Physics

Quantum Cheshire Cat: Scientists Separate A Particle From Its 'Grin'

In Lewis Caroll's novel "Alice in Wonderland", the Cheshire Cat could disappear but its grin remained.  Why? Who knows? Like dogs named Checkers and Esther Williams swimming pools, things don't always make sense. Scientifically, that c ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 29 2014 - 1:04pm

To Live And Die In Berkeley: Monitoring Schrodinger's Cat In Real Time

Schrödinger's cat is one of the famous examples of the weirdness of quantum mechanics   The thought puzzle is that you put a cat inside a box and make its life dependent on a random event, when does the cat die? When the random event occurs, or when ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 30 2014 - 2:07pm

"Extraordinary Claims, The 0.000029% Solution" And The 38 MeV Boson AT ICNFP 2014

Yesterday I gave a lecture at the 3rd International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics, which is going on in kolympari (Crete). I spoke critically about the five-sigma criterion that is nowadays the accepted standard in particle physics and astrophysi ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 31 2014 - 5:09pm

Anisotropic Resistance: A Physical Link To Weird Electronic Behavior

One of the baffling electronic properties of the iron-based high-temperature superconductor barium iron nickel arsenide is that, at sufficiently low temperatures, it becomes a better conductor of electricity in some directions than in others. The odd beha ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 31 2014 - 9:30pm

Reassuring SUSY Seekers

This morning at the ICNFP 2014 conference in Kolympari (Crete) the floor was taken by Abdelhak Djouadi, who gave a very nice overview of the theoretical implications of the Higgs boson discovery, especially exploring the status of Supersymmetry models. Djo ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 1 2014 - 2:43am

Quantum Entanglement: When Particles Fall Left And Right At The Same Time

In the world we commonly perceive around us, it takes only a slight disturbance for a pencil standing on its tip to fall in one direction or another, but in the quantum world it is possible in principle for particles of a system to fall both left and right ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 2 2014 - 8:30am

A SUSY Edge Signal? CMS Sees A 2.6 Sigma Excess!

The other day I wrote a post reporting of the lowered expectations of SUSY enthusiasts, who now apparently look forward to seeing 2-sigma effects in the next Run data of the CMS and ATLAS collaborations. That would keep their hope going, apparently. I woul ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 2 2014 - 9:26am

The New B...it Of The Summer: The Kardashian Index

Everybody seems to be talking about the Kardashian index (call it K) these days. It is a rather useless number that you compute as a ratio between the number of twitter followers you have and the number of citations that your papers got. Here is a quote fr ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 4 2014 - 5:01am

Traveling Between Quantum States: Mapping The Optimal Route

As a quantum state collapses from a quantum superposition to a classical state or a different superposition, it will follow a path known as a quantum trajectory. For each start and end state there is an optimal or "most likely" path, but it is n ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 7 2014 - 10:33am

Use CO2 To Cool Refrigerators

Tomorrow's commercial refrigeration systems, such as those in supermarkets, could be cooled by carbon dioxide instead of hydrofluorocarbons. Hydrofluorocarbons are a greenhouse gas that is nearly 4,000 times more potent than CO2 and a future with les ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 10 2014 - 10:27am