Physics

Superfluid liquid Helium is shot under very high pressure out of a tiny nozzle and into vacuum. Outside in front of the nozzle, the excess pressure bursts the liquid apart violently into a myriad of fragments. A cloud of ultra small droplets comes into existence. The liquid beam is almost completely atomized. If you take a randomly drawn droplet from the explosion, the number of atoms inside of it is mostly just one, a single atom. Finding two atoms is less likely, three atoms even less, and so on. Similar fractionations occur in earthquakes, the stock market, you name it. The law that…

Booze has likely inspired many an action in researchers but any actual science effect was second order.   No more.   Scientists from the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan found that immersing pellets of an iron-based compound in heated alcoholic beverages for 24 hours greatly increase their superconducting ability. And red wine, which has been shown to have numerous health benefits, is apparently tops in physics experiments as well. Iron-based compounds usually become superconductive after being exposed to air, though this process can take up to several months. The…

Just a very short post here to mention Marni Dee Sheppeard's guest post in the brand new NEUTEL blog, the blog of the Neutrino Telescopes 2011 conference, which will be held in Venice from March 15th to March 18th, in the beautiful setting of Palazzo Franchetti, on the Grand Canal. Marni discusses the connection between MINOS results and CPT violation. Marni is known by aficionados of this blog since she often comments my posts, and has published here already a couple of guest posts. But since a long time she has kept a blog of her own, now recently renovated. The blog contains hundreds of…

In a recent post I mentioned here that for the first of two feature articles I wrote for Physics World, and which just appeared in this month's issue (the first piece is actually available online here), I had hand-drawn four sketches that described visually the four main steps of a data analysis looking for new physics. I had chosen to pictorially describe the search for centrally-produced pairs of energetic hadronic jets, which may be the result of the decay of a massive new particle (say, a Z' boson, or a string resonance, you name it) or the anomalous production of high-energy scattering…

The results of a new Supersymmetry search have been released a few days ago by the ATLAS collaboration. They come from an analysis of events with large missing transverse energy and jets -the most classical signature of SUSY at hadron colliders, as well as the most sensitive one in a wide range of the complicated space of SUSY parameters. Since I discussed two other results on SUSY by ATLAS and CMS just a week ago, and I also hosted a discussion of the theoretical relevance of those results in a subsequent guest post by Ben Allanach, I will only provide a short report on this new paper,…

From March 15th to March 18th I will be following the NEUTEL 11 conference, which conveniently (for yours truly!) takes place in Venice, in the magnificent setting of Palazzo Franchetti (see picture below). NEUTEL (first bulletin here) deals with results in particle physics and astrophysics produced by, or in connection to, neutrino telescope experiments; the most recent advances in the theory of neutrinos, astrophysics, and cosmology will also be discussed by eminent theorists. I attended the last two editions of the conference and I was always delighted by the high quality of the…

Every once in a while we are told that Schrödinger’s cat is now proven. One incarnation of the ‘Finally Proven!!!’ of macroscopic quantum superposition was hailed as one of the 10 breakthroughs, the breakthrough of the year 2010. By Science about an article in Nature [1], no less! Such would destroy Roger Penrose’s idea about gravity collapsing quantum superposition. Many a ‘quantum-brain’ proposal would fall, too. I asked Roger why he does not object, and he is plainly too busy to care about such hype. He agrees that experiments are still far from a superposition of states…

Just appeared on Physics World online: the first of my two feature articles on LHC physics in 2011, which are being published in this month's issue.

Some ofthe theories or concepts like 'Film theory of the Universe' of physics and 'wave genetics' of Biology leads to a answer for ideas which were not explained by science. The school of thought gives a logical or scientific way of thinking for the super natural terms like God. The cosmological model ‘The Heart of the God’ says that the four dimensional space is like three dimensional fluid in the shape of sphere for which the surface area interprets the three dimensional space of sensible universe. This is termed as ‘HEART OF THE GOD’ since it also fluctuates for every fraction of second…

Modern cosmology believes that for the universe to behave as it does, the mass-energy of the universe must be dominated by dark matter and dark energy, though there is no direct evidence for the existence of these invisible components.    Alternate, though unpopular, possibilities are that the current theory of gravity does not suffice to describe the dynamics of cosmic systems.   Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) was hypothesized in 1983 by Moti Milgrom, a physicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.  One of MOND's predictions specifies the…