SuperB Officially Launches

While the US shuttered the last of it is particle collider experiment last month, elsewhere in the world, new particle collider experiments are either being planned, or just starting to be built. This is true in the case of the Italians and the SuperB project.

The accelerator will be what physicists call a B-factory, where electrons and their antiparticles, positrons, will race around two 1.3-kilometre-long rings, then collide and produce heavy B mesons. By studying the way these particles decay, physicists hope to fill some of the gaps in the standard model of physics, such as why there is more matter than antimatter in the Universe, and whether the exotic particles predicted by the theory of supersymmetry really exist.

SuperB will produce 100 times more collision events each year than did the two B factories previously built: the BaBar experiment at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, which shut down in April 2008, and the ongoing Belle experiment at the KEKB accelerator in Tsukuba, Japan. This increased luminosity should allow researchers to study even the rarest of physical phenomena.

Coupled that with the planned upgrade to Belle II at Japan's KEK, high energy physics experiments are slowly but surely migrating outside of the US. There's not a whole lot to be proud of here if you are concerned about high energy physics in the US.

Zz.

Feynman - The New Hero

It appears that Richard Feynman is the new hero of a graphic novel (cartoon?). His life story seems to have been turned into a series of graphic sketches in this new book.

In “Feynman,” read about how the irrepressible and colorfully sketched PhD pulls pranks on his fellow researchers on the Manhattan Project. Watch as the rascally professor solves the Dirac Equation. Observe as the hard-partying genius boldly calls Niels Bohr by his given name, instead of by his code handle “Nicholas Baker.” In one panel of the 300-page book, Feynman spins dinner plates to unlock secrets of quantum mechanics; in another he humiliates a NASA official during the Rogers Commission investigation of the Challenger explosion.

I suppose this man will remain popular to the public in general because of his "quirkiness".

Zz.

LHC@Home Attracts Large Support

I mentioned this a while back. It appears that a lot of people are eager to participate in the distributive computing effort to do a lot of simulations for the LHC. Since its announcement, the LHC@Home has received a lot of support.

The application Test4Theory, which runs Monte Carlo simulations of events in the LHC, was announced in a CERN press release on 8 August. Within three days, the number of registered volunteers swelled from a few hundred to nearly 8000.

Certainly nothing to sneeze at. Still, they're expecting 40,000 participants in this project, and that will result in an interesting consequence:

According to CERN's Peter Skands, the physicist leading the simulation effort, when the number of active volunteers passes 40,000 – which could happen later this year – the system will become equivalent to a true "virtual collider", producing as many collisions per second as the real LHC.

Fire away!

Zz.

2010 Nobel Lectures

A year after the date that they were announced as Nobel Prize winners in Physics, the Nobel lectures given by K. S. Novoselov and Andre K. Geim have now been published in Rev. Mod. Phys. They are "free to read" articles.

Zz.

The Physics of Flying Pumpkins

Each year, during this time of the year in the US, many pumpkins are scarified in the name of physics! :)

This is another example of a physics high school teacher trying to demonstrate Newtonian mechanics by shooting pumpkins.

“The students got a lot out of the project, but they're not done yet,” said physics teacher Jeff Partynski. “They must now analyze the flight of their pumpkins and create a detailed report that includes calculations, design criteria, and results.”

Partynski requires students to build catapults that can shoot pumpkins at least 20 meters.

The project requires the application of principles like projectile motion, energy, and forces. They also learn to work in teams like engineers or scientists tasked with at corporations.

Too bad they weren't shooting at some structure with round, green heads strategically placed in it...... Hum... OK, maybe I've been playing Angry Birds way too much.

Zz.

Tenson Within OPERA

I heard about this uneasiness within the OPERA collaboration since the news broke, but I didn't think it was appropriate to pass on rumors such as that. But now, with the news being reported on PhysicsWorld, it is now official that there are large section of the collaboration that want to make sure things are double-checked and looked into again before even submitting it for peer-reviewed publication.

The announcement made headlines around the world, since it appears to contradict Einstein's special theory of relativity. However, not everyone within OPERA was happy to release the results publicly, with several of the 30 group leaders within the 160-strong collaboration being opposed to the release of a paper on the arXiv preprint server and the accompanying seminars and press release without further tests of possible systematic errors being carried out. Now, a larger fraction of the group leaders is concerned about the paper being submitted to a research journal. One member of OPERA, who does not wish to be named, says there is a "lot of tension" within the collaboration and that up to half of the members are opposed to an immediate submission.

This article pointed out two possible issues with the OPERA analysis, and these are the two issues that have bothered many who have read the preprint.

One such check regards the timing of the neutrinos' arrival at Gran Sasso, and involves carrying out an analysis of timing data collected by monitoring the charge, rather than the light, generated by particles passing through the detector. This analysis relies on a very precise and painstaking measurement of the length of the cabling used to collect the timing data, in order to isolate any systematic errors that may be present within the electronics or other parts of the timing system.

Another independent check involves the statistical analysis of the data collected by OPERA. The researchers are not able to track, and therefore time, individual neutrinos as they travel from Geneva to Gran Sasso, but instead they measure the temporal distribution of the protons within each bunch just before the protons hit the graphite target and then compare this with the distribution of the corresponding neutrinos as they are detected in OPERA – with the temporal offset between the two revealing the time of flight. Some members of the collaboration argue that this offsetting procedure needs to be carried out independently, in order to be sure that the temporal profile of the neutrinos leaving CERN can be inferred accurately from that of the protons that produced them.

That last part could be crucial. They were using the proton temporal distribution to be the same as the neutrino temporal distribution. Unlike MINOS, OPERA has no Near Detector to verify the neutrino temporal distribution before they travel all that distance to Gran Sasso. MINOS, on the other hand, has a near detector right at Fermilab, with the Far Detector located hundreds of miles away in Soudan, Minnesota. In some sense, I think it will be up to MINOS, and to some extent, T2K, to verify this result, which they will be able to do within a year.

So sit tight. The next few months will be very interesting.

Zz.

Saul Perlmutter Nobel Prize Press Conference

Video of Saul Perlmutter Nobel Prize Press Conference.




Zz.

How to Land Jobs Outside Academia

This panel discussion for students and postdoc was held as SLAC. It consisted of members who are physicists and working outside of academia. In essence, this panel discussion tries to impart on how one gets a job, what should one do to be well-prepared for such a career, and how to go about applying/seeking such a job.

If you have been a long-time reader of this blog, you would notice similarities between what was said here, and what I've been saying all along. For example:

It’s never too early to start, added Chris Barnes (Stanford, ’07, and SLAC), and late of Solyndra. “The time to acquire the specific skills is when you’re still in school and can take classes,” he said. Some of the panelists focused on programming skills as a good example, but Exploratorium Senior Scientist Paul Doherty (MIT, ’74), said it never hurts to expand your physics problem-solving repertoire, as well.

I've always tried to emphasize this. In my "So You Want To Be A Physicist" essay, I explicitly said so in "Part VIII: Alternative Careers for a Physics Graduate"

If you have followed the series so far, you would have noticed that very early on, I emphasized one very important thing: the acquiring of a range of skills during your undergraduate years. This includes everything from computer programming skills to experimental skills. This is extremely important for any students, but especially if you end your physics education upon completion of your undergraduate degree. If you decide to pursue employment, your employability depends very much of what you can do. Let’s face it, not many employers are looking for someone who can ”do physics”. There are, however, employers who would like someone who can analyze numerical models and maybe write codes, or maybe someone who can work in an electronics industry doing thin film fabrication, etc. You will be surprised that some of the things you accidentally picked up in an advanced physics lab might be the very thing that gets you the job.

I repeated this theme in my idealized letter to the student "So I Am Your Academic Advisor"

Since you chose to work for me, you will be doing a lot of experimental work. Many of these are hands-on work that will involve learning, maintaining, and constructing vacuum systems. You will have to learn how various vacuum components work, how to handle them properly, how to assemble them, how to design and maintain such system. You may also end up learning several experimental technique, diagnostics, equipment, procedure, etc.. etc., some of which may not even be in your thesis. However, these are skills and knowledge that might land you a job. Your knowledge in many of these areas are relevant not only to a life in academic research, but also in many private, high-tech companies if you choose to pursue that line of employment.

So there you go! If you need any more convincing, this should do it.

Zz.

"Vision to reality: From Robert R. Wilson's frontier to Leon M. Lederman's Fermilab"

Now that the Tevatron has become part of our history, it is an appropriate time to look back at the history of Fermilab, and how it became what it is (was?). This article does that by examining the era under two different Fermilab administrations, that of Robert Wilson, and subsequently that of Leon Lederman.

Abstract: This paper examines the roles of vision and leadership in creating and directing Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory from the late 1960s through the 1980s. The story divides into two administrations having different problems and accomplishments, that of Robert R. Wilson (1967-1978), which saw the transformation from cornfield to frontier physics facility, and that of Leon Max Lederman (1979-1989), in which the laboratory evolved into one of the world's major high-energy facilities. Lederman's pragmatic vision of a user-based experimental community helped him to convert the pioneering facility that Wilson had built frugally into a laboratory with a stable scientific, cultural, and funding environment.  

Ref: Phys.Perspect. 5 (2004) 67-86.

Zz.

Producing X-rays At The APS

One of the most common misconception that I have to deal with is the idea that light can ONLY be created upon an atomic transition. You wouldn't believe how many people believe that this is the only way to create light. This shows a severe lack of understanding of classical E&M and Maxwell equations.

The one example that I typically use to counter such misconception is to tell people to figure out how synchrotron centers around the world create light, or EM radiation. In particular, many of these centers generate x-rays to be used for various purposes. These x-rays are generated via "charge acceleration", either by using the bending magnet, or using the insertion devices that essentially cause the electrons to "jiggle" up and down (or sideways) as if they are at the end of a spring. These cause the generation of EM radiation. No "atomic transition" is involved.

This video shows clearly how x-rays are produced at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab.



Zz.

"It Wasn't IKEA!"

Adam Rees had the best reaction to the phone call from the Swedish Academy informing him of his Nobel Prize in Physics this morning.

Riess said his "jaw dropped" when he received an early-morning call at his home in Baltimore from a bunch of Swedish men and realized "it wasn't Ikea," the Swedish furniture retailer. "I'm dazed," he told AP.

I had quite a good chuckle after reading that! :)

Zz.

Liquid Nitrogen Vs. Liquid Oxygen

This fun and crazy folks at JLab are at it again. This time, they teach you the difference between liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen, using a flame!

They are just plain hilarious!

Zz.

Nobel Prize Awarded For Dark Energy

The Nobel Prize in Physics this year was awarded to the 3 main figures in the discovery of Dark Energy. Half of the award is given to Saul Perlmutter of LBNL. The other half is given to Brian Schmidt of Australian National University and Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins.

This is a rather bold and brave move. While dark energy is considered to be "mainstream" in cosmology, its acceptance is still debatable in many circles, and certainly to the MOND folks. The Nobel prize tends to be more conservative, awarding it to people who has discovered something that is well-documented. Dark energy is still a phenomenon that we are still trying to pin down, as evident by many new efforts, such as DES, etc. that are about to go on line. So it is certainly a bold more (unprecedented?) to award for a discovery that has a degree of certainty that many considers to not be as high as other previous Nobel prize winning discovery..... YET.

And oh, Reuters-Thompson's prediction is wrong again! :)

Zz.

You Can Do It, But Did You Understand It?

Chatting with a bunch of people about our times in college brought up something that had crossed my mind a few times. Was there a course or subject area in which you could pass or get through, or even got good grades in it, but you thought that you didn't actually had a good grasp on it?

I certainly did. And the subject area was Thermodynamics. For some odd reason, even though I got good grades in it, I just didn't think I actually GET IT when I was an undergraduate. At that time, I thought that the subject was disjointed, and I see a lot of "starting points", where such-and-such an equation or description goes with such-and-such a problem. I didn't see any underlying uniform idea through the whole thing. Yet, I could still do well in exams.

I didn't get that feeling in other subjects, such as Classical Mechanics, E&M, QM, etc. I'm not saying that I find those easy, or easier, but at least I had a clear "view" of the material and able to figure out where I was at any given time. In Thermo, I had a pieces of the puzzle, and I can work with that puzzle, but I never had a clear idea of the whole picture.

That, of course, changed very quickly in graduate school where I finally had to 'apply' stuff that I learned in Thermo, and finally, many parts of it started to sink in. Now, I think, if I were to retake my undergraduate class in that subject, I can see the bigger  picture that applies to that particular problem or area. But I found it rather strange and disconcerting that I didn't have that level of understanding at that time.

I'm guessing that this is not unusual, and that a lot of students, especially in the intro physics courses, are able to get through by simply knowing how to work out a problem, rather than having a profound understanding of what they are dealing with.

Zz.

So Long, Tevatron!

Thank you, and goodbye, Tevatron.

Don't miss the streaming broadcast of the shutdown of the Tevatron today, for those who are not able to be there in person for the event.

Zz.

The Day Before The End

On the eve of the Tevatron shut-down, Fermilab scientists and its partners urged for continued funding of the intensity frontier in high energy physics. Towards this end, they are pushing for funding of LBNE.

The idea of moving more particles, rather than more energy, is what will make the LBNE project complimentary to, rather than competing with, projects like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Europe.

 It will be a tough sell during a time like this. One can only hope that the publicity surrounding the shut down of the Tevatron, thus ending all particle collider experiments on US soil for the first time since such an experiment was conducted, might make some people to think hard about what they are doing.

Zz.

Don't Jump to Conclusion Faster Than c!

Needless to say, I've had a lot of questions coming my way regarding the recent neutrino results from OPERA. You'll notice that I've tried to refrain from making any kind of analysis and commentary on this thing. But it appears that my lack of response to it seems to be causing even more questions and prodding for me to say something.

Actually, I intend to. However, I need to know quite a bit more of what is going on beyond just what they had put down on their preprint. And being at a place where I have access to people who work at CERN (through the ATLAS collaboration), and people working on MINOS, provides me some advantage of talking to them and getting their feedback. But that takes time, because these people themselves are inundated with similar questions.

I'm saving more of my comments till later next week. That's when the MINOS people here will have a chance to make their presentation and comments on this result. However, just to wet your appetite, I will describe the common theme that has been running through many of the people I've spoken to.

A very important factor here is the pulse length. The proton beam that hits the target as about, what, microsecond pulse length. This beam collision with the target creates muons, etc. that will eventually decay and create the neutrino beam in that same direction. Now, it is assumed (with good reason), that the neutrino beam will ALSO have that same pulse length. So when the neutrinos are detected, one expect the same pulse length. It is from such observation that they deduce the speed of the neutrino, very much like measuring the group velocity.

The problem here is that, the proton beam itself is quite long. If one studies the beam dynamics, one can easily envision that the tail end of the proton beam might get affected by the kicker, and that can lead to the beam not having the exact pulse length as expected when it hits the target. This affect is a bit more difficult to find and detect, unlike, say, the electronics and timing, where one can change things to double check if one gets the same thing.

There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the result, as one should be, as of now. We just need to let the process work itself out. I'm pretty sure the folks at MINOS and T2K will be looking at this more closely. They hold the key to the independent verification/falsification of this observation, and they are the only ones that can do that. Jumping to conclusion right now and making speculative scenario of what would happen if this is true is highly and truly premature.

Zz.

Flying Circus of Physics 2011

Another event that provides the public and opportunity not only to learn physics/about physics, but also to talk to physicists. This is, I think, I yearly event at Florida State University, which open their doors to welcome the public.

On Saturday, FSU professors will conduct free tours through the physics department, give lecture demonstrations, planetarium shows and hands-on experiments from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m."We will have certain rooms dedicated to certain areas in physics, and each room will have a hands-on demonstration led by a professor," said Volker Crede, FSU physics associate professor.

I have a $1 wager here that says that at least a few of the questions they will be asked is about the OPERA/faster-than-light neutrinos! :)

Zz.

Brookhaven Lab Becomes APS Historic Site

Congratulations to the folks over at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The American Physical Society has designated the whole lab as an APS Historic Site, making Brookhaven the first US National Lab to attain that designation.

Since its inception in 1947, Brookhaven Laboratory has been a leader in nuclear and particle physics experiments around the globe. “Brookhaven researchers’ explorations of fundamental science have resulted in seven Nobel Prizes — five in physics — and insights into some of the most puzzling questions about matter and the universe, as well as advances across scientific fields,” said Brookhaven Lab Director Samuel Aronson. “We are proud to be recognized as an institution for the breadth and depth of these discoveries.”

Having spent 3 good years of my life there, I can certainly attest to the historical importance of this laboratory and the discoveries that have been made there.

Still, what does this recognition gets you? Does that mean that certain historically--significant building or equipment will get preserved?

Zz.

Neutrinos Moving Faster Than c?

The big news right now, of course, is the report out of the OPERA collaboration at CERN of the apparent measurement of neutrinos moving faster than c.

The OPERA team fires muon neutrinos from the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN in Geneva a distance of 730 km under the Alps to a detector in Gran Sasso, Italy. The team studied more than 15,000 neutrino events and found that they indicate that the neutrinos travel at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light.

This will be big if true. So before jumping up and down that this is a major discovery, we will have to wait for several verifications, and certainly with experiments with high resolutions.

BTW, the article had a typo in one of its paragraphs:

This is not the first time that a neutrino experiment has glimpsed superluminal speeds. In 2007 the MINOS experiment in the US looked at 473 neutrons that travelled from Fermilab near Chicago to a detector in northern Minnesota. MINOS physicists reported speeds similar to that seen by OPERA, but their experimental uncertainties were much larger. According to the OPERA researchers, their measurement of the neutrino velocity is 10 times better than previous neutrino accelerator experiments.

 That "neutrons" should obviously be "neutrinos". As with OPERA, the MINOS experiment (which I've mentioned on this blog a few times) involves shooting neutrinos from Fermilab to a detector in Soudan, Minnesota.

Zz.