Physics

The Most Precise Mass Measurement: CMS On Top

The mass of the top quark is a very important parameter of the standard model: using its value together with other no less fundamental ones (the W boson mass, the Higgs mass, and many parameters describing the properties of Z bosons) it is possible to stud ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 4 2014 - 7:11am

Standard Model Or Minimal SUSY?

If I look back at the first times I discussed the important graph of the top quark versus W boson mass, nine years ago, I am amazed at observing how much progress we have made since then. The top quark mass in 2005 was known with 2-3 GeV precision, the W b ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 7 2014 - 1:33pm

Dark Matter Has Conferences, Now It Needs Evidence

In February, the University of California, Los Angeles held its 11th Symposium on Sources and Detection of Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe- "Dark Matter 2014" was aimed at discussing the latest progress in the quest to identify dark ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 8 2014 - 4:09pm

What Next?

Yesterday I was in Rome, at a workshop organized by the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), titled "What Next". The event was meant to discuss the plan for basic research in fundamental physics and astrophysics beyond the next ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 10 2014 - 11:44am

Supersymmetry Found In Nature?

U.C. Santa Barbara physicist Tarun Grover says he has definitive mathematical evidence for supersymmetry in a condensed matter system. Sought after in the realm of subatomic particles by physicists for several decades, supersymmetry describes a unique rel ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 9 2014 - 4:16pm

4-Quark Hadron Confirmed At LHC

The existence of exotic hadrons — a type of matter that cannot be classified within the traditional quark model- has been confirmed in a forthcoming article prepared by the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) Collaboration at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 10 2014 - 4:35pm

Aldo Menzione And The Design Of The Silicon Vertex Detector

Below is a clip from a chapter of my book where I describe the story of the silicon microvertex detector of the CDF experiment. CDF collected proton-antiproton collisions from the Tevatron collider in 1985, 1987-88, 1992-96, and 2001-2011. Run 1A occurred ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 15 2014 - 5:21pm

Quasiparticle Excitons- First Direct Observation In Motion

A quasiparticle called the exciton is responsible for the transfer of energy within devices, such as solar cells, LEDs, and semiconductor circuits, and has been understood for decades, but exciton movement within materials has never been directly observed ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 16 2014 - 8:42am

BICEP2, cosmic inflation, pre-Big Bang, SST, galactic effects...

Do BICEP2 data provide a proof of cosmic inflation? As early as March 17, a Stanford report asserted « New evidence from space supports Stanford physicist's theory of how universe began ». ...

Blog Post - Luis Gonzalez-Mes... - Aug 29 2014 - 7:23am

Tantalum Isomer Blurs The Boundaries Of Existence

Identifying the full extent of the nuclear landscape, essentially how many isotopes exist, is vital for nuclear physics. There is a lot left to learn. Beyond the stable nuclei that we find on Earth, there are many unstable nuclei that are formed in stellar ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 21 2014 - 8:42am