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Sam Homiller

@shomiller.com
257 followers 394 following 125 posts

Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh studying theoretical particle physics. Formerly at Cornell, Harvard, Stony Brook and Illinois. Atlanta baseball fan

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Reposted by Sam Homiller
Neal Weiner @nealweiner.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
An interesting result out today from LZ. Definitely not a standard wimp, but maybe an inelastic scattering or momentum dependent scattering? (1/n) www.sciencenews.org/article/dark...
sciencenews.org
Have scientists glimpsed the first dark matter particle?
Shadowy dark matter has eluded scientists for decades. The LZ experiment may have spotted one particle, called a WIMP, but more data is needed to check.
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 03/07/2026
Now just think of the magical things that would happen if we built a muon collider
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Reposted by Sam Homiller
Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
New: DOE is reorganizing the Office of Science, per email. Notably, it appears to be combining high energy physics and nuclear physics. Unclear if this keeps the funding pools separate. (I'll ask) Apologies for the low-res image; that's what they sent. On the right is the current org chart.
new org chart for DOE Science programs Existing org chart
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Reposted by Sam Homiller
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 24/02/2026
I'm constantly trying (/failing) to get this point across. If you're a trained expert in a field, then it may be worthwhile to question the scientific consensus of your peers. If you're not, the scientific consensus is absolutely the best you can do and it's arbitrary foolishness to disregard it.
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 10/02/2026
Shonny Miller, whoever you are, please for the love of god, stop trying to use my email address. It is not yours. It has never been yours. I am not interested in your Sam's Club statements or your pest inspection reports.
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 30/12/2025
Playing Guess Who (animal edition) with the toddler: 3yo: I’m going to choose the duck. Mom: You’re not supposed to say that out loud 3yo: *whispering* I’m going to choose the duck. .. Grandma: Is your animal green? 3yo: No, it’s white. It’s the duck.
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 19/12/2025
Apologies to the copy editors employed by APS who have to add "boson" after "Higgs" about 60 times in our paper for no reason other than the Physical Review being silly
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Reposted by Sam Homiller
Patrick Meade @theorydad.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
European particle physics strategy update summary 😅
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 10/12/2025
Computer Modern ftw
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Reposted by Sam Homiller
Patrick Meade @theorydad.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
Sad to see C.N. Yang passed away, a legendary physicist who despite his achievements was also one of the most underrated physicists of the 20th century and could have won multiple Nobel prizes not just one. He put Stony Brook University on the map and left an indelible impact on the YITP ⚛️🧪
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 30/09/2025
If you see this post a bridge. (Roberto Clemente Bridge, Pittsburgh)
View of Roberto Clemente Bridge in Pittsburgh, with PNC Park in the background.
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Reposted by Sam Homiller
Casey terHorst @ecoevolab.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
The GRFP lives!! (due end of October) www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...
nsf.gov
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 07/08/2025
Can confirm lol.
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 20/07/2025
Important:
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Reposted by Sam Homiller
Cara Giovanetti @idontevencara.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
Awful news: CMB-S4 is cancelled. This experiment was massively exciting for the cosmology community. It would have told us about the state of the universe some 400,000 years after the big bang, at a level of precision we can now only dream about ⚛️🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
U.S. abandons hunt for signal of cosmic inflation
Now-canceled CMB-S4 project would have searched the afterglow of the Big Bang for signs of cosmic exponential growth spurt
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Reposted by Sam Homiller
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 22/06/2025
My heart is with my Iranian friends and their families. May everyone live.
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Reposted by Sam Homiller
American Physical Society @apsphysics.aps.org · 02/05/2025
The president's budget proposal cuts billions in funding from the DOE Office of Science, NIST, NASA, and the NSF — but there’s still time to change it. Tell your lawmakers why they should stand up for science using our letter-writing toolkit, targeted to your state: go.aps.org/3RP9EWF
Looking up at the Capitol rotunda against a blue sky. An American flag in front of the rotunda is blowing in the wind.
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 19/04/2025
It continues to astound me just how much everything can be so awful and so unserious at the same time
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 17/04/2025
atmospheric signatures of life: the “Majorana quasiparticles” of planetary astronomy
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Reposted by Sam Homiller
Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
Judge Allison Burroughs, an Obama appointee, orders that all recipients be notified of the TRO within 24 hours and that a compliance report be filed with the report within 48 hours. TRO: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
The Court further orders that (1) within 24 hours of entry of this Order, Defendants must
provide written notice of the Order to all funding recipients affected by the Rate Cap Policy and
(2) Defendants must notify the Court that they have done so within 48 hours of entry of this
Order. Defendants shall additionally file status reports at biweekly intervals thereafter to
confirm the regular disbursement and obligation of federal financial assistance funds for so long
as the terms of the TRO remain in effect.
Defendants' opposition to the Motion is due by Tuesday, April 22, 2025. Plaintiffs may file a reply brief, limited to ten pages in length, by Friday, April 25, 2025. Counsel shall appear in-person for a hearing on the Motion at 11:00 AM on Monday, April 28, 2025.
This TRO shall become effective immediately upon entry by this Court. It shall remain
in effect until further order of this Court.
SO ORDERED.
April 16, 2025
/s/ Allison D. Burroughs
ALLISON D. BURROUGHS
U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 02/04/2025
Colored Feynman diagrams from MadGraph? Is this their April Fools' Day celebration this year?
Feynman diagrams for vector boson scattering processes, with the individual particle legs all given random, bright colors.
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 26/03/2025
Belle-II weighs in on the RD/RD* anomaly? 👀 (indico.in2p3.fr/event/35965/...)
Preliminary result showing the preferred region for R(D) vs. R(D*) based on 365/fb of Belle-II data, and a comparison to the current world average and SM predictions.
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 01/03/2025
Hard to overstate how disruptive this will be for a generation of particle physicists, specifically
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 13/02/2025
Ashoke Sen with a response to III: arxiv.org/abs/2502.07883 But missed the opportunity to title it “New Ideas for Old Physicists”
arxiv.org
Are Moduli Vacuum Expectation Values or Parameters?
Banks has argued that the moduli of string theory are not vacuum expectation values but parameters. We offer a different perspective on this question. Given two different points P and Q in the moduli ...
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 04/02/2025
Not sure how I should feel about this page being linked from the calendar with my seminar later this week 😅 physics.illinois.edu/calendar/sem... (But @mrocek.bsky.social might appreciate it)
physics.illinois.edu
The art of Sleeping in Seminars
The art of Sleeping in Seminars
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 04/02/2025
At the risk of Tom thinking I have it out for him, Section 1 being "Introduction" and Section 2 being "Conclusions" I think is a paper format we can all aspire to arxiv.org/abs/2502.01367
arxiv.org
Note on 't Hooft's Shock Wave Commutators From Near Horizon Conformal Field Theory
We construct a finite model of 't Hooft's shock wave commutation relations from the ansatz\cite{Carlip}\cite{Solodukhin}\cite{BZ} that the quantum degrees of freedom in a causal diamond in a solution ...
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 31/01/2025
We have enough institutions collapsing this month without the dictionary posting this nonsense…
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 30/01/2025
Irrationally upset by the number formatting being different in each of these papers: arxiv.org/abs/2208.08959 arxiv.org/abs/2307.15812 arxiv.org/abs/2501.17697
arxiv.org
Old Ideas for New Physicists:1
We review and clarify ideas proposed many years ago for understanding cosmology in a holographic framework. The basic strategy is to use Jacobson's\cite{ted95} identification of Einstein's equations w...
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 30/01/2025
This search covers the ~10 GHz range, that's more than enough of an excuse to make the prefix "Wonder" instead of "Giga" arxiv.org/abs/2501.17119
arxiv.org
First Axion-Like Particle Results from a Broadband Search for Wave-Like Dark Matter in the 44 to 52 $μ$eV Range with a Coaxial Dish Antenna
We present the results from the first axion-like particle search conducted using a dish antenna. The experiment was conducted at room temperature and sensitive to axion-like particles in the $44-52\,μ...
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 13/01/2025
One of the most impactful (for me) technological breakthroughs in my career has been the arXiv fixing the "TeX Source" button to download a properly named .tar file.
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 01/01/2025
My resolution this year is to spend a little bit of time each day thinking about the Roman Empire
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Reposted by Sam Homiller
Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 21/12/2024
Mathematical physicist Cécile DeWitt-Morette was born #OTD in 1922. She made foundational contributions to Feynman functional integrals, organized the first American conference on general relativity (important for gravitational waves), and started the Les Houches Summer School. 🧪 ⚛️ 👩‍🔬 (1/n)
Black and white photo of Cécile in the 1940s or 50s. She is smiling and looking to the right of the camera. Her hair is short and she is wearing a collared blouse.A black and white photo of Cécile take in her office at UT Austin in the early or mid 2000s. A blackboard with diagrams and a well-known file cabinet sit in the background. Cécile’s hair is short and she wears a floral print shirt.
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 20/12/2024
Just got a citation request before even seeing that the paper was on the arXiv 🤣
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 09/12/2024
Today I learned there's a double beta decay experiment named PIKACHU (Pure Inorganic scintillator experiment in KAmioka for CHallenging Underground sciences) which seems pretty clearly aimed at some of my old interests... arxiv.org/abs/2412.04712
arxiv.org
Simulation Tool Development and Sensitivity Analysis of 160Gd Double Beta Decay Search by the PIKACHU Project
Neutrinoless double beta decay (0v2b) has been investigated as a physical process that can provide evidence for the Majorana nature of neutrinos. The theoretical predictions of the 0v2b rate are subje...
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 05/12/2024
Surely some kind of record: Yesterday we re-submitted a paper to address some questions from the referee. They got it, responded, and it was accepted, all in under 3 hours! I’m happy, but now also a bit ashamed at the usual turnaround time for reports I write…
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 30/11/2024
Every timeout Kirby calls has me more convinced he’s actually Ted Cruz
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 28/11/2024
Thankful for the apparent meta-stability of the Higgs vacuum today 🙏 (figure from arxiv.org/abs/1707.08124)
Plot showing regions of absolute stability, meta-stability, and instability of the Higgs vacuum as a function of the Higgs and top pole masses. The Standard Model values lie in the narrow region of metastability.
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 27/11/2024
👀
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 23/11/2024
I expect I know the answer, but still find it remarkable that so many institutions insist on using Interfolio when it's so incredibly bad at the really simple task it's built for and surely costs much, much more than most of the alternatives...
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 20/11/2024
Not sure if there's a single book, but Langacker is underrated imo (and great as a reference)
Cover of "The Standard Model and Beyond" by Paul Langacker
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 26/10/2024
Why doesn’t CERN have a mascot?
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 15/10/2024
Going to start waking up every morning scared that Jim Cline is going to eviscerate my work out of nowhere from now on...
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 25/09/2024
I have a lot of misgivings about all my work being on Overleaf nowadays, but for starters, why is every remotely mathematical/scientific word excluded from its dictionary??
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 06/04/2024
A bit late, but Dan Garisto had a nice story last month in MIT Tech Review about the current state and future of particle physics at the energy frontier. I was quoted a few times, mostly for my enthusiasm following last year's P5 report: www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/20/1...
technologyreview.com
Inside the hunt for new physics at the world’s largest particle collider
The Large Hadron Collider hasn’t seen any new particles since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. Here’s what researchers are trying to do about it.
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 29/03/2024
A nice article about the path towards a muon collider in Science this week: www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
A muon collider could revolutionize particle physics—if it can be built
The radical new machine might be built faster and cost less than an equivalent conventional atom smasher, boosters say
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 07/12/2023
Highlights of the P5 report are up!
Slide on "The Path to a 10 TeV pCM" collider, emphasizing that a muon collider is an attractive option for bringing the energy frontier back to the US.
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 14/11/2023
There are a lot of bizarre minus signs and factors of two out there that exist only for historical reasons, but is there any more obnoxious than the sqrt(2) in the Fermi constant?
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Sam Homiller @shomiller.com · 06/10/2023
Well, I finally made it on here, I might as well make use of it... In case anybody was curious what I've been up to, my friends at Harvard and I just finished some work on zero modes on axion strings: arxiv.org/abs/2310.01476 (my first time posting on hep-th!)
arxiv.org
Zero Modes of Massive Fermions Delocalize from Axion Strings
Massless chiral excitations can arise from the interactions between a fermion and an axion string, propagating along the string and allowing it to superconduct. The properties of these...
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