Physics

"Gravity", Or Inertia?

Please note: spoiler information in this article! The recent movie "Gravity", featuring the two hollywood stars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, is a very interesting experiment in film-making. I can hardly recall other movies with just two cha ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 18 2013 - 9:07am

University Self Celebration

Yesterday evening I chanced to attend, invited by a friend, the opening of the 2013-2014 academic year of the university of Venice "Ca' Foscari", which was held at the Malibran theater. It was the first time I attended one such event, since ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 21 2013 - 7:17am

Floquet-Bloch State: Persuading Light To Mix It Up With Matter

Researchers have made a step toward the creation of materials that can be 'tuned' just by shining a light on them- they have succeeded in producing and measuring a coupling of photons and electrons on the surface of an unusual type of material c ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 25 2013 - 9:16am

The Quote Of The Week- Those Hot Boards

"The question is not whether these boards will catch fire or not. The question is when they will". (Said by Fermilab electronics experts who were members of a review panel that provided advice on the construction of a prototype of fast-tracker h ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 28 2013 - 10:09am

The Life Of Physics Students In Greece

Just a quick link today, to acknowledge an interesting report on the life of physics students in Greece and the present situation with Universities there. And of course, if you wish to practice your Greek, there are more articles there, translated for us b ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 26 2013 - 3:44am

Sorites Paradox: Many-Body Systems And How Few Particles Become A 'Heap'

At some point the exact number of particles in a group becomes irrelevant. But does when a collection of elements forms a "heap"? In recent experiments using ultracold atoms, Heidelberg physicists succeeded in observing the transition to a many-b ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 27 2013 - 8:18am

No Jet-Jet Bump In New CDF Diboson Analysis!

Do you remember the dijet bump at 140 GeV that CDF published in March 2011? This was a surprising excess in the mass distribution of pairs of jets found in events containing a leptonic W boson decay. ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 29 2013 - 7:55am

WIMP Watch: LUX Dark Matter Detector Sends First Data

The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment is trying to identify the nature of dark matter, an invisible substance that physicists believe is all around us, making up most of the matter in the universe, even though it has effect on our lives. The umbrel ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2013 - 12:51pm

Lux: No Dark Matter In Sensitive Direct Search

The results of the LUX experiment are out- and they are negative: no dark matter signal has been spotted by the extra sensitive detector. This is a normal day for you and me, but a gloomy day for those that counted on the neutralino to be the first supersy ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Nov 14 2013 - 11:14am

P5, Planning and prioritizing the next decade of American particle physics.

Top scientists met at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, this past weekend, in the first of a series of face to face meetings which will help determine the course of particle physics in the United States of America for the next decade.   This was the ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Nov 4 2013 - 4:30pm