Physics

What is a twistor, and why should we care? Well, I may not be the most qualified blogger out here to give you an answer, but I will try to at least give you an idea. Before I do, though, maybe first of all I should say why I am discussing here a rather obscure mathematical concept, in this typically experimental-physics-oriented blog. Twistor theory is a mathematical construction that dates back to the sixties, and is probably mostly known for some of its uses within string theory. Funnily enough, it has now been brought to the fore by Peter Woit, a mathematical physicist from Columbia…

As of late we have been scratching the barrel of "straightforward" measurements of the properties of the Higgs boson, the particle discovered in 2012 by the Large Hadron Collider ATLAS and CMS experiments. But the one property determined in the measurement published yesterday by the CMS experiment was one that many of us were very interested to check. If a particle is an elementary body, how many individual, distinct properties can it really have? For the word "elementary" means that it is intrinsically simple! But things are not so clear-cut in the subnuclear world. An elementary particle,…

Unification of General Relativity with Quantum Field Theory is the greatest mystery of physics, the holy grail of theoretical physics, and also a graveyard of theories. Everyone who has chosen has chosen poorly so far. Working on this problem from another point of view than the usual one I have been lead to the same basic insight as is found in string theory. That at some fundamental level the universe can be described exactly given either enough harmonic oscillators, or the right set of variables in which the behavior is that of a harmonic oscillator. This insight has come from expanding on…

Experimental physics is about investigating the world in a quantitative manner, by exploiting our technology to carefully map the wealth of phenomena that make planets turn around stars, atoms stick together, and hearts to beat. All of that can be understood by creating models of the underlying physics processes. These models need to be fed with input parameters which we must measure. Measurement is thus at the very basis of our understanding of the world. The more accurate our estimates become of fundamental physics parameters, the more knowledge we can extract from a comparison of the tuned…

A theorized particle process, called neutrinoless double-beta decay, could revise our understanding of ghostly particles called neutrinos, and of their role in the formation of the universe. But there is no evidence it actually exists. The CUPID-Mo experiment is among a field of experiments trying to see if it does and preliminary results based on data collected from March 2019 to April 2020 set a new limit for the neutrinoless double-beta decay process in an isotope of molybdenum known as Mo-100. But not a single event was detected in CUPID-Mo after one year of data-taking. Isotopes are…

On July 6th, at 7PM CET (1PM in NY, 10AM in California) I will be chatting online with David Orban on his show Searching For The Question Live (#sftql) about the present and future of particle physics, artificial intelligence and its applications to research, science communication, and the whereabouts. I hope you will be joining us, it should be fun! For those of you who do not know who David Orban is: David studied physics in Padova and we met there, about a billion years ago. From there he took a very interesting career path, which lead him to found companies, implant microchips under his…

A high-tech jamming session, through which a blend of live human and computer-generated sounds came together to create a unique performance piece, has been created thanks to "spooky action at a distance." Quantum teleportation is the ability to instantaneously transmit quantum information over vast distances, with scientists having previously used it to send information from Earth to an orbiting satellite over 870 miles away. In a recent study, Dr. Alexis Kirke at the University of Plymouth describes how he used a system called MIq (Multi-Agent Interactive qgMuse), where an IBM quantum…

When the most massive stars die, they collapse under their own gravity and leave behind black holes while when stars that are less massive reach their end, they explode in a supernova and leave behind dense, dead remnants of stars. Those are called neutron stars and heaviest known neutron star is two and a half times the mass of our sun while the lightest known black hole is about five solar masses. What's in that "mass gap" between neutron stars and black holes? A new paper posits some answers. Artistic rendering of the object in the mass gap as it combats a black hole. Credit: Carl Knox,…

I did not think I would need to explain here things that should be obvious to any sentient being, but the recent activity I detect on Facebook and other sites, and the misinformation spread by some science popularization sources and bloggers around the conclusions reached last week by the European Strategy Update for Particle Physics (EUSUPP), a 2-year-long process that saw the participation of hundreds of scientists and the heavy involvement of some of our leading thinkers, forced me to change my mind. If you smear some peppermint below your nose and bring yourself to read the above…

Fundamental science works by alternating phases of interpretation and refutation. When interpreting the result of experiments, physicists spend their time sweating shirt after shirt in the attempt of formulating economical and coherent explanations of observed phenomena. If the process converges, they formulate a theory which works well, whereby they celebrate for a little while. Then a second phase starts, when hypotheses are formulated on how to refute the shiny new model, finding effects and observatons that do not fit in the formulated framework. And so on. One example of this roller-…