Physics
There are twenty-four elementary fermions in the standard model. Sure, they are arranged in a very tidy, symmetrical structure of three families of eight fermions (two leptons and six quarks), which is not too unpleasant to behold. And of course, if one is willing to forget the fact that the quantum-chromodynamical charge of quarks does make them different, then the picture is even tidier: 12 fermions, six of them quarks and six of them leptons, arranged in three families of four.
Tidy or not, the two-digit number of matter fields in the standard model may suggest that these bodies are not,…
It has become a pleasant habit for me to visit Bassano del Grappa every February for a conference on particle physics aimed at high-school students. Thanks to the efforts and the skill of dr. Sergio Lucisano, the schools of Bassano organize every year several conferences on physics and cosmology. These conferences are connected with the european program of the Masterclasses, but they extend the scope considerably into the history of physics and other topics of interest for the students.
This year I was a bit frightened by a change of format on which dr. Lucisano had insisted: I needed to…
The phenomenon, by which perihelion of elliptical orbital path of a planet appears to rotate around a central body, is known as the precession of the orbital path. Since the precession of mercury’s orbital path is much greater, compared to the precession of orbital paths of other planets, it has attracted much attention.
This perturbation is attributed to various reasons. Classical physics lists precession of the equinoxes, gravitational pulls from other planets, presence of dust/particles in space between sun and mercury and unevenness of the Sun’s spherical body as the reasons. But results…
I remember very well the very first meeting of the Heavy Flavour Working Group in CDF that I attended in the summer of 1992. I was a summer student back then, and my understanding of spoken English was not perfect, so as a graduate student started discussing with his slides the results he was getting on the top quark mass reconstructed in simulated single-lepton top pair decays, I struggled to follow his talk -the physics was just as hard to follow as the English.
There was a tall guy who everybody called Avi, well-dressed and with some undetermined accent (he sounded a bit like Yogi the…
"In 1934, L.E.Kinsler at the California Institute of technology was studying the Zeeman effect as a means for evaluating the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron, e/m. The deduction of e/m from the measured wavelength differences involves, in addition to a high-precision measurement of the magnetic field, a knowledge of the way in which the individual electron spins and orbital angular momenta are coupled. However, there are certain quantities or combinations of quantities that are independent of the nature of the coupling. One such combination is provided for by a relation called the g-sum…
One of the positive side-effects of preparing a seminar is being forced to get up-to-date with the latest experimental and theoretical developments on the topic. And this is of particular benefit to lazy bums like myself, who prefer to spend their time playing online chess than reading arxiv preprints.
It happened last week, in the course of putting together a meaningful discussion of the state of the art in global electroweak fits to standard model observables, and their implications for the unknown mass of the Higgs boson: by skimming the hep-ph folder I found a very recent paper by a…
This afternoon I am leaving to Belgium. I have been invited by the Université Catholique de Louvain to give a seminar on the status and the future of the Higgs boson searches at the Tevatron collider. This was a good pretext to sit down and learn the latest details of the analyses carried out by CDF and DZERO, and to do some real work of my own, mainly to understand what are the discovery or exclusion prospects for the Higgs in the US in the next few years. I have somehow described my conclusions in a recent article.
Putting together a good seminar is not painless, as I rediscover every time…
A lot of my sophomore year in astronomy was spent solving harmonic oscillator problems. A harmonic oscillator is something that moves with a periodic motion—say, a pendulum swinging or a mass on a spring sliding back and forth. Students of physics and astrophysics learn to love (pronounced “loathe” in the first months) harmonic oscillators, because the equations that describe their motion also describes a bunch of other phenomena, including what happens when you deform a solid and the quantum theory of the atom. If you’re able to solve a simple harmonic oscillator problem,…
Jim Croce, whose major was psychology in Villanova University, perhaps, had a minor in physics, I don't know, when he graduated in 1965. His song "Time in a Bottle" conjures physics of love, right?
So, if there is chemistry of love, then there is definitely physics of love, its sister science. See if you "find" physics in the lyrics of Time in a Bottle.
If I could save time in a bottleThe first thing that I'd like to doIs to save every dayTill Eternity passes awayJust to spend them with you
If I could make days last foreverIf words could make wishes…
Earlier today I reported about the publication of a paper by a non-professional physicist, Carl Brannen. Now I have to do the same for a paper -the first one in a long and groundbreaking series, you can bet- from the CMS collaboration, one of the two main experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
Of course, the CMS Collaboration (which is over 2500-strong) has published countless articles already in the course of the last ten years or so: technical design reports of the various detector subsystems, computing model, data acquisition architecture; Monte Carlo studies of the discovery reach…