Physics

Wanted: 'Schroedinger Cat' With A Bigger Meow

Since 1935, when Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger created his famous thought experiment about a cat that was both alive and dead, physicists have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects. ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 21 2013 - 3:00pm

A Four-Sigma Evidence Of New Physics In Rare B Decays Found By LHCb, And Its Interpretation

Today I received news of an interesting measurement of angular distributions of the decay products in the rare decay of the B meson to  a K* and a muon pair- one of the specialties of the LHCb collaboration, which has more horse-power in some of these low- ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 24 2013 - 1:31pm

The Plot Of The Week- Top And W Boson Masses

The CDF and DZERO experiments recently produced a combination of their precision measurements of the W boson mass, and proceeded to include the LEP II results to obtain a "world average" of that very important parameter of the Standard Model. The ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 1 2013 - 7:56am

B Meson: New Physics Gets Some Confirmation, Say Researchers

The Standard Model has some gaps and is unable to explain phenomena like dark matter or gravitational interaction between particles. Some physicists are seeking what they call "New Physics", something more fundamental, but there has been no direc ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 1 2013 - 10:21am

Including The MSSM

Two days ago I showed how the measurements produced in the course of the last decade have allowed us to "zoom into" the parameter space of the Standard Model, pinpointing the W boson, top quark, and Higgs boson masses to a very narrow 3-D volume ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 3 2013 - 5:53am

Useful Entanglement: How To Witness Quantum Measurement

For quantum physicists working on future systems, entangling quantum systems is a key resource for upcoming quantum computers and simulators. Physicists have crafted a new, reliable method to verify entanglement in the laboratory using a minimal number of ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 5 2013 - 10:05am

Top Mass Measurements: The Status

In the past few weeks the Tevatron and LHC experiments have updated their results on some of the most important Standard Model parameters. Of these, notably the top quark mass is one where the Tevatron is still doing slightly better than the LHC, due to th ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 6 2013 - 10:44am

Atomic Clock Can Simulate Quantum Magnetism

Researchers have used an atomic clock as a quantum simulator, mimicking the behavior of a different, more complex quantum system, joining a growing list of physical systems that can be used for modeling and perhaps eventually explaining the quantum mechan ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 8 2013 - 5:54pm

Searching For The Beautiful Counterpart Of The X(3872)

Do you remember the X(3872)? This is a hadron containing charm and anticharm quarks, which was observed to decay into a J/Psi meson, a positive, and a negative pion. When it was discovered, by the Belle experiment in 2003, the X caused a lot of interest a ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 10 2013 - 10:02am

Physics: Places To Be, Places To Avoid

You have decided to start a graduate study in physics. Where should you apply? And how to decide which offer to take? A diarrhea of lists attempt to rank "the world’s best universities". Mostly these lists are based on some aggregate of different ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Aug 11 2013 - 11:28am