"Dropleton" Makes News

I've given up on trying to figure out why certain things from science make the news, while others don't. My feeble guess would be that a good, catchy name or phrase often can captivate a news reporter or agency more than having an actual importance.

Not that I'm implying the "dropleton" is not not important. After all, it made the cover of this week's Nature! Still, what makes the Los Angeles Times take note of it? I think it is a combination of the name and the sleek image on Nature's cover. Still, I don't think people who read the LA Times article on this thing would know what it is and why it is important enough that it made the cover. Besides, I don't think they would care.

It isn't often that a "new quasiparticle" makes the news. I probably won't see another one again in my lifetime, I would think.

Zz.

The Reincarnation of the Superconducting Supercollider?

This blog entry at Physics World presents an intriguing prospect at resurrecting high energy particle collider experiments in the US by reusing and re purposing the existing grounds in Texas that was meant for the failed Superconducting Supercollider facility.

However, a group of US physicists from Texas A&M University and Michigan State University is now proposing to wrestle back the energy frontier by constructing a huge accelerator in the US.

In a paper posted on the arXiv preprint server today, the researchers outline plans to use the partly constructed tunnel of the axed Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) just outside Dallas, Texas. Conceived in 1983, the SSC was to be the next big particle collider with a circumference of 87 km and a maximum collision energy of 40 TeV. But 10 years later the all-American project was cancelled, largely on grounds of cost, leaving a few buildings on the surface as well as tens of kilometres of tunnels deep underground.

Most of the cost of a new collider would be in excavating the tunnel, but the researchers claim that around 46% of the SSC tunnel has been already bored and some facilities built, such as the linear accelerator that feeds particles into the collider. This would then make it much cheaper than the CERN proposal.

If you continue reading the article, there are really seriously BIG proposals being mentioned here, up to a 270 km tunnel and 300 TeV machine!

I will admit that I am highly skeptical that the US will consider such a thing, at least, not under the current funding climate. I think they are a lot more organized at CERN, and with the wishy-washy political situation here in the US, having a center in Europe that is more "stable" is so much more preferred, especially considering that whatever this facility will be, it will involved a multi-national endeavor due to its expected astounding cost.

I'd love to be wrong with this one.

Zz.

Sochi Physics Homework

The Sochi Olympics may be over, but Rhett Allain has a nice set of "homework" for you on the physics of several Winter Olympics events. See if you can tackle them.

Zz.

Not The Type Of Substitute Teacher You Want In You Physics Class

A high school substitute teacher in Michigan started spouting bizarre conspiracy theories when he should have been teaching physics instead.

Sources who wish to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from school officials have told The Daily Caller that the incident occurred on Jan. 16, 2013 at Grosse Pointe North High School in a ritzy suburb of Detroit, Mich.

Where do they find these people? We still don't know if this sub can actually teach physics. For all we know, the school hired a crackpot.

From the article, it appears that the students had a lot more sense than the adult in question . Unfortunately, it sounds like this sub teacher is still "teaching" at that school.

Zz.

And Then, There Will Be One

Rush Holt, one of the two remaining physicists in the US Congress, has announced his retirement from the US House of Representatives at the end of the year. This leaves Bill Forster as the only remaining physicist in the US Congress.

Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ), a plasma physicist, didn’t reveal why he has decided to leave Congress after eight terms, or what lies in his future. “This is not the time to discuss next steps in my career; that can come later,” said Holt, who was assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory before coming to Washington in 1999.
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Holt was once part of a triumvirate of Ph.D. physicists in the House. But longtime Representative Vern Ehlers (R-MI) retired in 2010, and Representative Bill Foster (D-IL) returned to the House only last year after losing his one-term seat in 2010.

As of now, I don't see any new blood from the physics community to run for office in the US Congress.

Zz.

Synchrotron Radiation Center Set To Close

Another important science facility in the US is set to be shut down for good. The Synchrotron Radiation Center at the University of Wisconsin is set to close its doors for good on March 7.

After funding cuts from the National Science Foundation and the lab announced its preparations for closure, UW provided the lab with short-term funding as alternatives were sought. Bisognano said he has been looking for other sources for funding over the past several years, but with a shortfall of approximately $5 million, he has announced that the lab will be forced to close in March.
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“Over the past few years, we’ve developed an infrared beam that can measure the structure and the chemical identity of the target material at the same time,” Bisognano said in a statement. “This device is the best in the world, and that’s probably the saddest part about shutting this down.”

I believe if you also look at the incredible body of work out of the Campuzano's group at Argonne/UIC on ARPES measurement on high-Tc superconductors in the late 80's, 90's, and well into the early 2000's, you'll find that these were done at the SRC. This small facility, with barely a drop in the bucket in terms of funding costs, was a workhorse!

While many other countries, especially China, are racing to add scientific facilities within their countries, the US is tripping over itself to close one after another. At what point will the public and the politicians make this realization?

Zz.

How Modern Light Bulbs Work

A summary of how our modern light bulbs (beyond the incandescent light bulb) work, all in one place.



Zz.

NIF Achieves Milestone

Finally, some good news out of the National Ignition Facility.

In a paper published in Nature, Hurricane and colleagues report results from experiments carried out last September and November – the former producing 14 kJ of fusion energy from a single laser shot and the latter 17 kJ. The researchers point out that since the energy delivered to the fuel is about 10 kJ, both shots generated a fuel gain. They also calculated that as much as half of the energy output from these shots originated in alpha-particle heating. This is significant because such heating is a prerequisite for ignition.

They haven't achieve ignition yet, but this is certainly a necessary step towards understanding this whole process. Now, they have the difficult and unenviable task of delivering on the promise.

Zz.

Figure Skaters and Newtonian Physics

With the Sochi Olympics going on now, it is inevitable that articles on the physics of the various sports at the winter games will appear. This is one such article with an instructive video of Walter Levin explaining the physics of figure skating.

Zz.

Electron Neutrino Appearence In Muon Neutrino Beam

Another and clearer detection of the appearance of electron neutrino from muon neutrino beam due to flavor mixing. This one is from the T2K collaboration. The link give you access to the actual paper in PRL.

Writing in Physical Review Letters, the T2K collaboration reports the strongest evidence to date for the appearance of electron neutrinos from a pure muon neutrino beam. Their measurement allows them to determine a fundamental parameter of the standard model of particle physics, called θ13, which can in turn be used to make an early estimate of CP violation in neutrinos. Although this estimate has a large uncertainty, it will serve as a guide to future, more definitive neutrino experiments that are directly sensitive to CP violation.

Zz.

The Big Guns

In case you missed it from 2 weeks ago, this Nature article (Nature, v.505, p.604 (2014)) on X-ray FEL is similar to the article I highlighted earlier. The major difference here is that they are really highlighting the "trees", in this case, the XFEL facility and physics themselves.

In the foothills above Palo Alto, California, physicists have set up an extreme obstacle course for some of the world’s fastest electrons. First the particles are accelerated through a 3-kilometre vacuum pipe to almost the speed of light. Then they slam through a gauntlet of magnets that forces them into a violent zigzag. They respond with a blast of X-rays so fierce it could punch through steel.

But the scientists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have no interest in weaponry. Their machine, one of the world’s most powerful X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs), is a tool for studying challenging forms of matter, whether compressed to the kind of pressures and temperatures found deep inside a star, or folded into the complex tangle of a protein molecule.

Again, this is possible due to advancement in accelerator physics, which is now a separate field of physics in itself. Only when the "instrument" is available can scientists from other fields use it to look deeper and in greater detail at many of the things they study.

Zz.

The Hunt For Axions

Axions, which in some circles is a Dark Matter candidate different from WIMPs, is the focus of this news story.

This is kind of a Cinderella story – the story of a favorite and an underdog, in what may be the world’s most esoteric sport. The leading candidate for what might make up dark matter is called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP. It gets most of the research money and most of the ink.

But there’s another candidate, a bit of an also-ran, called the axion. Its profile is lower, but for Rosenberg, it just seems to fit in with how the universe works.

Of course, as with WIMPs, the search for axions has also been fruitless so far, as I've mentioned at least a couple of times earlier. We just have to sit back and wait to see how this develops in the next few years.

Zz.

The Awesomest Physics Cake Ever?

I don't know if it is, but it certainly takes the cake (pun intended) for being quite creative! I wouldn't mind getting a cake that looks like that, or some variation of it with some condensed matter theme or accelerator physics theme......

Hum... I think I've come up with an idea for something. Wonder if my local bakery can make it?

Zz.

Don't Miss Looking At The Trees Due To The Forest

This is a report on a proposal to enable us to view a "movie" of a Rydberg atom:

In addition to having a large electron cloud, an unusual feature of a Rydberg atom is that its highly excited electron can exist as a coherent superposition of several different atomic orbitals. These orbitals interfere with each other, which means that the electron cloud changes shape with time. These fluctuations are much slower than the movement of electrons nearer the atomic nucleus, which is why Kirrander and Suominen argue that the fluctuations could be tracked by firing intense and coherent pulses of X-rays at the atoms.

Such pulses can be produced at accelerator-based free-electron lasers such as the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California or the X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL), which is set to come online at DESY in Hamburg, Germany in 2016. Kirrander and Suominen have also calculated that the motion of the corresponding "electron hole" in the atom – the superposition of inner orbitals that the electron has left behind – can be visualized as well. As the inner electrons are involved in chemical reactions, the new technique could therefore be a powerful tool for chemists.

When I said not to miss looking at the trees, most people reading the article will be enamored by the proposal that we can actually view such a thing in real time, that we can see the evolution of such an atom, and the potential that we can view the dynamics of a lot more system having such short time-scale. These are the "forest".

The trees here, which *I* am more interested in, and what most people will have missed, is the advancement made in accelerator physics that allows the ability to make such a measurement. The instrument being used is within the realm of accelerator physics, and specifically, the study of beam physics and engineering. This field of physics is often the unsung hero that enables the advancement in many other fields of physics. Think of what the LHC and the Tevatron could do without advanced knowledge of accelerator physics.

And this brings us to a very important point here. Many areas of science can only advance in knowledge when they have the ability to perform the experiments that they want. Inevitably, this means that that they have the equipment and tools to be able to do these experiments. This ranges from high-spatial-resolution instrument to high-temporal resolution detectors. In other words, they depend on others to provide them with the instruments to advance their knowledge.

It also means that if you kill research in these grass-roots areas, you are killing more than just one area. When a lion killed the nursing mother of deer, for example, that lion took not one, but two lives with that kill. When funding for many of these areas of physics is severely reduced, the chain reaction and impact can trickle very quickly down stream. It affects the advancements in many other fields that would have gotten the benefit from it. Think of how many different usage of facilities such as a synchrotron light source or a free-electron laser.

So when you read an article such as this, don't miss paying attention to the fact that these proposed abilities to do such-and-such are benefiting from the advancement and investment in another field that you might have not realized. The interconnectedness of science is never more apparent than in an example such as this.

Zz.

"A physicist examines the Kennedy assassination film"

With the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination recently, a slew of TV shows and articles on that tragic event came into being. One of the more fascinating documentary was on NOVA. One of the biggest source of controversy, and the source for many conspiratorial theory that there was more than one shot at the President on that day was the examination of the way the President's head moved upon impact of the bullet. Many believe that the fact that the video showed the head moving backwards, i.e in the opposite direction that the Oswald bullet entered, showed that there must be another bullet that entered from the front.

The NOVA documentary appeared to have ignored a physics explanation that had been put forward to explain this many years ago. David Jackson, the editor of AJP, expressed his surprise that a well-respected documentary such as NOVA let this observation stood unanswered. He wrote his commentary on this in the Jan 2014 issue of AJP.

But not only that. Due to the anniversary, and wanting to make sure the public knows that there's a perfectly valid explanation to account for what was observed using just a single bullet from the back picture, AJP is making Luis Alvarez paper from 1976 freely available.

Maybe someone from NOVA might get to read it!

Zz.

Ingenious Quantum Physics Essay?

I don't think so.

Sometime people are impressed by the wrong thing. A toddler can sometime be more fascinated by the box  rather than the toy itself. This time, it is almost the same thing.

A physics student (didn't say at what level) wrote an essay on "quantum physics" and did something that is called "Rickroll", whereby he included the lyrics of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" in the essay. You are welcome to read the tedious essay at the link.

And for that, he gets notoriety, not for the poorly-written essay, but for his ability to stick such nonsense into it. And let's say it for what it is, this is an awfully-written essay. It is devoid of paragraphs, and the "story" here is extremely disjointed. The history of quantum physics and Bohr's contribution was chopped up, there never really a clear description on what Bohr's major accomplishment was. But then, he was focusing more on trying to match up on the lyrics rather than paying attention to the material. I wonder if his teacher gave him a D- for something like this? I would, but then I'm a curmudgeon.

So yeah, I was more interested in the toy rather than the box. Unfortunately, in this case, people are so enamored by the box, they didn't realize how awful the toy was.

Zz.

The Ghost Particle

No, not the often-used "god particle" that was designated to the Higgs, but rather the "ghostly" particle being used to describe neutrinos.

This NPR review of Ray Jayawardhana's book "Neutrino Hunters" has some basic intro to the history and mysteries of neutrinos if you are not familiar with it. And it is certainly true that, unlike the Higgs, the study of neutrinos has not received the same amount of publicity that it should have.

Neutrinos rarely get the press they deserve. Writers love to wax breathless about Higgs Bosons, antimatter, hypothetical thingies like tachyons (faster-than-light particles) and, of course, whatever makes up Dark Matter. But the ghostly neutrino turns out to be essential to everything from the physics of the early universe to the fusion reactions that keep the sun burning to the supernovas that light up the cosmos.

But as important, while the US has completely closed down all high energy collider physics, neutrino physics is the one area in which it still has a lot of involvement, both within the US and outside. Current projects within the US such as MINOS, NOvA, etc. are pushing our knowledge in neutrino physics, and future projects such as LBNE should ensure, if it gets continued funding, that the US will have a strong involvement in neutrino physics study.

BTW, if there's any crackpot out there who thinks that by calling neutrinos as "ghost particle" allows them the poetic license of justifying the existence of "ghosts", then they'd better read an earlier blog entry I made on this. Don't laugh! You'd be surprised at the extent these crackpots will go to simply to justify their incoherent and faulty logic.

Zz.

No Evidence of Time Travelers From Scouring the Internet

I mean, really!

As my first candidate of the year for the Ig Nobel prize, we have a couple of physicists who went looking for evidence of time travelers by examining the internet. Their work, which I think is still unpublished yet, was covered here.

Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson from Michigan Technological University’s physics department developed a strategy for tracking down time travellers by trawling the internet for references to prescient information posted before it should be possible.

For instance, they searched for mentions of “Comet ISON” prior to its discovery in September 2012, theorising that it was a large enough event that it would be known to those even far in the future and possibly mentioned online by accident after they travelled back in time.

Similarly, they looked for mentions of “Pope Francis” proper to March 2013, as the current pontiff is the first to have ever had the name.

The researchers scoured popular search engines such as Google, but also turned to Twitter and Facebook.

To cut an amusingly long story short, they found none.

Unfortunately, they were forced to conclude that no time traveller has ever come back from the future and left visible clues online.

“Although the negative results reported here may indicate that time travellers from the future are not among us and cannot communicate with us over the modern day internet, they are by no means proof,” they said.

“There are many reasons for this. First, it may be physically impossible for time travellers to leave any lasting remnants of their stay in the past, including even non-corporeal informational remnants on the internet. Next, it may be physically impossible for us to find such information as that would violate some yet-unknown law of physics.

“Furthermore, time travellers may not want to be found, and may be good at covering their tracks.”

They forgot one other reason. These time travelers knew that these two will be trying to trace them via such means and thus, made sure they did not make any such comments as to give themselves away.

:)

Zz.

Where To "Apply"?

Last last year, the American Physical Society (the publisher of Phys. Rev. family of journals) announced that they are soliciting submission for a newly-created journal under their wing. Called Physical Review Applied, the call for papers reads:

The editors are encouraging scientists to submit their theoretical or experimental work on materials science, surface and interface physics, device physics, condensed matter physics, optics and any intersection of physics and engineering. The journal will publish both short letters as well as longer journal articles.

Now, of course, those of us who are familiar with the various physics journals will wonder, is this new APS journal competing directly with the American Institute of Physics's family of Applied physics journals? The AIP already has a couple of established applied physics journals, namely Applied Physics Letters, and Journal of Applied Physics. From the description of Physical Review Applied, it looks like they are looking for the same type of papers as APL and JAP.

For those of us (including me) who do work in the applied fields, we certainly won't complain that another journal, especially from the well-established organization such as the APS, providing another avenue for us to consider for publication. We just have to figure out the level of standards that they will adhere to for publication in the new journals.

Zz.

Particle Fever

It looks like there is a documentary film about the search for the Higgs making its way around film festivals. Other than the uninspiring title, Particle Fever seems to be getting a rather good review. I am more impressed that the people responsible for the production of the movie are really physicists themselves.

It’s crucial for starters that the subject is second nature to the filmmakers: director Mark Levinson earned a doctoral degree in particle physics from Berkeley before veering into film, and producer David Kaplan, a professor of theoretical particle physics at Johns Hopkins, has also been active on History Channel and National Geographic science programs. They’re able to simplify and synthesize without dumbing down the material and put non-science-oriented viewers at ease by drawing a smart parallel between science and art: Both endeavors ultimately represent attempts to explain our existence and our place in the universe.

I'll have to check and see if and when they'll show that in my neck of the woods. Have you seen it? If you have, what did you think of the movie?

Zz.