Physics

"Extraordinary Claims, The 0.000029% Solution" And The 38 MeV Boson AT ICNFP 2014

Yesterday I gave a lecture at the 3rd International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics, which is going on in kolympari (Crete). I spoke critically about the five-sigma criterion that is nowadays the accepted standard in particle physics and astrophysi ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 31 2014 - 5:09pm

Anisotropic Resistance: A Physical Link To Weird Electronic Behavior

One of the baffling electronic properties of the iron-based high-temperature superconductor barium iron nickel arsenide is that, at sufficiently low temperatures, it becomes a better conductor of electricity in some directions than in others. The odd beha ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 31 2014 - 9:30pm

Reassuring SUSY Seekers

This morning at the ICNFP 2014 conference in Kolympari (Crete) the floor was taken by Abdelhak Djouadi, who gave a very nice overview of the theoretical implications of the Higgs boson discovery, especially exploring the status of Supersymmetry models. Djo ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 1 2014 - 2:43am

Quantum Entanglement: When Particles Fall Left And Right At The Same Time

In the world we commonly perceive around us, it takes only a slight disturbance for a pencil standing on its tip to fall in one direction or another, but in the quantum world it is possible in principle for particles of a system to fall both left and right ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 2 2014 - 8:30am

A SUSY Edge Signal? CMS Sees A 2.6 Sigma Excess!

The other day I wrote a post reporting of the lowered expectations of SUSY enthusiasts, who now apparently look forward to seeing 2-sigma effects in the next Run data of the CMS and ATLAS collaborations. That would keep their hope going, apparently. I woul ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 2 2014 - 9:26am

The New B...it Of The Summer: The Kardashian Index

Everybody seems to be talking about the Kardashian index (call it K) these days. It is a rather useless number that you compute as a ratio between the number of twitter followers you have and the number of citations that your papers got. Here is a quote fr ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 4 2014 - 5:01am

Traveling Between Quantum States: Mapping The Optimal Route

As a quantum state collapses from a quantum superposition to a classical state or a different superposition, it will follow a path known as a quantum trajectory. For each start and end state there is an optimal or "most likely" path, but it is n ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 7 2014 - 10:33am

Use CO2 To Cool Refrigerators

Tomorrow's commercial refrigeration systems, such as those in supermarkets, could be cooled by carbon dioxide instead of hydrofluorocarbons. Hydrofluorocarbons are a greenhouse gas that is nearly 4,000 times more potent than CO2 and a future with les ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 10 2014 - 10:27am

Scalar Gravity Theories and Frame Dragging

In a different blog,  Henry Brown made the following statement: ...

Blog Post - Doug Sweetser - Aug 6 2014 - 6:42pm

Status Of The Higgs Challenge

As I reported a couple of times in the course of the last three months, the ATLAS experiment (one of the two all-purpose experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider) has launched a challenge to data analyzers around the world. The task is to correctly cl ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 8 2014 - 6:07am