The big physics news of the week last week came while I was in transit on Wednesday: The MiniBooNE (the odd capitalization is because it’s sort of an acronym) neutrino experiment released their first results on the neutrino oscillation studies they’ve been doing, and found, well, nothing new. In contrast to a previous experiment that… Continue reading The Unsinkable Standard Model
Category: Experiment
Newton: Still Right
Physical Review Letters this week features a paper on a topic that might not seem to be in dispute: Newton’s Second Law of Motion: We have tested the proportionality of force and acceleration in Newton’s second law, F=ma, in the limit of small forces and accelerations. Our tests reach well below the acceleration scales relevant… Continue reading Newton: Still Right
Bad News for the LHC
As you undoubtedly already know, the Large Hadron Collider suffered a setback this week: The start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN could be delayed after three of the magnets used to focus and manipulate the accelerator’s proton beams failed preliminary tests at CERN earlier this week. The magnets were built at Fermilab… Continue reading Bad News for the LHC
The Life Cycle of a Microwave Photon
After a short post-March Meeting lag, Physics World is back to announcing really cool physics results, this time highlighting a paper in Nature (subscription required) by a French group who have observed the birth and death of photons in a cavity. I’m not sure how it is that the French came to dominate quantum optics,… Continue reading The Life Cycle of a Microwave Photon
Still More Bump Hunting
Physics World has a story today about a new addition to the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t maybe-it’s-a-Higgs-boson signals seen at Fermilab. (See here and here for a flavor of the earlier discussions). This one is a beyond-the-Standard-Model particle that would require a supersymmetric theory to explain. Of course, the evidence at this point consists of a whopping… Continue reading Still More Bump Hunting
Spooky Action at a Distance
This is an approximate transcription of my physics talk from Boskone, titled “Spooky Action at a Distance,” in which I attempted to give a reasonable explanation of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (“EPR” hereafter) paper and Bell’s Theorem. This was sort of a follow-on from last year’s “Weird Quantum Phenomena,” meant to highlight a specific class of weird… Continue reading Spooky Action at a Distance
Trapping Radium
The AIP’s Physics News Update this week highlights a paper on the laser cooling and trapping of radium by a group at Argonne National Laboratory. This is a new record for the heaviest atom ever cooled and trapped. It’s not quite as cool as the previous record, which involved the trapping of francium atoms that… Continue reading Trapping Radium
Thought Experiments Made Real
We’re back from Boskone, which included lots of fun stuff, and not enough sleep. I also cleverly forgot to bring my lecture notes home from work, which means I need to go in early to figure out what the hell I’m talking about in class today, so there’s not much time for blogging at the… Continue reading Thought Experiments Made Real
New Limits on Constancy
There’s a press release on EurekAlert about new measurements limiting the change in the fine structure constant from the Time and Frequency division of NIST in Boulder: Some astronomical and geological studies suggest there might have been very small changes in the values of fundamental constants over billions of years, although the results have been… Continue reading New Limits on Constancy
Modern Experimental Physics Update
Over at metadatta, Sujit is doing spectroscopy experiments with interferometers, and has posted a very nice introduction to the technique. Basically, if you have a light source emitting two different wavelengths that are very close together, you can determine the wavelength difference by shinging the light into an interferometer, and seeing how far you need… Continue reading Modern Experimental Physics Update