Meritocratic or mediocre?

ATLAS and CMS are the names given to two large experimental setups at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest accelerator for high energy physics (elementary particle physics) at the European CERN laboratory near Geneva. The setups are huge and heavy – 10,000 tons – and technologically very advanced and innovative: from superconducting magnets to highly integrated ‘deep sub-micron’ electronics. The detectors deal with tens of proton-proton collisions every 50 nanoseconds, producing thousands of particles at this high rate. In order words: the proton bunches in the beams meet and collide at the center of these detectors two hundred million times per second. Powerful and smartly programmed computer systems filter out about one hundred of the most interesting collision ‘events’ per second for recording them on a mass storage medium for further ‘off line’ analysis. In total the experiments record approximately 15 million gigabytes per year. The worldwide LHC computing grid – a distributed infrastructure – was developed for storing and analyzing these data.

The teams of scientists involved in each of these experiments (ATLAS, CMS) number two and a half, maybe three thousand persons. The period over which ATLAS/CMS were designed, constructed, built, commissioned up to ‘data taking’ and data analysis (‘physics’) is about 15 years, longer for the hand full of pioneers involved from the very early days of audacious planning. Audacious because they had to plan for technological advances that were by no means sure to happen. They had to work hard to make them happen!

ATLAS/CMS fully live up to the expectations. They collect their data very efficiently from the collisions provided prolifically by the Large Hadron Collider, also working wonderfully well. Prolific is also the production of scientific papers by ATLAS/CMS. I read them with great interest. It is exciting, breathtaking, to follow the hunt for the Higgs boson (its ‘hiding place’ has been localized quite accurately; before the end of 2012 we will have captured it!).

But there is one thing that disturbs me about the scientific publications of ATLAS/CMS. And that is the author list, in particular the length of it. You can find all 3000 authors on every paper. That is ridiculous. It brings high energy physics into a cultural crisis. It prevents the young and brilliant to manifest themselves through a distinctive publication record. It allows mediocrity to creep in.

I call on ATLAS/CMS to do something about this. In these days of web-based publishing it should be technically easy to distinguish, say, five categories of authors. 1: those who really did the innovative analysis published in a particular paper; 2: those, usually more senior, who were closely involved in inspiring, supervising, checking, improving the work; 3: those who made distinctive, but more generic contributions to the technical infrastructure of particular importance for the paper under consideration; 4: the present leadership of the collaboration; 5: the long retired who once made a contribution to the collaboration.

I know, my categories are not perfect, but they are a start. If high energy physics is to survive it has to very quickly re-emphasize scientific excellence again as the most important criterion for leadership.

Jos Engelen, March 26, 2012