Physics

Based upon some recent statements by the DOE, the commitment to building a muon collider in this country may be more tangible: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/10/its-on-god-part.htmlHere is a conceptual layout:

These days the Higgs boson search is a bit over-hyped, with the impending competition between Tevatron and LHC on the discovery of the fabled boson making headlines every time there is a new, even minor, update in the results of the CDF and D0 experiment. But the hunt is on for many other, maybe even more interesting, rare processes. Among the few really interesting pieces of subatomic physics that are being pursued at the Tevatron, the search for flavor-changing neutral-current (FCNC) decays of neutral B mesons is probably the cleanest, most clear-cut one. I have reported about it in the…

Researchers using measurements of the cosmic microwave background - a faintly glowing relic of the hot, dense, young universe - say their results provide support for the cosmological model of the universe - a prediction that dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of everything in existence while ordinary matter makes up just 5%.  Writing in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers on the QUaD telescope project have released detailed maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB); they focused their measurements on variations in the CMB's temperature and polarization to learn about the…

A Sunday morning browsing through preprints recently posted in the Cornell Arxiv revealed interesting reading material. If you have a couple of hours to kill next week, why not having a look at the following papers ? It will definitely hurt you less than spending the time on your WII or watching Jerry Springer. - Alejandro Rivero, "Unbroken Supersymmetry Without New Particles", 0910.4793: Alejandro is a friend and he already wrote in this blog about his "sbootstrap" theory. To tell you in two words what this is about, he moves from a startling numerical coincidence between the masses of…

My statistics page depressingly shows that a large fraction of readers who visit this site do so for an average of 30 seconds. Maybe they were looking for something different, or maybe they do not like the content offered here. In any case, I have decided that my long, detailed articles about particle physics are not exactly meeting the demand of the audience. I am not going to change my writing style because of that, of course, but I will try to also offer some thirty-seconds physics bits here, every once in a while. So let me make a dry run, using a recent result by the CDF collaboration.…

NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope has captured more than one thousand discrete sources of gamma rays in its first year, including a measurement that provided experimental evidence about the very structure of space and time, unified as space-time in Einstein's theories. Some approaches to new theories of gravity picture space-time as a shifting structure at physical scales trillions of times smaller than an electron and some models predict that the foamy aspect of space-time will cause higher-energy gamma rays to move slightly more slowly than photons at lower energy but such a model…

You read right his "mad" idea is simply that electromagnetic fields effect the formation and evolution of cyclones.  What they proposed and measured in the paper, "Electromagnetic fields recorded in mesocyclones" by Richard Heene, Robert Stevens, and Barb Slusser, is a small effect.  The basic premise is sound, moving electric charges generate magnetic fields.   I have read myself and heard of things published on the arxiv which were patent nonsense. It stands to reason that a large mass of such charged matter, like thunder clouds is rotating it could generate a B field.…

Ready for another turn into National-Enquirer mode of particle physics reporting ? I have a figure to discuss. It is a result now a few months old, but one which received little attention -less than it should have, perhaps. I myself got to see it only a few weeks ago in a presentation given by Jacobo Konigsberg, CDF spokesperson, at a workshop in Bologna. The scandalistic cut of this article is manifest in the title: facing a dearth of exciting reports of new physics discoveries, we are bound to now and then swerve off the path of our usual responsible handling of two-sigma effects, odd…

A friend told me this funny anecdote about the construction of a part of the inner tracker of the CDF detector called "ISL", the so-called "intermediate silicon layers" which were constructed in Italy and then sent to Fermilab for installation in the core of CDF. A technician reports: "When we were finished with the construction and we had to move to Fermilab to install the device, he took extreme care to arrange the shipment of the expensive, sensitive device overseas in three parts, with three separate cargos, such that if a plane had an accident, we would only lose a third of the detector…

As I mentioned yesterday, I was able to put together a proceedings paper on the "Search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the CMS Detector" with the help of a collaborator, Eleni Petrakou. The article will be available on the ArXiv preprint server tomorrow, or even today by clicking on the picture below, which shows part of the first page. The article is quite simple to read and quite short. It should be readable by anybody, not just experts. I will be available to answer any question you may have on its contents, as always. Enjoy!