Physics
I am happy to read from a message by our publication board chair that CMS has reached the important goal of publishing 100 scientific papers. The majority of these are analyses of collision data (75); 24 more are from studies performed on the three billion cosmic-ray events taken during commissioning; and one is the CMS detector paper description.
I thought I'd share this news with you... I think this is a good start, but of course I expect we will soon reach 1000 papers. It should take us of the order of 10 years.
Another thought is that, CMS being a collaboration of O(3000) scientists,…
I like to think at this blog as a place where both full outsiders and highly knowledgeable insiders coexist and exchange information. I know I often err on the side of producing posts which are unintelligible to most outsiders, but at least you have to acknowledge that I try hard to make my pieces at least accessible in their introductory part. Anyway, this is a preamble to say that today I am happy to be able to post a quite nice analogy for outsiders, one which will hopefully explain why we high-energy experimentalists are equally thrilled at the prospects of finding a Higgs boson, or not…
"Particle Accelerators Full of Spin and Fury, Signifying Something"
Standard stuff written well. I particularly liked the end:
After some 70 trillion collisions, the Large Hadron Collider has seen no trace of the most popular candidate for such a theory, called supersymmetry, which among other things is needed to explain why whatever mass the Higgs has is low enough to be discovered in the first place and not almost infinite. It also predicts a whole new population of elementary particles — called “superpartners” to the particles physicists already know about — one of which could be the …
Do you remember the dijet mass bump found by CDF in W plus jets events ? That signal, whose significance exceeded four standard deviations, had everybody around go crazy for a while. Theoretical models appeared overnight in the arxiv, experimentalists canceled trips to spin their data to confirm the signal, others speculated on wild systematic uncertainties creating the effect, bloggers placed bets on the reality of the effect.
Time has passed, and the bubble of course has deflated a little. The signal has not been conclusively been disproven yet, but there are indications that it might not…
My work on gravity received a fatal blow in the Spring of 2007. A patient, creative exploration in the neighborhood of a deep truth might find an alternative expression to dodge the bullet that killed my math haiku. This blog tells the story.
The cranial trauma was caused by a vector current coupling term in the Lagrangian, JuAu. An analysis of the phase reveals the mediating particle is spin 1. Like charges repel for forces mediated by spin 1 particles. Like charges attract for gravity. Therefore my proposal "violently disagrees with observation." Gravity must be mediated by spin 2 particles…
Why dark matter does not emit photon?
We are now living in the era of new revolution.
Are we again treading on the process of huge revolution that occurred in the late 19th century and the early 20th century?
The current observation of dark matter requires explanation on two important situations as the following.
Situation 1: Denial of the gravitational (attractive) phenomenon
Dark matter is five times more than the general matter, but it does not show macro-structure like the structure of galaxy or galaxy cluster, or micro-structure like fixed star or planet. The result of the current…
Dark Matters from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
Sounds like they had a few physics grad students + Jorge Cham. A good and entertaining review of these major players on the cosmological stage. Note: dark energy is mentioned but not explored.
I am still looking for a few good relativistic rocket scientists to work on these issues.
As a 20-year-long (ok well, 19) member of the CDF collaboration, I am very proud of this wonderful experiments' accomplishments in all areas of high-energy physics, from exotic searches to Higgs searches, from top quark measurements to b-physics measurements, and what not. CDF is a landmark in experimental physics, and the longest-lasting physics experiment ever. But it is not foulproof - nobody is in this wild world of statistical flukes and impossible-to-unearth systematic effects.
Recent analyses in the B-physics sector by CDF produced a couple of important claims. I will not bother to…
While experimentalists gathered in Grenoble present the latest results on High-Energy Physics searches and measurements, phenomenologists like Sven Heinemeyer are working 24/7 to update the picture of the breathing space left for Supersymmetry, in the light of the most recent searches.
You of course do not need to be reminded that Supersymmetry is not a theory but a framework, within which a host of possible manifestations of subnuclear physics are configurable based on the value of 120-or-so free parameters. Because of that, if one wants to discuss in detail what are the most likely versions…
vongehr |
Lets gamble; participating costs you only 50 cents per game. The odds are in your favor! Two out of three times, you win and get a dollar. So we start playing, and it seems as if we walk along time, every game we get to a point in the road where it splits into three paths, two of them are winning one-dollar branches, one is the zero-dollar branch, there we toss a three sided fair die, then we ‘find ourselves’ in one of the three branches. However, I cheated.
I used a quantum die. Although the classical probabilities are V0 = 1/3 and V1 = 2/3, the zero-dollar branch itself branches into three…