The holidays are here, it's time to leave the labs
But with physicists gone, machines are up for grabs
Elves on experiments, Rudolph the science whiz:
Can they answer questions in a holiday quiz?
As symmetry pauses for a long winter's nap, we leave you with a series of rhyming physics questions and their surprising answers. Enjoy! We'll see you next year!
If you’ve ever had to shop for kids toys, you know it can be a demoralizing experience. Rows and rows of schlock, organized in alternating rows of “pink” or “camo”, anchored to their boxes by 43 twist ties, reeking of child labor and waste. (Can you guess how much I like shopping?) To help you [...]
A new partnership between scientists from US institutions and CERN could improve results from neutrino experiments around the world. The scientists hope to use equipment at CERN to gain a more precise understanding of the process of creating a neutrino beam.
In September 2010, about 100 theoretical particle physicists gathered at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for a workshop unique in purpose and unprecedented in scope: This group of theorists was determined to rewrite the way Large Hadron Collider data is interpreted—in effect, the way scientific discoveries are made in the realm of high-energy physics.
Late last week, I ran across a spectacular video of a man being completely awesome: The video shows Christophe Hamel jumping/falling/hurtling off of walls, landing on a trampoline, and then bouncing up to land back on top of the wall — sometimes in a handstand in case there was a risk you wouldn’t be impressed [...]
Space telescopes have greatly advanced our understanding of the universe, but they have also surfaced some new and puzzling problems. Recently scientists gained insight into a mismatch between theory and observation uncovered by space telescope research by using a ground-based X-ray technology that grew out of particle physics.
The Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment achieved a significant milestone this week.
The US Department of Energy on Monday granted Critical Decision 1 approval to the first phase of LBNE, which includes construction of a beamline at Fermilab and a near-surface far detector at the Sanford Lab in Lead, South Dakota. One of the largest proposed neutrino experiments in the world, LBNE will send neutrinos generated at Fermilab through 800 miles of earth to the South Dakota detector.
Many have speculated about which theorists the Nobel Committee might honor for the prediction of the Higgs boson, but it was the experimentalists involved in the search for the particle who received recognition today. 
Decay channels are the possible transformations a particle can undergo as it decays.
When a particle decays, it does not break into smaller bits; its energy does. Even fundamental particles—so named because they are the basic building blocks of matter that cannot be broken into smaller parts—can decay. Many particles in the Standard Model exist for only a limited time before decaying.
When a particle decays, it transforms into collections of less massive particles whose combined energy adds up to the energy of the original particle.
Quantum Diaries Thoughts on work and life from particle physicists from around the . world Home About Quantum Diaries Latest Posts All Blogs John Felde UC Davis USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.03.05 Fast Photosensors for Neutrino Physics 2011.11.22 Recent Events at UC Davis 2011.11.09 First Double Chooz Neutrino Oscillation Result USLHC USLHC USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.12.09 Advent Calendar 2012 December 9th 2012.12.08 Advent Calendar 2012 December 8th 2012.12.07 Advent Calendar 2012 December 7th Frank Simon MPI for Physics Germany View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.07.04 Plus Two 2011.12.14 After the talk is before the talk 2011.10.24 Breathe Flip Tanedo USLHC USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.07.19 The Post-Higgs Hangover : where’s the new physics
Quantum Diaries Thoughts on work and life from particle physicists from around the . world Home About Quantum Diaries Latest Posts All Blogs John Felde UC Davis USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.03.05 Fast Photosensors for Neutrino Physics 2011.11.22 Recent Events at UC Davis 2011.11.09 First Double Chooz Neutrino Oscillation Result USLHC USLHC USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.12.09 Advent Calendar 2012 December 9th 2012.12.08 Advent Calendar 2012 December 8th 2012.12.07 Advent Calendar 2012 December 7th Frank Simon MPI for Physics Germany View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.07.04 Plus Two 2011.12.14 After the talk is before the talk 2011.10.24 Breathe Flip Tanedo USLHC USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.07.19 The Post-Higgs Hangover : where’s the new physics
Many movies use pseudoscience to explain the origins of their villains. A film released this weekend follows the same model, but its producers and stars all know better than to buy the nonsense: They’re PhD students and postdocs in particle physics.
An audience member yelled: “35, 27, 42, 41.” Wim Klein chalked the numbers on a blackboard and then muttered to himself for a few seconds as he multiplied them. He wrote the answer, “1627290.” The crowd applauded.
Klein, a Dutch mathematician, was capable of much more fantastic feats of enormous calculation. In 1976, he took two minutes and 43 seconds to calculate the 73rd root of a 500-digit number, earning him a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.
"I know! Clamp a clamp to it, and then clamp to the clamp with two other clamps...!"
[...]
In its infancy, the universe was made of nearly equal parts matter and antimatter. Yet matter overwhelmingly dominates today. Scientists design experiments that examine the conditions of the early universe to investigate why.
An international collaboration of scientists proposed to build one such project, a particle collider that would specialize in creating B mesons, in Italy over the next several years. However, last week the Italian government withdrew funding for the project, citing the country's weakened economic state.
About 5 billion years ago the universe underwent a crucial transition. The gravitational tug that pulled together the matter in the universe was overwhelmed by a different, repulsive phenomenon. As a result, the universe began to expand at an accelerating rate.
Scientists have given that phenomenon a name: dark energy. However, they can say with confidence only what it does, not what it is, where it comes from, or why it’s pushing galaxies apart at an ever more rapid speed.
Almost a decade remains before the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope sees first light, and construction has yet to begin on most of the telescope’s hardware. Even so, astrophysicists are already developing methods for analyzing the rush of data LSST will produce. In a survey this large and this advanced, data management is just as important as cameras and mirrors.
A new system that would use bent crystals to remove errant particles in the Large Hadron Collider passed a major test last month by surviving a barrage of protons at high energy.
First of all, for anyone who hasn’t heard about the Higgs boson, please crawl out from under your ro
When Virginia high school teacher Deborah Roudebush teaches physics, she doesn't exactly follow the book.
In one of her more memorable lessons, she gives her students a stopwatch and a ruler and sets a toy pig flying around the classroom. The students must use their tools to determine the speed of the pig in two different ways.
"There's no set value for pig speed," Roudebush says. "I'm teaching them to develop methods and test those methods. That's how scientists do it."
Supersymmetry Fails Test, Forcing Physics to Seek New Ideas: Scientific American, Daily Digest, 29 N
In its four years in orbit, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has found a cosmos teeming with points of gamma-ray light. Newly discovered gamma-ray sources run the gamut from the expected, like supernova remnants and active galactic nuclei, to the surprising, like gamma rays from the sun or Earth-bound lightning strikes.
Particle colliders do not keep normal working hours. They must be tended to 24 hours a day, seven days a week, holidays included.
Few people know this as well as the family of Robert “Obie” Oberholtzer, a talented engineer whom crews at Fermilab would call—any day, any time—when something went wrong with the accelerator complex for the laboratory’s particle collider, the Tevatron.
Physicist Sam Hewamanage woke up, got ready and made his usual 15-minute drive to work. He parked his car, walked inside and sat at his workstation before digging into his primary task for the day: monitoring a particle detector located 100 meters underground on the border of Switzerland and France.
Hewamanage (pictured below) doesn’t live in Europe. He lives in Batavia, Ill., just outside of Chicago. But he can work on the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider as if he were on the CERN campus, thanks to the Remote Operations Center at Fermilab.
Let’s review the tests of the Higgs couplings to fermions and massive vector bosons completed by CMS and ATLAS. The Higgs mechanism generates mass terms in the standard model Lagrangian. Electroweak symmetry is broken at the same time that the W and Z bosons get their mass. Fermions masses, on the other hand, are generated [...]
Let’s use the word “Higgs boson” for the new state discovered by ATLAS and CMS. The collider physics community is trying to measure everything they can about this new particle. One of the “easiest” properties to measure is its mass, MH. (One of the more difficult is the CP Nature of the Higgs boson.) Values [...]
On Friday night, Nov. 16, about 1000 people came out to Fermilab to see five physicists duke it out... with science.
The occasion was the laboratory's first ever . A physics slam is kind of like a poetry slam—the five contestants were given 12 minutes each to explain a complex particle physics concept to an auditorium filled with laymen. And they had to do it in the most entertaining way they could, because audience applause determined the winner.
Asymptotia Q Train Guy Components Published on November 20, 2012 in art craft design fun science science education sketches and work 0 Comments : Tags tedyouth Here’s the first slide of my TEDYouth talk from Saturday It was time consuming but fun to draw all those hands and tiny items of various sorts . The whole talk was about what I call hidden structures” , which in a sense is what my field high energy physics , particle physics , cosmology , string theory , etc . is all about . To help motivate it all , I started by talking about opening up your smart phone and figuring out how it works by taking it apart and discovering the components inside , and using the rules of how to put them together to deduce the structure of other things see that second stage of the slide being delivered on
Quantum Diaries Thoughts on work and life from particle physicists from around the . world Home About Quantum Diaries Latest Posts All Blogs John Felde UC Davis USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.03.05 Fast Photosensors for Neutrino Physics 2011.11.22 Recent Events at UC Davis 2011.11.09 First Double Chooz Neutrino Oscillation Result USLHC USLHC USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.11.20 Particles of the Day 2012.11.14 Mixing it up 2012.11.11 Foxes , hedgehogs and particle physicists Frank Simon MPI for Physics Germany View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.07.04 Plus Two 2011.12.14 After the talk is before the talk 2011.10.24 Breathe Flip Tanedo USLHC USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.07.19 The Post-Higgs Hangover : where’s the new physics 2012.07.06 More Post-Higgs
If you hurl two oranges together at close to the speed of light, there’s going to be a lot of pulp. But, somewhere in the gooey mess will be the rare splinters left over from two seeds colliding.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN works in a similar way. Protons, each made of quarks and gluons, collide and produce other particles. Roughly once every 5 billion proton collisions, everything aligns and a Higgs-like boson pops out.
Launch tour »
Quantum Diaries Thoughts on work and life from particle physicists from around the . world Home About Quantum Diaries Latest Posts All Blogs John Felde UC Davis USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.03.05 Fast Photosensors for Neutrino Physics 2011.11.22 Recent Events at UC Davis 2011.11.09 First Double Chooz Neutrino Oscillation Result USLHC USLHC USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.11.14 Mixing it up 2012.11.11 Foxes , hedgehogs and particle physicists 2012.11.02 A Dalitz What Now Frank Simon MPI for Physics Germany View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.07.04 Plus Two 2011.12.14 After the talk is before the talk 2011.10.24 Breathe Flip Tanedo USLHC USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.07.19 The Post-Higgs Hangover : where’s the new physics 2012.07.06 More Post-Higgs silliness
We are in the process of ascertaining the properties of the Higgs-like particle discovered by CMS and ATLAS last July 4th. It must be a boson because it decays to pairs of bosons. Since it decays to a pair of massless photons, it cannot be spin-1. The relative rates of decays to WW and ZZ [...]
The LHCb experiment has observed the rare decay Bs→μ+μ-. Br(Bs→μ+μ-) = (3.2+1.5-1.2)×10-9. This is the culmination of nearly 30 years of searching for this extremely rare decay (see yesterday’s blog post). The slides from Johannes Albrecht presented at the HCP conference give a nice overview of the measurement. These results come from 1 fb-1 at [...]
On Tuesday, November 13th, Matteao Palutan representing the LHCb Collaboration will report new results on the search for the extremely rare decay Bs→μ+μ-. At tree level, this decay is forbidden in the standard model. It can occur through a loop diagram, however, involving a top quark and W bosons that are far, far off mass [...]
I accidentally hit the link to GFITTER in my bookmarks file while having an early morning cup of coffee. So I looked at the plots there – they’re interesting. As most particle physicists know, GFITTER is a public computer program for calculating fits to the Standard Model based on precision measurements of electroweak observables. Such [...]
Quantum Diaries Thoughts on work and life from particle physicists from around the . world Home About Quantum Diaries Latest Posts All Blogs John Felde UC Davis USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.03.05 Fast Photosensors for Neutrino Physics 2011.11.22 Recent Events at UC Davis 2011.11.09 First Double Chooz Neutrino Oscillation Result USLHC USLHC USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.10.30 Zombies at CERN 2012.10.22 Are the Higgs Rumors True 2012.10.16 For the Higgs , No Theological Assistance Required Frank Simon MPI for Physics Germany View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.07.04 Plus Two 2011.12.14 After the talk is before the talk 2011.10.24 Breathe Flip Tanedo USLHC USA View Blog Read Bio Latest Posts 2012.07.19 The Post-Higgs Hangover : where’s the new physics 2012.07.06 More