Physics

Last week I met Marek Karliner at the ICNFP 2013 conference in Crete, where we both enjoyed a nice friendly atmosphere, great food, and a wonderful peaceful location. Professor Marek Karliner is the chair of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of Tel Aviv in Israel. Since he agrees that outreach in physics is an important service that researchers should provide to the community, I was able to convince him to write for this blog the short article which you find below, on the interesting topic of baryons containing two heavy quarks - TD. Baryons with two heavy quarks: bbq, ccq, bcq - Why they…

Every once in a while I feel compelled to write in clear what should be self-evident to anybody with a working brain; to give a sort of "advice to surfers". I don't expect that such an advice be taken seriously - nobody wants to be told what to read and what to avoid - but at least it is posted, can be referred to, and it provides a sort of "disclaimer of liability". Writing a serious blog, i.e. one that informs with continuity one audience and provides a true service, is already quite a demanding task; having to cope with the aftermath of articles that may inflame some readers, or with out-…

The universe may be constructed in a completely different way than models of today predict. The most widely used model today cannot explain everything in the universe, and therefore there is a need to explore the parts of nature which the model cannot explain. This research field, new physics, is out to turn our understanding of the universe upside down and the authors of a new paper say they have succeeded in creating a new method that can make it easier to search for new physics in the universe. The method is a scalesetting procedure and it fills out some empty, but very important,…

One year has passed since the joint discovery, by the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, of a particle which perfectly fits our expectations for a Standard Model Higgs boson. Highly wanted and sought for at particle colliders since the seventies, the Higgs boson is now an established reality, and the interest of experimental physicists has moved to a detailed study of the observable properties of this particle. And there are dozens of exciting things to study! The excitement is due to the fact that the Standard Model, our very precise theory of elementary…

One year has passed since the joint discovery, by the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, of a particle which perfectly fits our expectations for a Standard Model Higgs boson. Highly wanted and sought for at particle colliders since the seventies, the Higgs boson is now an established reality, and the interest of experimental physicists has moved to a detailed study of the observable properties of this particle. And there are dozens of exciting things to study! The excitement is due to the fact that the Standard Model, our very precise theory of elementary…

Yesterday I had the great pleasure to listen to George Zweig, who gave seminar about the discovery of the idea of quarks (or Aces, as he originally named them) at the International Conference of New Frontiers in Physics which is going on this week in the nice setting of Kolymbari, on the north-west coast of the Mediterranean island of Crete. The seminar included a very entertaining recollection of how the idea came about, and what were the initial reactions of several of the main characters of the theoretical physics arena in the sixties of last century (including Feynman, who was originally…

As few of my readers know, I have run a blog written in Greek language in parallel with this one for a couple of years. The idea of that endeavour was twofold: to offer some particle physics outreach in Greek language in the blogosphere, which is difficult to find, and to perfect my writing skills in that language. The translation job was entertaining but difficult, and I finally gave up for lack of time, so that blog went in a hybernation state for a couple of years. But not any longer - I found a physics student who volunteered to continue the translation job, picking articles from this…

Cosmic rays, high-energy particles, can damage electronics on Earth, as well as human and non-human DNA, which puts astronauts in space at risk but has also caused any number of genetic modifications in plants that are considered completely natural.   Their origin has confounded scientists for decades. A study using data  collected by IceTop at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, reveals new information that may help unravel the longstanding mystery of exactly how and where these "rays", because the more scientists learn about the energy spectrum and chemical…

Thanks to a friend and follower of this blog, which I will not name for once to protect him from your flaming, I can share today with you one of the best instances of involuntary humor in particle physics graphs I have ever seen in my whole life. The graph appears to be genuine, so this is a good candidate for the IgNobel prize IMHO. The figure, which was shown at the SUSY 2013 conference in Trieste by Sho Iwamoto, describes how the LHC exclusion region "penetrates" into the opening in SUSY parameter space. The talk actually contains several versions of this figure, but this one, showing…

Back from the beautiful Greek island of Naxos, I find myself in Venice for just a day before leaving to another Greek island - Crete. But this time for business rather than vacations: I will be giving a CMS Overview talk at the International Conference of New Frontiers in Physics, which started yesterday in Kolympari, on the north-western coast of the island. As usual, I am lagging behind with the task of putting together my presentation slides. This time I had been working at a reasonable pace while on vacation, and I thought I was almost done, when I was notified that due to the absence of…