Physics

Searching For The Beautiful Counterpart Of The X(3872)

Do you remember the X(3872)? This is a hadron containing charm and anticharm quarks, which was observed to decay into a J/Psi meson, a positive, and a negative pion. When it was discovered, by the Belle experiment in 2003, the X caused a lot of interest a ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 10 2013 - 10:02am

Physics: Places To Be, Places To Avoid

You have decided to start a graduate study in physics. Where should you apply? And how to decide which offer to take? A diarrhea of lists attempt to rank "the world’s best universities". Mostly these lists are based on some aggregate of different ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Aug 11 2013 - 11:28am

Revealed: A Universal Increase In Electrical Conductivity

Here's a development that could have significant implications for electrochemistry, biochemistry, electrical engineering and many other fields: a Nature Materials paper is about computer simulations which find that the electrical conductivity of many ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 11 2013 - 7:06pm

Demystifying The Five-Sigma Criterion

A pre-emptive warning to the reader: the article below is too long to publish as a single post. I have broken it out in four installments. After reading the text below you should continue with part II, part III, and part IV (which includes a summary). ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 25 2013 - 4:36am

Demystifying The Five-Sigma Criterion- Part II

In the previous installment of this longish article, I have introduced some of the issues that may affect the correct interpretation of a statistically significant effect. ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 25 2013 - 4:39am

Demystifying The Five-Sigma Criterion- Part III

Note: this is the third part of a four-part article on the Five-Sigma criterion in particle physics. See part 1 and part 2 to make more sense of the discussion below. ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 25 2013 - 4:43am

Is The Universe Expanding, Or Are We Shrinking?

In 1937, Dirac made the bold conjecture that since the big bang, gravity has been weakening. The cold reception that greeted his highly speculative and numerology-based cosmology paper didn't seem to hurt him much. This was a decade after Dirac discov ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Aug 18 2013 - 11:36am

Demystifying The Five-Sigma Criterion- Part IV And Summary

Note: this is the fourth, and last, part of a four-part article (see part I, part II, part III) on the five-sigma criterion for discovery claims in particle physics. If you haven't read the first three installments, the text below may or may not make ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 25 2013 - 4:50am

Top Quark- The Shortest Lived Matter In The Universe

Despite the shutdown of the Fermilab Tevatron collider, two years ago, and the subsequent disassembling of the glorious CDF detector, the CDF Collaboration continues to produce excellent physics results using the large bounty of data they have accumulated ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 22 2013 - 9:56am

The Plot Of The Week- Search For New Vector-Like Heavy Quarks

Yesterday CMS published the results of a new searc h for a heavy partner of the bottom quark, by looking for the decay b'-> bZ: that is, the heavy b' is sought in a so-called Flavour-Changing neutral current process. The "neutral current& ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 26 2013 - 12:59pm