Physics

Casimir Effect And Boosting The Force Of Empty Space

A vacuum- empty space- is not as empty as one might think. In fact, empty space is a bubbling soup of various virtual particles popping in and out of existence – a phenomenon called "vacuum fluctuations". Usually, such extremely short-lived part ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 22 2014 - 11:30am

BICEP2 Data, CMB B-modes, Inflation, Alternative Cosmologies... (II)

It is now generally admitted that the BICEP2 Collaboration has not yet produced an evidence for the existence of primordial B-modes in the measured polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Contrary to the claim contained in the ini ...

Article - Luis Gonzalez-Mes... - Sep 21 2014 - 12:44am

Hybrid Nanowires And A Crystal Wedding In The Nanocosmos

Researchers have succeeded in embedding nearly perfect semiconductor crystals into a silicon nanowire. They say the new method of producing hybrid nanowires, very fast and multi-functional processing units, can be accommodated on a single chip in the futu ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 23 2014 - 1:00pm

100,000 Amps: New Magnets Boost Fusion Energy

Assembling yttrium-based high-temperature superconducting tapes in order to fabricate a large-scale magnet conductor has led to the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) in Japan  achieving an electrical current of 100,000 amperes, by far the highe ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 25 2014 - 11:01am

A Useful Approximation For The Tail Of A Gaussian

This is just a short post to report about a useful paper I found by preparing for a talk I will be giving next week at the 3rd International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics, in the pleasant setting of the Orthodox Academy of Crete, near Kolympari. M ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 26 2014 - 7:03am

Rotational Wavepackets And Liquid-Like Motion Of Atoms Within An Ultra-Cold Cluster

A new study has unlocked the potential to create new materials using nanosized ‘building blocks’, by using a laser technique to examine in rich detail the structure and internal atomic motion of a small cluster containing an acetylene molecule and a single ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 27 2014 - 8:21am

More On The Alleged WW Excess From The LHC

This is just a short update on the saga of the anomalous excess of W-boson-pair production that the ATLAS and CMS collaborations have reported in their 7-TeV and 8-TeV proton-proton collision data. A small bit of information which I was unaware of, and wh ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 29 2014 - 3:28am

Publishing in scientific journals cost MONEY!? A kickstarter project.

If someone can use Kickstarter to raise $50,000 for making potato salad, perhaps, I can raise at least $2500 to pay publication fees on three papers.   It is a little known fact that formally publishing an article in a scientific journal cost money. ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Aug 3 2014 - 3:38pm

Quantum Cheshire Cat: Scientists Separate A Particle From Its 'Grin'

In Lewis Caroll's novel "Alice in Wonderland", the Cheshire Cat could disappear but its grin remained.  Why? Who knows? Like dogs named Checkers and Esther Williams swimming pools, things don't always make sense. Scientifically, that c ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 29 2014 - 1:04pm

To Live And Die In Berkeley: Monitoring Schrodinger's Cat In Real Time

Schrödinger's cat is one of the famous examples of the weirdness of quantum mechanics   The thought puzzle is that you put a cat inside a box and make its life dependent on a random event, when does the cat die? When the random event occurs, or when ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 30 2014 - 2:07pm