Apartment Hunt in Sendai

Finding a suitable place to live is an important part of the moving process. Each location comes with its own specific challenges, which are usually compounded if you are not a citizen of the country you live in. If you are a particle physicist, chances are you know what I'm talking about.
In Geneva, finding a place to live takes a couple months in my experience. Once you've found a place, as a postdoc you probably need to find a guarantor, and enough money to cover the deposit amounting to about three months of rent.

The housing market in Sendai is thankfully much less crowded, giving you a much larger choice of apartments. The approval process, however, is rather prohibitively difficult for foreigners:
After finding an apartment on one of the Japanese-only web sites, you contact the agency for a viewing appointment. If you like the place, you need to get approved for credit, which is basically impossible for a foreigner without a Japanese bank account. (Which I am sure you can't get without a permanent address in Japan. The typical catch 22 for foreigners.) Luckily (?) there are companies who help with getting approved - against a not insubstantial fee. I addition, you still need a Japanese guarantor; apparently retired people don't qualify for this.
When you have all of this together, you need not one, but two hanko - the Japanese replacement for signatures on legal documents. This is a stamp of your name and it uses a special ink. Apparently there is simple version, mitomein 認め印, and a more complicated version, jitsuin 実印, and to sign the rental agreement you need both. You can get them at a hanko-shop, and then they need to be registered to your name at the ward office.

Like I said, prohibitively complicated. For foreigners Tohoku university has a number of resources.
http://www.insc.tohoku.ac.jp/cms/?pg=100113145442
https://www.cefix.insc.tohoku.ac.jp/house/default_e.asp
http://www.insc.tohoku.ac.jp/cms/index-e.cgi?pg=130527113858
There are a number of reasons why I chose to go to the open market instead, and for the ILC I'm sure some people prefer to live on campus, while others rather live in the city. Enabling this choice is one of the action items when the ILC gets approved.

A new year, a new job, a new continent

I will be joining the Tohoku University group at the beginning of next year. This is an exciting opportunity, but it required yet another international relocation.
A few lessons learned:
- Do not move between the years, if you can avoid it. The holidays complicate everything.
- Give yourself enough time for visa applications. 2 months is not too much, particularly if paper work needs to be sent back and forth.
- Give yourself enough time to sell your stuff. In particular electric gadgets that operate on a different voltage than what you find in your new destination.

With the new year I plan on updating the blog with accounts of the research in my new group as well as situations I might encounter as a European in Japan. That's at least my new year's resolution.

Now I need to find a suitable apartment. Wish me luck.

What's next for Particle Physics?

So the LHC experiments found the Higgs a particle that is consistent with a Standard Model Higgs boson. Great! Now what?
There is a lot of discussion about what particle physicists should focus on next. So first, let me point out a SLAC seminar by UC Irvine professor Tim Tait on what the Higgs boson actually is and why we've been looking for it for such a long time.

In brief, the Higgs mechanism is the simplest way that we could come up with to complete the Standard Model of physics. If the newly found boson really is the Standard Model Higgs boson, then we guessed correctly, and the Standard Model of Particle Physics is complete.

But here's the catch: We don't want to have complete Standard Model. Not only would that be extremely boring, but the Standard Model falls short in addressing some fundamental questions: What is dark matter? What is dark energy? Why is there apparently so much more matter than anti-matter in the universe? We know the Standard Model cannot give a complete picture. Instead, we're looking for extensions or other theoretical frameworks altogether, for example supersymmetry. With these theories, we could maybe address some of these questions, but we lack conclusive evidence why the theory should be true. So far, the precision tests that were carried out at LEP, SLD, and other experiments since then have provided spectacular confirmation of the Standard Model, but have failed to put the finger on the cracks that we know exist.

The discovery of the Higgs boson now gives us a new handle on understanding nature. All the time that we've been looking for the boson, we've spent on understanding this last piece to the Standard Model in great detail. We know exactly what it has to look like in order to fit perfectly. (We just didn't know where it was until now.) Now we need to measure its properties with the highest possible precision to find deviations from these predictions. The LHC was not really built for this task. It will be able to identify large deviations from the predictions, but precision measurements will be extremely difficult. So what's next?

There have been ideas about a Higgs factory in form of a muon collider. Unfortunately, nobody knows how to build such a machine, and it could well be a decade or more before we can start thinking about building such a machine.

Instead, I have been working on detector research for linear colliders for the past decade. The LHC took over 20 years from inception to first collisions. It is unlikely that the next machine will be built faster. People have been working on the ILC and on CLIC for over a decade already. That means we will start to take data in ten years at the earliest. The easy questions have been answered. Answers to the next questions requires a continuous effort. These big expensive machines are not toys, but scientific instruments. They drive progress in science, technology, education, and, by virtue of being international collaborations, even politics. They are without a doubt worthwhile the money we want to spend to build them. The upcoming Symposium on the European Strategy for Particle Physics will be an important step towards the realization of the next big machine.

Moving

Not my favorite pastime.

Unfortunately, in a field as international as particle physics, it kind of comes as part of the job.

This time, we lasted only a year before we had to move on, albeit this was not job-related, but rather landlord-related.

Luckily we were able to find something close by, so the move was less stressful than others had been.

So we can still use the same voltage for our appliances, and even the plugs are the same (You would think that something as trivial as a plug would be easy to standardize across borders. I'm sure it actually would be, but apparently there is no interest in this. Maybe with the opening of the European job market, this will change. I hope people don't attach something like national pride to the design of their plugs.)

So now all our stuff has changed places again. I can't really call the move finished, because we had still a large fraction of our stuff in boxes before the move. But move number 7 in the past 11 years is in the books. Here's to hoping the next one won't be due for a few years.

The Higgs

What an exciting day to be a particle physicist!
The observation of the Higgs boson was announced today at CERN.
This particular particle has been long sought after, but searches at LEP, the Tevatron, and other facilities have failed to produce conclusive evidence for its existence. Today's announcement is the result of a lot of hard work from a very large number of people, including the ones whose search came up short.
Since the Higgs has been missing for so long, we kind of know already a lot about it. It's like putting together a puzzle. Even if you are missing a piece, you know exactly what it looks like based on the pieces that you do have. There are other blogs, who can explain much better what we think it looks like, for example Flip Tanedo's.
I'm an experimentalist. What we need to do now is measure the Higgs back and forth, inside and out. We need to look at it, and understand if it's really the last missing piece in our puzzle. There are some other very important questions, none of which can really be answered by our current flavor of puzzle, the Standard Model.
Personally, I hope this discovery opens the door to even more questions.

First Post!

Welcome, dear friend.
I am a Physicist and currently work at CERN.
I would like to take you on a journey through the world of a particle physicist working in one of the most exciting places on the planet, in a very promising time.
On the other hand, "May you live in interesting times" is allegedly also a Chinese curse.
We shall see where the journey will take us. It will be slow at times, but interesting, nevertheless, I hope.