Physics

The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is using X-rays to measure, in atomic detail, a key process at work in extreme plasmas like those found in stars,…

This is a post about basics. That's because I think a point needs to be made which is surprisingly not as well-known as its elementary nature would have you guess. Correlation -in its most used…

The news of the prizes to theorists and experimentalists are going to receive million-dollar prizes ($3M and $1M, details everywhere else -but see Peter's blog for insightful comment and discussion)…

In High-Energy Physics the small p-value of an observation may be the first hint of a discovery about to be made. Here by p-value I just mean the probability, just to be fancy (or brief). Because we…

Ask a physicist how to split a black hole, and you will receive the reply "That's impossible". Ask for further clarification, and you will get a lecture on black hole thermodynamics. The argument…

A new preprint is out in the arxiv today, detailing the results of a new analysis of neutrino speeds performed by the OPERA collaboration using proton spills of the CNGS beam produced during…

Even in deep space, atoms feel the the cosmic microwave background left over by the Big Bang. The cosmos is filled with electromagnetic interactions that show atoms they are not alone. Stray electric…

The conceptual design report of the Mu2E experiment at Fermilab is out in the arxiv for you to browse. Mind you - it is a rather thick document, 562 pages in all, so if all you have is 15' of lunch…

Black holes are again hitting the headlines. Another record super massive black hole has been unveiled. This time it is galaxy NGC 1277 at the center of which a true monster is discovered to be…

"While looking for the decay pi+ ->  e+ nu_e, we focused all our attention on reducing backgrounds, since a prior experiment had set a limit at the level of 10^-6 on the branching ratio. When…