Physics

Tomorrow I am traveling to CERN, where I have been invited to give a seminar at a meeting of the LHCb experiment. My talk will discuss the issue of the energy calibration of b-quark jets, a topic to which I have devoted a good part of my research time for the last thirteen years. The talk will of course be centred on the explanation of the analysis Julien Donini and I, together with a few colleagues, performed in CDF a few years ago, the search for Z boson decays to b-quark jet pairs. I have in the pipeline a simpler article than the present one, where I explain why b-quark jets are special,…

Created in a Bose Einstein Condensate, sound may enter these acoustic black holes but it may not leave.  This creates an system we can experiment with on a table top level and learn about black holes from it.   The strange and unique features of the Bose condensate never cease to surprise us.  A while back they were used to slow a beam of light almost to a standstill. Now a research team out of the institute of technology in Haifa Israel claims to have created "A sonic black hole in a density-inverted Bose-Einstein condensate." by O. Lahav, A. Itah, A. Blumkin, C. Gordon…

    Early science decided on the topology of matter as a system of atoms, durable units of mass.   The development of the full periodic table of elements gave each one a clear electron structure.  Now the classical mechanical definitions and models of atoms and waves are at the particle physics crossroads where only a conclusive synthesis of modern relative quantum observationsand mathematics will do.    New Science Will Resolve the Contradictions of  Relativity and Quantum Effects     Quantized changes of atomic states…

The search for planets capable of sustainable life (as we know it) is on, but with an infinite number of planets astronomers are focusing their attention on each system's 'habitable zone', where heat radiated from the star is just right to keep a planet's water in liquid form. They have found planets orbiting red dwarf stars because those make up about three-quarters of the stars close to our solar system. Potentially habitable planets must orbit closer to those stars, perhaps one-fiftieth the distance of Earth to the sun, since they are smaller and generate less heat than our sun. But new…

It is a well-known fact that it is much easier to measure a physical quantity than to correctly assess the magnitude of the uncertainty on the measurement: the uncertainty is everything! A trivial demonstration of the above fact is the following. Consider you are measuring the mass of the top quark (why, I know you do it at least once a week, just to keep mentally fit). You could say you have no idea whatsoever of what the top mass is, but you are capable of guessing, and your best guess is that the top mass is  twice the mass of the W boson: after all, you have read somewhere that the…

Core-collapse (or gravitational) supernovae are among the most energetic and violent events in the universe and  constitute the final tremendous explosions in the life cycles of stars 8 times more massive than our Sun. After running out of fuel, the core of such a star collapses and forms a neutron star or a black hole. At the same time, the outer layers are ejected at high velocity (up to 10% of the speed of light) and shine as brightly as billions of stars together. To provide some perspective, the total energy suddenly released by such a supernova exceeds the total energy release by…

It feels good, for a die-hard sceptic like I am, to live and let unexplained phenomena die. The phenomena in question are measured deviations from the predictions of the Standard Model (SM), our wonderful theory of subnuclear interactions, which has been condemned to fail by theorists soon after its construction, but continues, disappointingly for many, to succeed in explaining experimental results. Mind you, the Standard Model is only an effective theory. This much has to be set straight: much like Newtonian mechanics, the Standard Model is incomplete, and only works in a certain range of…

'True muonium' is a long-theorized but never-seen tiny atom that was first proposed more than 50 years ago.  True muonium, which unlike "muonium" (an atom made of an electron and an anti-muon) is made of a muon and an anti-muon.   Both muons and anti-muons are created frequently in nature when energetic particles from space — cosmic rays — strike the Earth's atmosphere yet their existence is fleeting and their combination, 'true muonium,' decays naturally into other particles in a few trillionths of a second. This has made observation impossible. But it might be observed even in…

This is going to be a rather long piece, so for the lazy and the absent-minded among you I decided to put together an executive summary at the top, and not at the bottom of the article as I usually do. It is a bit of a spoiler, but those of you who can invest some time reading about particle physics will not be deterred by the first few lines of text. Besides, an executive summary is needed because we are discussing real news here: so here it is. The CDF Collaboration at the Tevatron has produced yesterday a preprint of a publication, meant to be published by Physical Review Letters, where…

SINCE WE INHERITED SCIENCE AND WE ARE PRETTY SURE NO ONE WHO STARTED IT IS STILL ALIVE, WHY KNOT BELIEVE ITS CREATORS KNEW THIS AND ADDED EXTRAS TO SCIENCE FOR THIS SOLE PURPOSE TOO!