Physics

Not Just Football Or Basketball- Scientists Demonstrate Pear-Shaped Atomic Nuclei

While school-age models of atomic nuclei show them as being spherical, like a basketball, they are more like the shape of a football.  Yet for some particular combinations of protons and neutrons, nuclei can also assume very asymmetric shapes, like a pear ...

Article - News Staff - May 9 2013 - 11:00am

CDF Memories, Circa 1992

In 1992 the top quark had not been discovered yet, and it did not make much sense for the CDF collaboration to have a full meeting devoted solely to it; rather, analyses targeting the search of the top quark were presented at a meeting which dealt with bot ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 11 2013 - 1:54pm

The Plot Of The Week- Pick Your Favourite μ

Supersymmetry, the extension of the Standard Model of particle physics that was once sold as an almost certain discovery that the LHC experiments would bump into upon starting to collect proton-proton collisions, is not in a very healthy situation these da ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 15 2013 - 1:10pm

Higgs Decays To B-Quarks From CMS

Finally the decay of Higgs bosons to b-quark pairs is emerging from LHC data, too. ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 16 2013 - 8:43am

Hofstadter's Butterfly Effect Confirmed

Hofstadter's Butterfly, a complex pattern of the energy states of electrons that resembles a butterfly, has appeared in physics textbooks as a theoretical concept of quantum mechanics for nearly 40 years but had never been directly observed- until no ...

Article - News Staff - May 16 2013 - 4:09pm

The Quote Of The Week- "No New Physics" Now Conceivable

"New Physics can appear at any moment but it is now conceivable that no new physics will show up at the LHC" Guido Altarelli, LHC Nobel Symposium, May 15th 2013 It is funny reading the above quote if you are one who "conceived" that th ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 19 2013 - 1:17pm

Is Cold Fusion For Real?!

The results of a third-party investigation of Rossi's E-CAT reactor have appeared on the Cornell arxiv, and the conclusions of the tests are at the very least startling: ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 23 2013 - 10:19am

ATLAS Vs CMS Higgs Results: Which Experiment Has More Sensitivity?

" Oh Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? " Good old Shelley inspired me to start today's article with the above verse, taken from his magnificent "Ode to the West Wind". With the weather we are experiencing these days ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 24 2013 - 4:35pm

The Quote Of The Week- A Dark Matter Cusp At The Galactic Center?

"The cusp in the dark matter distribution required to explain the recently found excess in the gamma-ray spectrum at energies of 130 GeV in terms of the dark matter annihilations cannot survive the tidal forces if it is offset by 1.5° from the Galact ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 28 2013 - 6:39am

10. Manipulate The Data

[The title of this article comes from a T-shirt with ten advices on what to do when everything else fails] It has always surprised me to realize how confident we physicists are of the good faith of our colleagues. We may argue endlessly over one graph or ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 31 2013 - 6:25am