Physics

The Say of the Week

" Other people's data ntuples are a bit like their genitals. You may occasionally be allowed to play with them, but you should not expect to be granted unhindered access." Unknown (the previous attribution to M. F. is fallacious) ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 27 2009 - 11:44am

Will The Standard Model Die By The Hands Of Its Dearest Child?

A new paper on the ArXiV caught my attention this evening for several reasons. First of all, because two of its five authors (J.Ellis, J.R.Espinosa, G.F.Giudice, A.Hoecker, and A.Riotto) are (or have been) my colleagues in Padova University; second, becaus ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 2 2012 - 9:21am

Swimming Through Empty Space

An article in the latest (August 2009) edition of Scientific American describes an astronaut floating motionless with respect to his distant spaceship. He is not tethered to the spaceship and has no objects available that can be hurled away or can in some ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Jul 25 2009 - 1:07pm

Two Standard Deviations From Tevatron Results Of Bs Mesons

One year ago, a paper by a distinguished group of theorists announced first evidence of new physics from measurements of the properties of B_s mesons performed at the Tevatron by the CDF and DZERO experiments. They had combined all the available informatio ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 27 2009 - 8:33am

Low-Energy Electron Diffraction- Buckyballs On A Silver Platter

Scientists at Penn State University, in collaboration with institutes in the US, Finland, Germany and the UK, have figured out the long-sought structure of a layer of C60 – carbon buckyballs – on a silver surface.  The results in Physical Review Letters an ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 27 2009 - 12:50pm

Rudiments Of The Method Of Maximum Likelihood

Besides the usual share of random readers who google something and get directed here by mere chance (to be read: by the sheer amount of valuable information I have posted here), this blog is read by an interesting mix of particle physicists, students, expe ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 29 2009 - 5:45pm

Detailed Balance Explained To My Son

Detailed balance is a simple and powerful rule to describe the dynamics of two-state systems. If you know the probability of a transition from a state A to the other state B of a physical system (in some appropriate time unit), and you also know the probab ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 2 2009 - 10:47am

Getting Electrons To "jump" Forces Them To Split Apart

Previously thought to be indivisible, with negative charge for all, the electron is one of the fundamental building blocks of nature. A new experiment, however, has shown that electrons, if crowded into narrow wires, are seen to split apart. The electron i ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 30 2009 - 4:23pm

Fibonacci Chaos And Time's Arrow

Call it irreversibility, call it time's arrow, call it the second law of thermodynamics. Fact is that everything evolves in such a way that things get more messy. Disorder rises. Entropy increases. We do not observe the opposite happening. Heat flows ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Aug 10 2009 - 8:10pm

A New Z' Boson At 240 GeV? No, Wait, At 720!?

Readers familiar with this blog know that I am a die-hard skeptic on the issue of physics beyond the Standard Model. However, today I am wearing my fluctuation-enthusiast hat, and I will be trying to argue in favor of the possible signal of new physics tha ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 3 2009 - 7:03pm