Physics

Lightwave amplification by a stimulated emission of radiation

All light is made of electromagnetic waves.   This means that like any wave, there is something repeatedly sloshing back and forth with light.   A water wave is crests and troughs on the water going up and down over and over as they travel across the surf ...

Blog Post - Robert Hayes - May 7 2015 - 7:42pm

The Quote of the Week: Economical Numbers

“ There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers. ” Richard Feynman, ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 11 2015 - 7:57am

Rydberg Atoms, Qubits And Magic Wavelengths In Quantum Computing

Rydberg atoms, atoms whose outermost electrons are highly excited but not ionized, might be just the thing for processing quantum information. These outsized atoms can be sustained for a long time in a quantum superposition condition (a good thing for cre ...

Article - News Staff - May 12 2015 - 8:38am

AMVA4NewPhysics: Statistical Learning And New Discoveries

I am very happy today because I have been notified by the European Community that a project I submitted for funding as coordinator last January has been evaluated very positively by the EU reviewers. The project is a training network of universities and r ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 13 2015 - 8:28am

Burton Richter Advocates Electron-Positron Colliders, For A Change

Burton Richter, 1975 Nobel prize in Physics for the discovery of the J/ψ meson, speaks about the need of a new linear collider for the measurement of Higgs boson branching fractions in a video on Facebook (as soon as I understand how to paste here I will!) ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 14 2015 - 10:47am

Dark Matter Not Made Of Heavy Particles

A new simulation that explains the collision between clusters of galaxies known as "El Gordo" also challenges popular thinking on the blanket term for undetected 'dark matter'. In general, galaxy clusters grow in size by merging with ea ...

Article - News Staff - May 16 2015 - 8:30am

Will We Soon Have A 2-D Liquid?

Computer simulations have predicted a new phase of matter: atomically thin two-dimensional liquid. ...

Article - News Staff - May 24 2015 - 10:16am

Why Sub-Zero Temperature Water Doesn't Become Ice

Water behaves in mysterious ways, especially below zero before it turns into ice. Physicists have recently observed the spontaneous first steps of the ice formation process, as tiny crystal clusters as small as 15 molecules start to exhibit the recognizab ...

Article - News Staff - May 27 2015 - 10:00am

Bang!! 13 TeV- The Highest Energy Ever Achieved By Mankind?!

The LHC has finally started to produce 13-TeV proton-proton collisions! The picture below shows one such collision, as recorded by the CMS experiment today. The blue boxes show the energy recorded in the calorimeter, which measures particle energy by " ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 21 2015 - 4:46pm

Highest Energy Collisions? Not In My Book

Yesterday I posed a question- Are the first collisions recorded by the LHC running at 13 TeV the highest-energy ever produced by mankind with subatomic particles? It was a tricky one, as usual, meant to think about the matter. I received several tentative ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 22 2015 - 2:57pm