Physics

In a mail message sent to the INFN president Roberto Petronzio and a few other distinguished particle physicists (not me, I got it third-hand), Carlo Rubbia announced today at 3.53 PM that the ICARUS experiment has begun operations. Below is the unamended text, which I excuse myself if I distribute freely, given the scientific value of the information and my conviction that I am not harming in any way the experiment nor the people involved (leave alone my own employer, INFN): "We have the pleasure to announce that today at 12:14. immediately after turn on of the detector, tracks have been…

And after all, it is just a matter of language. I am convinced that 99% of the reason why a person with no scientific background cannot follow the developments of a particular research topic, despite a strong will, is language. Not the lack of ten years of specialization, nor the dearth of basic knowledge. Anything that can be explained in plain English -anything- can be understood by an English speaker willing to listen. So why is it so hard then? Cannot we, the scientists, just make that little extra effort and step down a bit from our self-erected podium? Or is it not really needed, given…

"Leptons interact only with photons, and with the intermediate bosons that presumably mediate weak interactions. What could be more natural than to unite these spin-one bosons into a multiplet of gauge fields ? Standing in the way of this synthesis are the obvious differences in the masses of the photon and the intermediate (boson), and in their couplings. We might hope to understand these differences by imagining that the symmetries relating the weak and electromagnetic interactions are exact symmetries of the Lagrangian but are broken by the vacuum". Steven Weinberg

Albert Einstein said scientists would never be able to observe the instantaneous velocity of tiny particles as they randomly shake and shimmy, so called Brownian motion, but physicist at the University of Texas say they have done so. In 1907, Einstein likely did not foresee a time when dust-sized particles of glass could be trapped and suspended in air by dual laser beam "optical tweezers." Nor would he have known that ultrasonic vibrations from a plate-like transducer would shake those glass beads into the air to be tweezed and measured as they moved in suspension. "This is the first…

Listening to music based on the genre it belongs to may lead you away from songs or albums you would actually enjoy, say the authors of a study in the New Journal of Physics. The research shows that searching for the temporal aspects of songs – their rhythm – might be a better way to find music you like than using current automatic genre classifications. By studying similar and different characteristics of specific rhythmic durations and the occurrence of rhythmic sequences, the group of Brazilian researchers found that it is possible to correctly identify the musical genres of specific…

Finally, the Bose-Einstein Correlations article by CMS to which I have personally contributed during the last few months is now an arxiv entry, and has been sent to Physical Review Letters. This is a success for the CMS collaboration, since we are the first to measure this effect in the new LHC proton-proton collisions, at 0.9 and 2.36 TeV of center-of-mass energy. Bose-Einstein correlations are a quantum-mechanical effect which enhances the probability that multiple bosons be found in the same state -same position, same momentum. We study them by searching for pairs of same-charge pions…

If you follow the blogosphere as a source of information on cutting-edge high-energy-physics results, you certainly by now know that the DZERO collaboration has produced a new exciting result. They find a 3.2 standard deviation effect in a study of charge asymmetry of muon pairs, which can be due to a unexpected, large source of CP violation -one which constitutes a very good shot at explaining the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe! I got news of this by Resonaances, who asked me about the analysis (I had no information for him), and later wrote an excellent blog…

While around the world particle physicists are working frantically to produce important new results to be shown at ICHEP 2010 -the International Conference on High-Energy Physics, which is held every two years and is arguably the single most important meeting for this branch of science-, new discoveries get claimed in an asynchronous way. And some of them in a very asynchronous way, I should say, since they are based on 40-years-old data. Old data may well still hold in custody surprising things that we have yet to unearth: in the course of the last 70 years physicists have produced…

Academics pay a lot of attention to the quality of their writings. It is generally a point of pride to publish flawless documents, and this is felt in scientific disciplines just as much as in literary ones. If I told you how much time the members of a scientific experiment such as CDF at the Tevatron or CMS at CERN (the ones I work in) spend in the review of their articles before these are sent to the publishers, you would be startled. Actually, let me just do it, since I promised it earlier this week. The thing works like this: you, alone or with a small group of researchers, produce a…

This is going to be a short post where I confess my recent troubles with keeping everything going on at full speed in my life, while the workload constantly grows. I believe it is a temporary problem -I have experienced the same situation in the past- but I feel swamped by a few things that have piled up. So today, rather than reading on a new physics result or a new article on the arxiv, you are going to find here a list of the things I am not attending in order to write this short post. In random order: I have a undergraduate thesis to correct. I also need to write a reference letter for…