Physics
Think a a mere 0.0350 millionth of a millionth of a millimeter is unimportant? Think again.
At the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, an international team of researchers has now measured the proton with experiments they say are ten times more accurate than all previous ones. And all the old values for the dimension of the proton, the nucleus of the hydrogen atom, are off. Instead of 0.8768 femtometres it measures only 0.8418 femtometres, they say
If so, at least one fundamental constant now changes and physicists also have to check the calculations of…
Sometimes my sympathy for science magazines (in print and online), which try to keep intelligent readers informed on the progress in basic science, gets dampened by observing how they end up providing a narrow-sighted look at things. What is at stake is usually not science popularization: an article you read does not need to inform you of all what is going on in a field of research; rather, it is the correct acknowledgement of the different efforts. It sometimes happens that a group works hard on something, they believe they have made great progress and furthered everybody's knowledge in the…
UPDATE: if you came here to learn more details about the rumored Higgs signal, which media around the world are discussing and which Fermilab Today just dismiss-tweeted, please visit this other more recent post for more details. Below is the original post which apparently originated a lot of buzz.---------------
And for once, I feel totally free to speculate without the fear of being crucified. If you have followed my past blog adventures for long enough, you know that in at least a couple of occasions my posts have created some friction.
Blogging can mean walking on a rope for particle…
Which country does not belong in the following list: Burma, Liberia, Somalia, United States?
OK, that was not too difficult. As astute Scientific Blogging reader you got that right. Somalia has made the step to metric (SI) units already half a century ago, and therefore does not belong in one list together with the three remaining countries that haven't embraced the metric system yet.
The word 'yet' seems appropriate, as with 95% of the world population adhering to metric units, it seems it will just be a matter of time for the remaining tiny fraction to go metric. The more so as the 5…
Researchers have shown a new ability to control the behaviors of individual electrons within simple atoms and molecules by stripping them away, one by one, and in some cases creating 'hollow atoms'.
The results describe how the Linac Coherent Light Source's intense pulses of X-ray light change the very atoms and molecules they are designed to image. Controlling those changes will be critical to achieving the atomic-scale images of biological molecules and movies of chemical processes that the LCLS is designed to produce.
A team led by Argonne National Laboratory physicist Linda Young…
Z' Bosons: The Dream Moves Away
The long-distance competition between CERN and Fermilab - between Europe and the US, if you like - for supremacy in the field of fundamental physics is made of direct challenges, like the search for the Higgs boson, as much as of indirect skirmishes, such as one facility excluding a signal that the other facility has a chance of discovering.
A picture-perfect example of the latter is the new search for Z' bosons that the CDF experiment has recently published. As soon as ATLAS and CMS will collect enough data, discovering Z' bosons will be their business,…
Through a casual browsing of the Arxiv's hep-ph section, I got to read the following title:
"CAMORRA: A C++ Library for Recursive Computation of Particle Scattering Amplitudes"
Authors are R.Kleiss and G. van den Oord. None of which appears Italian by name, so my first reaction to the title (are these people stupid or what?) got tempered by the fact that they may just be ignorant.
Camorra is the name of one of the three main criminal organizations operating in southern Italy. From wikipedia, even a computer-illiterate could learn that
The Camorra is a mafia-like criminal organization [...] It…
csumsefm |
X-ray in characterization techniques
1. X-ray X-ray is a form of electromagnetic wave with wavelength in the range of 10 to 0.01 nm and energies in the range of 120 eV to 120 keV, shown in Fig. 1 [1]. It was emitted by the electrons outside the nucleus. Because of this, many material characterization techniques have been developed.
Fig. 1 Electromagnetic spectrum2. Characterization techniques related to X-ray2.1 XRD: X-ray Diffraction As the wavelength of x-ray is comparable with the lattice parameter of crystals, diffractions can be happened when…
Social networks are a great help for this kind of news: a new paper by a FB friend does not go unnoticed (at least by me) as it once would. I learned today that Garrett Lisi (picture below), the surfer and theoretical physicist, has deposited another paper in the Cornell arxiv. And it looks as a significant addition to his previous studies of the E8 group. He explicitly calls it "a companion" to the previous article, "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything".
The new article is titled "An Explicit Embedding of Gravity and the Standard Model in E8". In it, Lisi shows explicitly how the…
Metric mania
Which country does not belong in the following list: Burma, Liberia, Somalia, United States?
OK, that was not too difficult. As astute Scientific Blogging reader you got that right. Somalia has made the step to metric (SI) units already half a century ago, and therefore does not belong in one list together with the three sole remaining countries that haven't embraced the metric system yet.
The word 'yet' seems appropriate, as with 95% of the world population adhering to metric units, it seems it will just be a matter of time for the remaining tiny fraction to go metric. The…