Physics

Primordial Gravitational Waves: BICEP2 Announces First Direct Evidence Of Cosmic Inflation

Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the Big Bang. In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of our best tel ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 17 2014 - 12:21pm

Direct detection of CMB B-Mode Polarization by the BICEP2 team. Yay! Now what does any of that mean?

The first reported direct detection of gravitational waves via the B-mode polarization of the CMB may have supported the simplest and most popular inflationary models.   Results from the European Space Agency’s Planck CMB observing satellite may or may no ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Mar 17 2014 - 6:11pm

Techni-Quark: Is This, Rather ThanThe Higgs, The God Particle?

The Higgs boson, colloquially called the God Particle because of its fundamental nature, may not be the smallest particle out there. Well before the Higgs had even been found at the Large Hadron Collider, there were lots of hypotheses put forth as to what ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 21 2014 - 9:52am

A Precise Bound On The Higgs Boson Width

At 125 GeV of mass, the Higgs boson is a very heavy particle; yet its natural width is predicted to be of just 4.15 MeV in the standard model, a value much smaller than that of particles of similar mass. The top quark, for instance, has a width of 1.5 GeV; ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 22 2014 - 11:34am

Why Increasing Bandwidth Of Radio Transmissions Using Orbital Angular Momentum Is Innovative

I received the following comment from Bo Thide', one of the authors of the paper where Fabrizio Tamburini and collaborators explain their novel method to multiply the transmission of information via EM waves (see here). I think his points are of inter ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 24 2014 - 4:20am

Quantum Tornados And Kelvin Waves

As a child, you may have been fascinated to learn that draining the water from a bathtub causes a spinning tornado to appear. That or gravity may have been your first introduction to classical mechanics. As the water rotated faster, a vortex appeared. Yet ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 24 2014 - 4:28pm

BICEP2, CMB B-modes And Spinorial Space-time

Would the existence of B-modes in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation be an evidence for inflation? Many influential colleagues claim that this is indeed the case. But their arguments are based on standard cosmological schemes. Actually, pre-Bi ...

Article - Luis Gonzalez-Mes... - May 12 2014 - 12:27pm

Extreme Superposition: Researchers Record Quantum Entanglement In 103 Dimensions

In a recent PNAS paper, scientists have described how they managed to achieve a quantum entanglement with a minimum of 103 dimensions with only two particles. 103 dimensions rather than 3? Is that a typo? Elementary particles such as photons can produce s ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 30 2014 - 11:30am

The Plot Of The Week- No Higgs In Top Decays

Now that we know that the Higgs boson has a mass of 125 GeV and displays all the properties that a regular standard model Higgs boson should have, one question you could ask is, is it possible that a top quark decays into a Higgs boson? The question is a l ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 29 2014 - 4:23am

Book Status

As I mentioned a few months ago, lately I have been writing a science book for laymen. The idea is to focus on the history of CDF, a particle physics experiment that collected data from 1985 to 2011 at the Fermilab laboratory near Chicago. ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 2 2014 - 5:10am