Physics

Plot Of The Week- Quark Compositeness Is Nowhere Near

The CMS experiment has just released a new result which excludes the possibility that quarks have a substructure at energy scales below 4 TeV. The result comes from the analysis of just a handful of inverse picobarns of collision data-2.9 to be precise- an ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 25 2010 - 9:27am

Physical Reality: Less Is More

Physical reality is composed of properties like distance, duration, velocity, area, volume, mass, energy, and temperature. To quantify these properties you need to measure them. And the act of measuring boils down to comparing against an agreed yardstick, ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Oct 26 2010 - 10:54am

Black Hole Duality: General Relativity Without Singularities

In one description, an observer falls freely through empty space, in another one, she hits a surface smack on, yet both descriptions are completely equivalent. This example for a duality in modern physics was explained the last time in this series. There w ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Oct 29 2010 - 10:07am

Over 40 Inverse Picobarns Delivered By LHC!

News from the LHC: the integrated proton-proton luminosity at 7 TeV centre-of-mass energy has generously passed the mark of 40 inverse picobarns yesterday. The CMS experiment alone has integrated over 42 inverse picobarns, as shown in the graph below (the ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 30 2010 - 7:20am

Quantum Hexodynamics

Special Guest Post From A Far Boundary Of Our Universe By Richard P. Flatman "I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space." This is how my gre ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Nov 1 2010 - 11:27pm

Plot Of The Week: Improved Projections On ATLAS Higgs Reach

The ATLAS collaboration has just released an important study of the sensitivity to a standard model Higgs boson. For the first time precise predictions are made for LHC running at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV (but also 8 and 9 TeV are considered, given ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Nov 4 2010 - 9:48am

Guest Post: Giorgio Chiarelli, Tevatron's Silver Wedding

Giorgio Chiarelli is a particle physicist. His research activity has been based largely at the Fermi laboratory near Chicago, US, at the CDF experiment. In 1994-96 he actively participated in the discovery of the top quark and in the first measurements of ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Nov 6 2010 - 4:37am

The First ZZ Event In CMS!!

As beautiful as they get, or even more so. It is hard to express the beauty of the event that the CMS collaboration published today. CMS, which stands for "compact muon solenoid", is one of the two main detectors operating at the CERN Large Hadro ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Nov 5 2010 - 11:03pm

Microwave Synthesis And Ramen Noodles

Microwaves are a low frequency light, at least compared to visible light, say, or ionizing radiation like gamma rays. Thus, microwaves are quite harmless. A microwave oven baths the food in an oscillating electro-magnetic field. Molecules with permanent e ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Feb 21 2012 - 11:23pm

Fourth State Of Matter Gets Beautiful

Can plasma be beautiful?   Surely, anything can, but physicists are luckier than most because when they probe the mysteries of plasma, the fourth state of matter, they often discover phenomena of striking beauty.  Plasmas support a large variety of waves, ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 8 2010 - 12:49pm