Kaustubh Rajwade (U. Oxford, UK), Edo Berger & Liam Connor (CfA) and Natasha Hurley-Walker (Curtin U., Australia)
The fifth paper of the week is “Cosmological Dynamics of Multi-Axion Quintessence” by Supakorn Katewongveerachart (Mahidol U., Thailand) and David J. E. Marsh, King’s College London, UK). This was published on Thursday 20th August 2026 in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. This study explores dark energy dynamics, and their potential observational consequences, for a cosmological model with two, three or four axion fields.
The overlay is here:
The officially-accepted version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Cosmological Dynamics of Multi-Axion Quintessence" by Supakorn Katewongveerachart (Mahidol U., Thailand) and David J. E. Marsh, King's College London, UK)
Finally for this week, the sixth paper of the week is “How can we finally see the first light? Status and perspective in the search for Population III stars” by Alessandra Venditti (U. Texas Austin, USA) and 28 others from around the world. This was published on Thursday August 20th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. This review article discusses the ongoing search for the first stars (Population III), their formation, and characteristics. It highlights various observational strategies and the role of advanced technology in this quest. This can perhaps act as a reminder that we do publish review articles, as long as the Editorial Board and the reviewers consider them a useful contribution to the literature.
The overlay is here:
You can find the officially-accepted version of the paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "How can we finally see the first light? Status and perspective in the search for Population III stars" by Alessandra Venditti (U. Texas Austin, USA) and 28 others from around the world
And that’s all for this week. We’re starting to clear the backlog of papers accepted through the summer but yet to be published, but it will probably take a few weeks to do so completely.
The following is a guest post by William Barter, who recently finished a term as the ‘physics coordinator’ of LHCb-UK.
–o–
The European particle physics community recently undertook a two-year process to update our strategy – setting out the things that we, as a field, choose to prioritise. The highest priority in that update was “the full exploitation of the physics potential of the Large Hadron Collider”. Despite our consensus, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has decided to pull UK funding for the next-generation upgrade of LHCb, one of four large experiments at the LHC. This decision was made for financial reasons; the science case for the upgrade is not in question, and current LHCb operations are fully funded. With this cut, we are experiencing the same pain as many of our astrophysics colleagues. Our plans and ambitions have been hit by self-defeating decisions from the same funding body.
For decades we have known that our current theory of fundamental quantum physics – the Standard Model of Particle Physics – is incomplete, but a fuller picture eludes us. The LHCb Upgrade offers a unique way to explore this science. Our experiment, operated by around 2000 scientists from 28 countries, is dedicated to the study of beauty and charm quarks, fundamental particles whose behaviour can be measurably influenced by Beyond Standard Model phenomena. Through these studies we hope to unlock a new understanding of how nature works at its most fundamental levels. The upgrade, planned for the 2030s, would enable us to take five times more data than is possible with our current experiment.
LHCb has a tremendous record of success. We are responsible for discovering more particles than any other particle physics experiment in history, including new forms of matter: pentaquarks and tetraquarks. The LHCb Upgrade would be the only experiment capable of finding many more. That’s not all. One of the only things we know about the physics that lies beyond the Standard Model is that we expect it to introduce differences in the behaviour of matter and antimatter, in order to explain why our universe is made out of particles rather than antiparticles. LHCb is uniquely able to make the dedicated and precise measurements needed to probe this physics in the quark sector. Measurements at LHCb are also directly sensitive to the quantum imprints of new fundamental particles. We are able to explore energy scales far beyond those directly accessible at the LHC. In the same way that the discovery of radioactivity gave us key insights into the weak force more than 80 years before the observation of the fundamental particle responsible, the W boson, new fundamental particles can also influence our measurements of beauty and charm quarks. It will take us at least another 50 years to reach the same energies that LHCb probes using future particle colliders. Put simply: the LHCb Upgrade offers a unique and compelling physics programme that complements and extends what is possible at the other LHC experiments.
These opportunities were already recognised by UKRI, who had previously committed to funding the upgrade. In addition to making physics sense, this investment met UKRI’s funding strategy. UKRI has the goal of securing “an average of £3 of additional investment for every £1 of public funding”. International partners were expected to contribute their share of the overall cost of the project on top of the UK contribution, leveraging almost five times the UK contribution. Given the widespread international support for the project, it was no surprise when the previous executive chair of STFC, the part of UKRI responsible for funding particle physics, nuclear physics, and astrophysics, included the fact that he had “secur[ed] the UK’s investment in the LHCb Upgrade” in his successful government-backed manifesto for the CERN Director General role. The recent backpedalling from UKRI therefore has broader consequences: it has raised difficult questions about which promises our international partners can trust the UK to keep. It’s hard to see how we can be relied on in future international collaborations if we are the reason that the LHCb Upgrade falls apart now.
And there are other, potentially larger, ramifications. Other future projects across the STFC remit have seen similar cuts. The decisions amount to a lack of ambition for fundamental research in the 2030s. One of the key purposes of STFC is to fund research over long timescales, understanding that Big Science areas like particle physics and astronomy require a stable approach that goes beyond any individual government spending review period. However, the decision to resile from new particle physics goals and commitments for the 2030s because of claimed cost overruns in the next few years completely rejects this mission. This will have a lasting impact: LHCb is simply one of the first examples, with the UK programme in particle physics, astrophysics, and nuclear physics due to contract significantly in the coming years as a result of UKRI’s choices.
So, where does this leave things? All is not lost. These decisions were communicated to us by UKRI at a strange moment, when the UK government was handing over between Sir Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham, while DSIT – the government department that oversees UKRI – was being disbanded, and while its replacement, BIST, was being set up. We know that Big Science is key to the UK’s scientific strategy: our work enthuses and inspires the next generation of scientists and researchers. The people we train enter the workforce skilled in modern data science techniques, ready to tackle the biggest problems with new approaches. There is still a window of opportunity for BIST to act and find a solution to the problem they’ve been handed. When news of the UKRI cuts broke, the incoming Secretary of State, Jonathan Reynolds, committed to investing in “the next generation of scientific facilities and infrastructure”. We now wait to see whether he means what he said, and if he will save UK particle physics, astrophysics, and nuclear physics from the self-defeating damage unleashed by UKRI.
I was taken aback by the description “QUANTUM DRY” but then I remembered Chapter 40 of the Feynman Lectures on Physics on the topic of The Flow of Dry Water, by which is meant the flow of a fluid with zero viscosity (i.e. inviscid flow). I therefore infer that the material of which this product is composed is a quantum superfluid, i.e. a quantum fluid with zero viscosity. Can someone point me to the scientific literature on superfluid anti-perspirants?
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In the Dark 