Physics

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has found is that there are interesting features in the cosmic ray background which could indicate dark matter particle anti particle annihilations.  That is not the same as finding dark matter.   The ANTARES neutrino telescope was used to take observations of the solar neutrino flux with directionality, which found no excess of neutrinos from the sun  (http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.6516).  That would have indicated dark matter concentrated at the center of mass of our solar system.   Taken together these results indicate…

The mediatic effect of the Higgs boson discovery of last July is clear to everybody. And CERN has been very good at exploiting it, making fundamental physics a familiar topic and creating interest worldwide. Yet I think we can do more. The gap between basic research in physics and the public is wide, and we are doing still too little to fill it. There is an old idea of mine that has been sitting there for over eight years unattended, and I think it could be used with good effects now to increase the awareness of laypersons on basic science. The basic idea is to use the events collected by CMS…

What looks like a tantalizing signal of the rare two-muon decay of the Higgs boson has been evidenced in an analysis of 2011+2012 data just sent to PRL by the CMS collaboration. This analysis targeted supersymmetric neutral Higgs bosons, whose decay to muon pairs is enhanced for some values of the SUSY parameters, but was not expecting to see any signal in the 25 inverse femtobarns of collisions that the CMS experiment has so far collected. The branching ration of the Standard Model Higgs boson into muon pairs is a 10^-5 thing, so no more than one or two events could appear in the statistics…

I have decided to rescind this proposal.  Stars in a galaxy travel at one velocity, light at the speed c.  There is only one velocity involved in applying the product rule to the definition of a force as a change in momentum.  Note that is not a trivial application of the product rule either.  Newton's second law is invariant under Galilean transformation.  The dm/dt dR/dt is not invariant. The Problem with Velocity ProfilesThe velocity profile of thin disk galaxies is a riddle worth pondering. Studies have shown that the velocity of stars in a galaxy rise to a peak…

The velocity profile of thin disk galaxies is a riddle worth pondering. Studies have shown that the velocity of stars in a galaxy rise to a peak as one leaves the center, and then stays flat as one looks further from the center. Newtonian gravitational theory can predict the peak correctly, but there must always be a decline. From Galaxy rotation curve, with A being the Newtonian prediction and B the data. There are two parts to any force law: the cause and the effect. Consider the elliptical motion of the Moon around the Earth.  The cause is the gravitational field of the Earth…

I think I wrote a post about the "definitive results" of the CDF and DZERO experiments on the search for the Higgs boson at least a couple of times already in the past, but you know, these busy experimentalists continue to improve their analyses, adding previously incomplete information, combining results, tweaking and improving things here and there. It is only natural that on such an important topic as the observation of the Standard Model Higgs boson the Tevatron folks were not ready to give up just yet. So yesterday a new paper appeared on the Cornell arxiv, which is (should be) the final…

The number of conferences held every year around the world to present and discuss topics in frontier particle physics is surprisingly large: over a hundred per year. Just look at the following list of conferences scheduled in the last three weeks for a proof (and no, March is not very different from other months): 2/3 Moriond EWK4/3 KEKPH 20134/3 DPG 20139/3 Moriond QCD10/3 Aspen 201310/3 HiJetsUSC 201313/3 LHCC17/3 LISHEP 201318/3 MITP 201321/3 HFMCW 201321/3 DPHEP7 2013 Now, let me straighten out a thing at the outset: I am fully corresponsible, have lived and thrived in the system for…

From the perspective of one theoretical particle physicist Planck found far from "nothing". The ESA's Planck probe largely corroborates the findings of NASA's WMAP probe, but it leaves theoretical astrophysics unsettled. After reading my fellow blogger Dr. Tommaso Dorigo's coverage of the Planck announcement I was unsure how to react. We can only conclude that the Planck mission has largely confirmed WMAP's results. Just this kind of confirmation is a basic step in the scientific method. Therefore, far from being “nothing”, the European Space Agency has done the masterful work of…

The Planck collaboration has released today data from the first 16 months of operation of their space instrument (see left). There will be a live streaming of their announcements to the public in 1.5 hours at this link. The data collected by Planck are a huge amount of information on the sky at a unprecedented level of resolution. To navigate through this we will need the word of the experts; I will update this post in a few hours to comment on the most interesting results. A picture of the cosmic microwave spectrum, taken from the freshly released results (see here to get your own pic of the…

"...spend one year one mile underground to stare at a bucket of xenon ... only to come out for your zen moment and profoundly declare "nothing happened" ... and then you spend twice as long wondering how you allowed yourself to be talked into doing that sort of nonsense ... one has to admit to being duped" Deluded Experimentalist, circa 2013