Physics

Fusion: Now With Less Instability, Thanks To A 19th Century Technique

The Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories is moving us toward a fusion future by stepping into the past- in this case using a 19th century device called a Helmholz coil, which is a pair of circular coils on a common axis with equal currents flowing in ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 10 2014 - 10:52am

Newtonian Gravity with a Tiny Test Mass

I will try to keep my Newtonian wig on. Digressions will be in well-defined sidebars. Time to serve the meat and potatoes. The Action for the Newtonian Gravitational Field Two things go into this action: a mass density and a scalar field: ...

Blog Post - Doug Sweetser - Jan 25 2014 - 11:30pm

One more view at Italy's escape of brains

In Italy the debate over the escape of brilliant young scientists to foreign countries has been going on for decades now. Italians like to debate, much less to solve their own problems. So although the problem is clearly identified and a recipe to solve it ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 15 2014 - 7:50am

Are Tetraquarks Real?

Tetraquarks are hypothetical particles made up by four quarks (two quarks and two antiquarks). Unlike mesons (quark-antiquark pairs) and baryons (three-quark or three-antiquark systems), the quarks in a tetraquark are quite loosely bound within their confi ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 18 2014 - 4:22am

The Quote Of The Week

"Statistical power does not corrupt" Leland Wilkinson, "Statistical Methods in Psychology Journals", in American Psychologist, August 1999. [Note: "power" in the context of statistical tests measures the probability that a te ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 21 2014 - 2:49pm

Now We Can See If That Cat Is Alive Or Dead: Peeking Inside Schrodinger's Box

Measuring a 27-dimensional quantum state is a time-consuming, multistage process using a technique called quantum tomography, which is similar to creating a 3D image from many 2D ones. Researchers have instead been able to apply direct measurement to do t ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 20 2014 - 1:34pm

Professor Ready

I must say I feel proud of myself tonight. In Italy a unified procedure to rank candidates to the position of associate or full professor has been launched last year, and I of course participated to the qualification by sending a documentation of the work ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 23 2014 - 1:52pm

The Quote Of The Week- Pati On Preons

"The most important task at hand is experimental. Based on our considerations of dynamical symmetry breaking through preons and the assumption of universal size for all quarks and leptons, we are led to predict that quarks and leptons have an inverse ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 24 2014 - 6:45am

True Classical Black Holes Don't Exist Says Stephen Hawking. I Say He's Right.

In a paper posted to the arXiv a few days ago Stephen W. Hawking the preeminent expert on black holes argued quite effectively that given what we know about quantum gravity they don't exist. Quantum theory allows for matter and energy to escape from ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Feb 2 2014 - 9:26am

The Future Of US Particle Physics: Communication, Education And Outreach

Chapter 10 of the report on the 2013 community summer study held at Snowmass, titled "Communication, Education, and Outreach" is available since Jan 24th in the Cornell ArXiv. It is a 26-pages document describing the importance of outreach activi ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 27 2014 - 7:19am