At the end of 2022, I received a very exciting and unusual commission: designing the cover of a PhD thesis in particle physics, titled: “The simplicity and complexity of the Higgs boson”.
What made the commission so exciting is that author, Federica Pasquali, who works as an Algorithm Engineer & Product Owner, had a very specific request: she wanted the front cover to show a cat knocking a coconut-resembling round object off a table and the back of the cover showing the cat looking at the split object with an avocado inside.
You're probably wondering just like I was back then: what do cats and avocados have to do with particle physics? Well, to begin with, the Higgs boson does resemble an avocado. Secondly, in the words of Federica:
“Much like cats knocking down objects, particle physicists appreciate colliding protons. While cats run experiments with gravity, our inquiries aim in proving or disproving the existing theories about how the subatomic world works. The mathematical theory used to describe the subatomic world is called Standard Model (SM) and incorporates all the discoveries of elementary particles starting from the discovery of the electron in 1897, to the Higgs boson (H) in 2012. While this theory is validated and supported by a large number of experiments, one open question is whether the last-discovered particle is the one theorized by the SM, or something that just resembles it. This thesis contributes to this effort, by analyzing the Higgs boson decay into two W bosons, specifically the mode where the W bosons decay into different-flavor charged leptons."
It was one of the nicest commissions I've done and we were both very happy with the result!
