This post is a little over a month late, but while I was sitting through some of the talks at the April APS meeting, I thought that I should put some of my ideas about it in writing. I didn’t have anything to present at the conference, but since it was local, I just bought a student pass and took the weekend to listen to what was going on and talk to a lot of different people.
Before I go into the main point of this post, I want to speak a little to my conference experience. Typically, when I attended conferences in the past, I always had something to present. This led to me focusing heavily on my own responsibilities and not really taking in what was going on in the field that was relevant to me as well as what other things are going on that are just interesting. During this conference, I was able to focus entirely on what other people were presenting, and I found the conference to be much better for me as a result. Disregarding all of the technical science discussed, I found a couple new people whose work I would like to follow and see what they continue doing in the future: Thomas Papenbrock, Gustav Jansen, and the whole coupled cluster group; Martin Savage and other lattice QCD collaborators; Dean Lee; and Paul Fanto, a graduate student at Yale that left a profound impression on me. Despite still being a graduate student, he already understood a variety of different topics at a level where he was able ask pointed, technical, relevant questions of many different speakers, something that I’ve only really seen out of extremely experienced older professors in the past.
Allow me to begin by saying that nuclear physics research is very closely linked to developments in national security and defense. Developments of improved models or better experimental measurements of the properties of unstable nuclei factor into a variety of applications ranging from securing the national nuclear stockpile to having improved threat detection at border control stations. A single example that points to this is the fact that the nuclear research and the development of these improved technologies occur on the same site in places like national laboratories, and scientists often work on highly academic research at the same time as they work on classified projects that relate to national security and nuclear weapons policy. Thus, the state of nuclear physics research in the USA is intimately tied to our ability to work towards our own goals with respect to nuclear policy.
At the APS meeting, it dawned on me just how much of nuclear physics research in the US is done by people from outside the US. Many of the groups at national labs and in other sensitive contexts have strong international representation. The reason for this is simple: the opportunities to pursue nuclear physics research in the USA are unmatched, and for these international scientists, it makes sense to work in a space that offers the best opportunities and the most resources. As a result, we have many international scientists doing cutting edge research at national labs. The nature of national labs is such that very few developments make it out of the lab (only the ones cleared for publication to the public by a review system), and so most of the information stays in the national labs and can be leveraged by applications and policy teams.
This shows very clearly how opening American borders to scientific talent (seasoned scientists as well as international graduate students and undergraduate students) aids the USA in working towards its nuclear policy goals. Tightening the conditions on who can move into the space of American nuclear physics simply serves to reduce the number of people in nuclear physics in the USA, which slows the academic exploration of the field and slows down technical developments that would have a significant impact on American nuclear policy and defense policy.