I have to admit, I’m writing this one up partly because it lets me use the title reference. It’s a cool little paper, though, demonstrating the lengths that physicists will go to in pursuit of precision measurements. I’m just going to pretend I didn’t see that dorky post title, and ask what this is about.… Continue reading Commanding the Power of Thor…ium: “Wigner Crystals of 229Th for Optical Excitation of the Nuclear Isomer”
Category: Experiment
Watching Photons Interfere: “Observing the Average Trajectories of Single Photons in a Two-Slit Interferometer”
It’s been a long and brutally busy week here, so I really ought to just take a day off from blogging. But there’s a new paper in Science on quantum physics that’s just too good to pass up, so here’s a ReasearchBlogging post to close out the week. Aw, c’mon, dude, I’m tired. What’s so… Continue reading Watching Photons Interfere: “Observing the Average Trajectories of Single Photons in a Two-Slit Interferometer”
What Goes Around Is Really Round: “Improved measurement of the shape of the electron”
The big physics story of the week is undoubtedly the new limit on the electric dipole moment (EDM) of the electron from Ed Hinds’s group at Imperial College in the UK. As this is something I wrote a long article on for Physics World, I’m pretty psyched to see this getting lots of media attention,… Continue reading What Goes Around Is Really Round: “Improved measurement of the shape of the electron”
The Test(ing) of Time: Measuring the Performance of a Stopwatch
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m schedule to teach a class on “A Brief History of Timekeeping” next winter term as part of the Scholars Research Seminar program. Even though I have a hundred other things to do, I continue to think about this a lot. One of the goals of the course is to introduce… Continue reading The Test(ing) of Time: Measuring the Performance of a Stopwatch
Lessons in Applied Data Archaeology
I’m teaching our upper-level lab course this term, where I do a two-part experiment on laser spectroscopy. The first part is to calibrate the free spectral range of a homemade Fabry-Perot interferometer, and the second part is to use that Fabry-Perot as a frequency marker to calibrate a diode laser scan across the rubidium hyperfine… Continue reading Lessons in Applied Data Archaeology
“Supersolids”: The Saga Continues
Several years ago, now, a group at Penn State announced a weird finding in helium at extremely low temperatures and high pressures (which is what you need to make helium solidify): when they made a pendulum out of a cylindrical container with a thin shell of solid He toward the outside edge, twisting about its… Continue reading “Supersolids”: The Saga Continues
The Most Precisely Tested Theory in the History of Science
NASA held a big press conference yesterday to announce that the Gravity Probe B experiment had confirmed a prediction of General Relativity that spacetime near Earth should be “twisted” by the Earth’s rotation. A lot of the coverage has focused on the troubled history of the mission (as did the press conference, apparently), but scientifically… Continue reading The Most Precisely Tested Theory in the History of Science
Science Marches On
It’s been a hectic day here, so I haven’t had time to do any substantive blogging. I did want to quickly note a couple of stories presenting marked improvements in experiments I’ve written up here in the past: 1) In the “self-evident title” category, there’s Confinement of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds, which extends last year’s… Continue reading Science Marches On
Proving Einstein Wrong…ish: Measurement of the Instantaneous Velocity of a Brownian Particle
Last summer, there was a fair bit of hype about a paper from Mark Raizen’s group at Texas which was mostly reported with an “Einstein proven wrong” slant, probably due to this press release. While it is technically true that they measured something Einstein said would be impossible to measure, that framing is a little… Continue reading Proving Einstein Wrong…ish: Measurement of the Instantaneous Velocity of a Brownian Particle
Treating Photons Like Atoms: “Bose-Einstein condensation of photons in an optical microcavity”
This paper made a big splash back in November, with lots of news stories talking about it; it even made the #6 spot on Physics World‘s list of breakthroughs of the year. I didn’t write it up then because I was hellishly busy, and couldn’t take time away from working on the book-in-progress to figure… Continue reading Treating Photons Like Atoms: “Bose-Einstein condensation of photons in an optical microcavity”