My First Ever Research Meeting

This happened last July 8, 2022. To be honest I do not know how to start this journal because of how many things are popping out in my mind. To describe what happened to my first research meeting with Dr. Sombillo with one word, I would say DENSE. I have a lot of terms and concepts that I do not understand yet on my own research topic, and this drives me to fell on to the rabbit hole of reading a lot of papers related to hadron physics. In fact, My laptop and I are already used to having multiple tabs open in Google Chrome. I will show what happened this day before I reflect again so you may understand what I mean that the session was "DENSE".

Figure 1: My Research notes

Well firstly, before the meeting, I am already curious with my topic he assigned to me which is developing a deep learning algorithm for extracting the poles of the scattering matrix. If you are confused with what I said, believe me, I am too. Thus, I scoured through the research history of my adviser and started at the oldest paper that he and his colleagues wrote (which is around 2020) in order to find the purpose of what they are studying as well as how the topic has gathered results and improved on further studies. I decided to read the first paper one hour before our meeting. I did a way to remember the terms that I am unfamiliar with by writing it on my notes, as well has grasping the concepts by paraphrasing the introductory section of the paper. And I felt like it worked because even though I have only read the introduction, I have already acquainted myself with a lot of terms as you can see above. Hence, DENSE. When I felt that confused mind of mine, I immediately started to check each term on Google and tried to curiously asked questions so I can relate it with my unripe present knowledge (well I guess ignoring my hard subjects in electromagnetism and math methods lead me to this consequence). That and paraphrasing the introduction lead me to understanding the purpose of this study and even more questions that I want to ask my adviser almost endlessly. I really enjoyed what I did so I think this could be an effective way of learning my research, and maybe I could also apply it to my major subjects.

Figure 2: Zoom Research Meeting

Now came the research meeting. I attended a bit earlier than the meeting schedule so I saw my adviser teaching the latter parts of his introduction to my fellow research group member, Darwin. He said he should have introduced us at the same time because we are working on the similar topic which is about hadron scattering. As he began to discuss he started on the basics of particle physics, and there is a lot going on already. For example, we have a convention that mass and energy are the same unit because we omit the mass eV/c^2 (electron-volts per light speed) into just eV which is a unit of energy. He also introduced me to conventions in particle physics that the reduced Planck's constant and light speed are both called equal to 1. It such a big overload when you think there are a lot of other fields in physics (condensed matter physics, astrophysics, optical physics, etc.) that use other mathematical conventions. It clearly shows why physicists who specialize on one field have a hard time grasping a new one. He also introduced that the kinematics used for particle physics are understood to be special relativity. Thus, we tend to have cases where we generalize equations expressed in either nonrelativistic or relativistic forms. I am not even familiar with the relativistic equations introduced to me because I did not encounter it on my recent modern physics class. After that thing we just went to another topic about quantum chromodynamics or QCD, and all I had to know first is we are working on the low energy area of it, which is nonperturbative compared to what CERN are probing in high energies. Then we shifted to another topic which now nearly relates to what I have been tasked for as well as what I have learned on my modern physics, and it is about the potential models in quantum mechanics, that I know about for example the infinite and finite square well, harmonic oscillator, and coulomb potential. But here in my research when we get our results, we can infer what would be the model of the potential that keeps the quarks (these are the particles that make up protons, neutrons, and other hadrons) only inside the nucleus, which is a phenomenon called confinement. Now we shifted again to the main concept that I need to understand mostly for the work, which is now on the process of finding resonances. Here I need to understand how the S-matrix (Scattering Matrix) works. He even started to send me an introductory reference about it. 

Now for all the things that are mentioned, I felt like I cannot connect every concept together yet, because I also need to understand each one deeply. That is why my mind was fully overloaded on that day. Nevertheless, I appreciate the whole research meeting because I never had anything like this before. Back in high-school, when we are tasked to think of a research topic, we have to think on our own, and it must be realistically new. We do not even know how to search the right reference to start with. And now it felt like a breath of fresh air. Because not only my research adviser recommended me a topic for physics, but he also taught us the background to make us understand this confusing work. I would not be able to know what I need to know first to understand real professional research without him.

Now, next up is reading the RRL.