Friday, April 15, 2011

Important Reults coming from XENON100

In an article titled Dark Matter Results from 100 Live Days of XENON100 Data the XENON collaboration reports some of the most stringent restrictions on direct dark matter searches to date.
You can find the article here on the arXiv.

With only 3 candidate events on a background of ~2.4 this puts strict restrictions on the available parameter space for WIMP dark matter candidates.

Just eking out their CDMS rivals their results spell trouble for many SUSY models that predict Lightest Stable Particles (LSP's) of low mass range to make up the world of dark matter we observe from astronomy.
Any way you take it, science is honing in on what dark matter "could" be by excluding where it isn't!

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Explanation of hints at new physics from CDF

There is a good summary article in the New York Times (see link here) that talks about the exciting new physics that will be reported today from CDF (Collider Detection at Fermilab).

I spoke about this in my previous blog post (see link here) and the talk is being given today at Fermilab.

The basic summary, "If it is real, than it is really exciting!" says it best.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Imporant new result from CDF

So there is a really exciting Wine and Cheese Seminar scheduled for Wednesday April 6th at Fermilab to talk about an exciting result being reported in the "W+2 Jet " channel.

You will be able to find the talk here: http://theory.fnal.gov/jetp/

IF streaming video is available for this talk you will find it here: http://vms-db-srv.fnal.gov/fmi/xsl/VMS_Site_2/000Return/video/r_live.xsl


For those of you on the fringe of particle physics this will be talk about a new result from the collaboration about production of a fundamental particle known as a W boson. This particle is one of the fundamental messenger particles in the Standard Model. A "Jet" is just a deposit of energy found in our detector coming from the collision.

What is exciting about this somehow boring sounding title is that there could be evidence for all kind of interesting things when looking at what is thought to be "well understood".

No matter how you look at it, this result was important enough to schedule a special seminar...so lots of eyes in the physics world will be looking at it

Saturday, April 2, 2011

TED Talk "Sean Gourley on the mathematics of war "



A good friend of mine recently posted this talk on his Facebook feed and I simply found the power of looking at the data brought to bear by this group of physicists on the complex problem of war and insurgency strategy really fascinating.

I would say the graph shown at the end where he plots "alpha" over time for the Iraq War the proverbial "punchline" to the true power of showing that what they have modeled here has some actual real world value.