Physics

The title of this post is not of my making - it is something you may read in a list of recent ATLAS results, in one of the otherwise dry and business-like web pages of the experiment: Don't get me wrong, I am all for a bit of personality in such web outlets, so the above rather than criticism should be seen as an exhortation to my CMS colleagues (as CMS the experiment I am a member of) to mimic its competitor. I look forward to a listing of "CMS wondrous new results on Higgs physics", e.g. ... Anyway, after noticing that adjective, I could not help having a closer look. But what are Flavour…

That's the title of a short article I just published (it is online here, but beware - for now you need to access from an institution that can access the journal contents), on Nuclear Instruments and Methods - a renowned journal for particle physics and nuclear physics instrumentation. The contents are nothing very new, in the sense that they are little more than a summary of things that the MODE collaboration published last March here. But for the distracted among you, I will summarize the summary below. The article is a proceedings of the Elba conference named "Frontier Detectors for…

At about this time of the year I find myself teaching my students about the construction of V-A theory, which is a milestone in the construction of the Standard Model of particle physics. And in so doing I rejoice about having a chance to tell them the details of one of the most brilliant experiments of the twentieth century, one performed in 1957 by Maurice Goldhaber with his colleagues Grodzins and Sunjar, and which has become a cornerstone of the physics of weak interactions and of particle physics in general.  Now, the title of this post is catchy enough that many of you may have…

The most important service to physics can be revealing that there are problems to be solved rather than solving them.   As the Nobel laureates, prize winners, Alain Aspect and John F. Clauser  did by demonstrating the fundamental difference between classical and quantum mechanics.  Anton Zeilinger who also won for his key work on teleportation and quantum information.  These are kin to the fundamentals of electricity in terms of how they may effect human technology in the future. Spooky action at a distance  In simple text friendly terms suppose you…

The DeepLearn school series, now reaching the seventh edition, offers insight into artificial intelligence and applications in a week-long course, tightly packing a significant number of high-profile instructors. The present edition, currently being held at the Technical University of Lulea, in the north of Sweden, features the following: - Sean Benson, Netherlands Cancer Institute- Thomas Breuel, Nvidia- Hao Chen, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology- Janlin Chen, University of Missouri- Nadya Chernyavskaya, CERN- Efstratios Gavves, University of Amsterdam- Quanquan Gu,…

For some reasons, my personal web page features high in web searches for master thesis offers. I got to learn this by inquiring with a few students who asked me to supervise them remotely on some of the offered topics: where did they get to know about my research activities, and what led them to pick my offers? They all answered that they bumped into my web page section "thesis offers". Well, at least that was no wasted time when I wrote it. But that realization now leads me to increase the visibility of those offers and of my supervision activity in general, by also describing it here. In…

In a recent post in this blog I discussed the idea of exploiting the properties of negative muons for a new kind of imaging technique of unknown volumes of material. The idea is based on the fact that negative muons stopped inside matter have a lifetime that is modified by nuclear interactions, so that a precise detection of their lifetime and point of decay becomes a means of inferring the composition of unknown volumes. Here, I want to offer the results of a quick simulation of the processes, to show that the idea is not so far-fetched.Different techniques for muon tomography While muon…

Creativity occurs whenever novel connections are made, and often, this occurs by accident. Scientists from the University of Manchester, who were working on the flow of “low valence” electrons, ended up discovering that the old adage, “You can't get something from nothing”, isn’t strictly true, as they created particles without recourse to collisions or precursor particles.  The Schwinger Effect The Schwinger Effect was named after Julian Schiwnger, who, in 1951, gave a complete theoretical description of a prediction in quantum electrodynamics (QED). The effect was first proposed in…

The solution to the issue of dark matter and dark energy may be found by way of modifying Einstein's equations of General Relativity.  Working with Shane Larson of Northwestern University we may have found an analytical and exact solution to one such set of equations.  With this we may be able to test such proposals once and for all using the future Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, LISA. Exact solutions to the differential equations that describe fundamental physics are rare. So rare they are sometimes called by name.  As one of many collaborators in the Laser…

Are you a recently (8 years) appointed Ph.D. graduate in fundamental physics, who wants to work in Italy? This post is for you. The INFN is opening 20 positions for foreigners who would like to join a group of research in one of the INFN sections (there are 25 across Italy). The positions are for one year, renewable, and the salary is competitive, given that it is roughly at the level of a starting associate professor in Italy. Note, also Ph.D. students who plan to graduate before November 1st 2023 can apply! Also, the 8-years limit can be waived if you spent time in maternity, military…