Heather Logan

Heather Logan

@helogan.bsky.social

Theoretical particle physicist, university professor, nature enthusiast, Wiccan HPS (dual Lexi/Gard), autistic person. She/her. https://people.physics.carleton.ca/~logan/

480 followers211 following803 posts

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

So ah... if you're applying for a postdoc position in my group, and you email me a targeted one-page research proposal about expanding on some detail of one of my older papers, and it's pretty obvious that AI wrote the proposal for you, do you think that's going to help or hurt your application?

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

To be clear, this email was entirely separate from how we handle applications, which is through AJO. And there are 5 of us in the group with a range of research interests.

Heather Logan reposted

Ann Leckie
@annleckie.com

Replying to @annleckie.com

I do know a couple people who didn't use physics--either didn't ever learn any or didn't think it mattered, depending--and they ended up in the hospital on account of it.

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

@en.ottawa.ca Have you considered adding a "days since last fatality" to the travel dashboard? #autowa

City of Ottawa@en.ottawa.ca

Take a look at last week's travel trends in #OttCity Busiest day for car travel: Wednesday Quietest day for car travel: Monday Track travel trends with our dashboard, subscribe for updates & find trip-planning resources through the Mobility Hub: https://bit.ly/3UGPAdA

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

Interviewer: Can you explain this [mass] gap in your CV? Quantum chromodynamicist: We haven't been able to derive that from first principles yet, but when we do, you will be sure to hear about it.

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Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

Maybe I should come up with a ludicrous consulting fee structure for this kind of request. If people value my expertise over the bot's, surely they'd be willing to pay a higher hourly rate for it, like say $33M/h? Problem is that I don't think I'd do this kind of work for any amount of money.

Heather Logan@helogan.bsky.social

We need to talk about bot slop. At the end of summer I got an email from a recent grad of our BSc Physics. He'd "written" a theory paper about Higgs physics and wanted me to review it. Spoiler alert, he hadn't written or calculated anything. A bot had done it all. 20 pages of hot garbage.

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

We need to talk about bot slop. At the end of summer I got an email from a recent grad of our BSc Physics. He'd "written" a theory paper about Higgs physics and wanted me to review it. Spoiler alert, he hadn't written or calculated anything. A bot had done it all. 20 pages of hot garbage.

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Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

Since then I've gotten two more "papers" like that. The most recent was a "review" of double-Higgs production at the LHC from an EE undergrad in India. He really wants to do theory! He's really willing to put in the work! He's not even doing a physics undergrad! (req'd for most phys grad progs)

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

I should add that two of our former postdocs are now professors at universities in India, and our current postdoc came from an Indian undergrad physics program. There are lots of top-notch opportunities there to work on this stuff specifically.

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

We need to talk about bot slop. At the end of summer I got an email from a recent grad of our BSc Physics. He'd "written" a theory paper about Higgs physics and wanted me to review it. Spoiler alert, he hadn't written or calculated anything. A bot had done it all. 20 pages of hot garbage.

View full thread
Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

... a desperate screed about how AI was going to revolutionize research by liberating human creativity and potential. He told me that he currently had the bot running "numerical validations" (of what???). One can only wonder how much he was spending on bot-farm compute cycles.

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

That's AI psychosis. The bot just has to find one topic or problem or idea that hooks your interest. "Engagement" is the goal. Engagement is what makes the bot companies money. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

We need to talk about bot slop. At the end of summer I got an email from a recent grad of our BSc Physics. He'd "written" a theory paper about Higgs physics and wanted me to review it. Spoiler alert, he hadn't written or calculated anything. A bot had done it all. 20 pages of hot garbage.

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

The bot had "derived" space-dependent photon-W mixing in the Standard Model by choosing a spatially-dependent vev orientation for the Higgs field. That's total nonsense. The vev orientation is just a gauge choice. You only get stuff like that if you've totally ignored gauge transformations.

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

But of course, our former undergrad didn't know that, because it's grad material and he'd been drinking in bot slop for the past several months. The killer was that he didn't WANT to know what the problem was. He ignored that part of my response entirely, and responded with...

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

Pleased to see that my webpage meets the Strossian ideal!

Charlie Stross@cstross.bsky.social

I long for a back-to-basics web: Markdown for text, JPEG images, no video, no Javascript or other client-side scripting, writable by a human being with a text editor. Make it as advertising/corporate hostile as possible. And above all keep it *small*. In other words, web like it's 1996 again.

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

Ken Lane spent some time at Fermilab when I was a postdoc there. He gave a marvellous series of pedagogical lectures on technicolor that turned us all into true believers (or at least, true appreciators). SUSY is cool, but technicolor is *beautiful*. (And Nature has already used the idea once.)

Chris Quigg@chrisquigg.com

I am sad to report that a formidable colleague, Ken Lane (Boston U), has died. Ken made many notable contributions, among them his work on the Cornell charmonium model, dynamical symmetry breaking in the form of extended technicolor, and supercollider physics. He shared the 2011 Sakurai Prize. RIP!

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

#CarletonU orientation day is tomorrow. I have a couple of meetings with my grad students/postdocs, then an hour of short talks from undergrad summer students. Classes start on Wednesday. This is always exciting.

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

Important thread. There's a good argument here that not naming your "collaborator" up-front is academic fraud.

Crystal Fleming is on sabbatical@alwaystheself.bsky.social

I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

The HTML 'blink' tag is here to stay. We need to stop fearmongering about the HTML 'blink' tag and start finding the ways that the HTML 'blink' tag can be used ethically and to support our causes. Naysayers need to realize that this technology is inevitable.

Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees@mcnees.bsky.social

Microsoft Bob is here to stay. We need to stop fearmongering about Microsoft Bob and start finding the ways that Microsoft Bob can be used ethically and to support our causes. Naysayers need to realize that this technology is inevitable.

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

That feeling when you can't tell whether the new guy in Research Accounting is functionally illiterate or is just outsourcing their email to a chatbot. ๐Ÿ’€

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

ArXiv is going nuclear ๐Ÿ’ช๐Ÿ˜

anil oza@aniloza.bsky.social

wowย โ€” the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations ๐Ÿค–

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

My first crosslist to astro-ph.CO and I immediately get an email from a crackpot begging for an arXiv endorsement. ๐Ÿ˜ฌ

Heather Logan@helogan.bsky.social

New paper today! โš›๏ธ Cool (semi-)analytic results on nonperturbative fermion production during scalar field oscillations (e.g. of the inflaton, post-inflation). Great work by our student Fazlul Yasin as part of his PhD! arxiv.org/abs/2604.07326

arxiv.orgAnalytic Approximations for Fermionic PreheatingNon-thermal fermions can be produced non-perturbatively in the early universe during coherent oscillations of a scalar field. We explore fermion production in $ฮปฯ•^{4}$ inflation through this mechanism and analyze the momentum spectrum of the fermions produced, which depends on a coupling parameter $q$. For $q \gtrsim 0.01$, the main contribution to the total number density comes from an approximately half-filled Fermi sphere as a result of non-adiabaticity. For $q\lesssim 0.01$, we find that the major contributions instead come from resonance peaks at higher momentum values. We find a simple relation to predict the momentum values corresponding to resonance peaks for any $q$. We also obtain analytic power-law approximations for the total number density of fermions and find that it is proportional to $q^{1/2}$ for $q\lesssim 0.01$ and proportional to $q^{3/4}$ for $q\gtrsim 10$. If fermions produced by this mechanism make up the entirety of dark matter, we estimate lower bounds on their mass.
Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

New paper today! โš›๏ธ Cool (semi-)analytic results on nonperturbative fermion production during scalar field oscillations (e.g. of the inflaton, post-inflation). Great work by our student Fazlul Yasin as part of his PhD! arxiv.org/abs/2604.07326

arxiv.orgAnalytic Approximations for Fermionic PreheatingNon-thermal fermions can be produced non-perturbatively in the early universe during coherent oscillations of a scalar field. We explore fermion production in $ฮปฯ•^{4}$ inflation through this mechanism and analyze the momentum spectrum of the fermions produced, which depends on a coupling parameter $q$. For $q \gtrsim 0.01$, the main contribution to the total number density comes from an approximately half-filled Fermi sphere as a result of non-adiabaticity. For $q\lesssim 0.01$, we find that the major contributions instead come from resonance peaks at higher momentum values. We find a simple relation to predict the momentum values corresponding to resonance peaks for any $q$. We also obtain analytic power-law approximations for the total number density of fermions and find that it is proportional to $q^{1/2}$ for $q\lesssim 0.01$ and proportional to $q^{3/4}$ for $q\gtrsim 10$. If fermions produced by this mechanism make up the entirety of dark matter, we estimate lower bounds on their mass.
Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

Fake goatees for all crew members.

kidney witch@stavvers.bsky.social

When they go round the moon, the Artemis astronauts will be completely out of contact for 40 minutes. What's the single funniest (yet feasible) thing they could do when they get back in touch?

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

Some time after my Mac updated its OS, I spent two hours I couldn't really spare getting my Fortran compiler to work again. You really don't want to have to do that when you're someplace without decent WiFi, like say halfway to the moon.

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Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

No joke paper will ever surpass the sublime brilliance of Supersplit Supersymmetry, arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0..., "born" on this day in 2005. 100% correct physics, and a pointed commentary on some of the excesses of the field at that time. โš›๏ธ

arxiv.orgSupersplit SupersymmetryThe possible existence of an exponentially large number of vacua in string theory behooves one to consider possibilities beyond our traditional notions of naturalness. Such an approach to electroweak ...
Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

A salute to our trans physics students. We value you and are proud that you are part of our department!

City of Ottawa@en.ottawa.ca

Today is International Transgender Day of Visibility. Since 2009, March 31 is a day to celebrate and honour transgender people and highlight the challenges they still face. It is an important day for continued acceptance and advocacy. To our transgender community: We see you, and we stand with you.

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

Quantum mechanics and special relativity are both totally normal and thoroughly established parts of physics.

M. Nolan Gray ๐Ÿฅ‘@mnolangray.bsky.social

What's something that experts/practitioners in your field universally agree upon, but that remains a "hot take" among the general public?

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

I'm preparing lecture notes on the polarized e-e+ --> mu-mu+ cross section (Peskin & Schroeder Sec. 5.2) and I'm gonna use it as a launchpad to talk about forward-backward asymmetries and I am so excited about this! โš›๏ธ

Heather Logan
@helogan.bsky.social

Sounds like CAUT has drunk the kool-aid. Sad to see them buy in to the denigration of faculty who still value the intellectual development and creativity of our students.

CAUT/ACPPU@caut.bsky.social

โ€œWe must not respond to autonomous AI technologies by regressing to past ways or adopting punitive policies that fragment student experiences and access.โ€ Read more on how AI fits in teaching and learning in the latest Bulletin: www.caut.ca/bulletin/cre...