Quantum Man: Richard Feynman

There was an exceptional lecture about Richard Feynman given at CERN a few days ago that was shared by a colleague and wanted to repost here.

From the CERN document server: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1386327

Lawrence Krauss gives a very nice overview of some of the things that I think made Feynmann exceptional both in his physics and in being a human in a field of giants (physics).

Like most people coming up after this exceptional man I too was influenced by his writings and his legend and as I make the transition from graduate student to Post-doc I can only hope to have my path as rich as Feynman's was!

DZero Doesn't see the same excess as CDF!

So the physics world is all a buzz with the reported excess in the W+2 Jet channel reported by CDF.

The graph here shows the most recent result released by CDF in the W+ 2 Jet channel for 7.3 fb-1 and shows a clear (and growing) excess in the invariant mass range around 150 GeV. The community has been buzzing with speculation and ideas as to what this phenomenon could be. From mis-modeling to Technicolor (a new model of physics) the result isn't really clear. But something seems to be really there.

The really exciting thing is that CDF's sister experiment at the Tevatron, DZero, has publicly released their findings in the same channel today and they don't seem to see anything. (See the public release by Fermilab here).

So what does it all mean? Well clearly something is happening here. The CDF result has been checked and double checked from within the collaboration (that is really the only way such a result could ever see the light of day) and now you have an independent check by another experiment on the same data and they don't see anything! The fury of discussion as to whether DZero and CDF are doing identical things will launch as well as much debate as to what it means and how to proceed.

To me this is where physics is really interesting! Methods of analysis and meaning and understanding will be hotly debated. DZero will be giving a seminar talk today at 4pm and is webcasted here.

For sure what is to come will be what makes science great. Checks, cross-checks, argument, and ultimately (and probably after many sleepless nights and hurt ego's) agreement to what causes such deviations.

Get Excited!

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!

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.

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.

Recontres de Morinond

I thought I would share a good link to find all the current talks being given in the particle physics world from the conference Recontres de Moriond.

The link to the talks is here

As said on the website the purpose of this conference is:

The purpose of the Rencontres de Moriond is to discuss recent findings and new ideas in physics in a pleasant, relaxed and convivial atmosphere. The meeting is intended to promote fruitful collaboration between various communities and institutes by bringing together a small number of scientists in inspiring surroundings.

Of course being in the Italian alps helps the relaxing and convivial atmosphere, I am sure. 

While I'm not personally giving any talks at this conference many people I know are and you can expect some big name talks coming from the Tevatron. 

Budget Problems facing the U.S.

Budget Problems facing the U.S.

If it seems that the news lately has been grim coming out of the U.S…it is because it is. In a talk yesterday by the director of Fermilab Pier Oddone laid out some very bleak circumstances for the coming year that Fermilab and many scientific ventures face.
See Pier’s talk here (http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/Lectures/AllHands/presentations/110215AllHands.pptx)
The short of it is the budget put forward by the Republican congress would slash domestic spending in view of the fact that the U.S would see 1.5 trillion dollar deficit in Fiscal Year 2011. Now that being said, these proposals actually only effect < 20% of the total budget and definitely don’t fix the total problem.

However, the impact would be very real! Since the U.S government has be acting on a continuing resolution (basically saying keep 2010 spending and appropriations since Congress didn’t pass a new budget), getting a 20% cut now actually amounts to a 40% cut for the rest of the year! This fact has DIRE impact on Fermilab

As Pier said in his talk

Impossible to accommodate such cuts without major disruptions:

1) Stop operation of all accelerators immediately

2) Slow down projects to barely keep-alive levels

3) Prepare layoffs of 20% of the staff or 400 employees

4) Furlough staff for roughly two of the remaining six months

This coming on the heels of the announcement that there would be no extension to the running of the Tevatron in 2011 means that things would slow down in the US High Energy Physics area very quickly with no clear signs of when they will pick up again.

Frankly, for a government that is purporting not wanting to miss “their sputnik moment” the idea of drastically cutting funding to fundamental research seems just plain stupid! Innovation does not happen in a climate where people are worried if the lab they work at is going to be there tomorrow…nor will “job creation” and “a balanced budget” happen by cutting spending to a small fraction of the overall budget that actually generates jobs and opportunities in the United States. The best quote I’ve heard to describe this sort of approach to budgetary problem solving was in an article in the Washington Post (linked here)

“Making the government lean by cutting the most defensible (and productive) federal spending is akin to making an overweight aircraft fly by removing the engine!”

So what do we do? Write your congressman/congresswomen and tell them that gutting science is no way to the future! There are instructions on the webpage of how to get this letter written. I encourage all readers to write to help save such great scientific programs such as Fermilab!

http://www.congressweb.com/

cweb2/index.cfm/siteid/

APSPA/action/TakeAction.Contact

/lettergroupid/90

Tevatron to Shutdown!

As was announced today by the director of Fermilab (see here) there will be no extension to the running of the Tevatron beyond 2011.
As stated:

"The present budgetary climate did not permit DOE to secure the additional funds needed to run the Tevatron for three more years as recommended by the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel."
This marks a very sad day for me to hear that the experiment I am working on and have grown to love will be ending after this year.
It is especially hard to hear considering that this choice is being made (at least publicly) by budgetary considerations and not by the recommendation of the science that drives field.
I'll probably have more to say on this in the coming days...but for now I have a PhD to finish and thought it would be worth while to post briefly on this.

See more related articles here:
From the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/life-and-physics/2011/jan/10/1
From Chicago Buisness: http://beaconnews.suntimes.com/news/3242019-418/tevatron-fermilab-funding-accelerator-energy.html

Super-B Accelerator Moves forward (does the US move back?)

As described in the following press release (see here). The Italian government has confirmed that they will be moving forward on the construction of the high intensity electron/positron collider known as SuperB.

Expected to produce 1000's of B-Mesons and Tau particles every second this will allow physicists to study the very rare decays of these B mesons as well as study CP violation to a much higher degree of accuracy than previously possible.

The U.S. meanwhile is still holding in the background awaiting word if we will even have a say in the future of particle physics. With the awaiting word of the Tevatron extended run (see P5 report recommending the extension of the Tevatron here) and knowing that many of the components for the SuperB will come from the short lived PEP-II experiment at SLAC just reinforces that while the rest of the world is looking forward to the future of science the US is increasingly looking like it playing a "wait and see" game.

At least this physicists may end up having to look for jobs in Europe and add to the potential brain drain (all though in my case a very small drain) facing the US.

LHC sees Lead-Lead Collisions

As many of you know the Large Hadron Collider has switched from colliding proton on proton to using Lead Ions on Lead Ions.

 

A great article from the guardian (found here) describes the type of physics that can be probed from colliding heavy ions at high energy that is often hard to tease out of collisions like proton/proton or proton/anti-proton like the what is done at the LHC and the Tevatron respectively.

This is another really big landmark for the LHC and the next era of particle physics. I can't wait to see what results come from Alice and LHCb with these collisions.

See live event collisions from the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) webpage here

http://cms.web.cern.ch/cms/

CMS Luminostiy Online

So for all of you who are from outside of particle physics a little explanation is in order.

When we want to know how much data we are recording in our particle physics experiments we often talk about this in terms of "Luminosity" which has strange units of inverse area and time.
Without giving too much of an explanation this is basically a measure of how many collisions we are having and how much data we are recording.

The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment currently operating at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN has posted their Luminosity plots online here:

http://cms-service-lumi.web.cern.ch/cms-service-lumi/overview.php

So you can actually see as the improvements in the accelerator and the operation of the detector improve the recorded luminosity and delivered luminosity (recorded being what the detector captures and delivered being what the accelerator pumps through the experiment) increase at nearly a exponential rate!

Not to brag too much but the same plots of the Tevatron at Fermilab can be found here:

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/now/tevlum.html

All I'm saying is our inital Luminosity at the start of a store (when the particles start colliding) is pretty impressive when compared to all the data the LHC has taken so far...but they will catch up!

2010 Hadron Collider Physics Summer School (Live and Streaming)

The fifth annual CERN / Fermilab Hadron Physics summer school is currently going on right now at Fermilab in the Wilson Hall High Rise.

This annual summer school is a great opportunity for young physicists to listen to lectures about the field of high energy physics both experimental and theory. Furthermore, these  lectures are designed to give someone with limited experimental knowledge some real understanding of how these accelerators, detectors, and analysis computing take place in the real world of particle physics

This summer series is going on August 17th - August 20th and is available streaming online:
http://www-visualmedia.fnal.gov/live/2010HCPSS_Live.htm

As well as the slides from the various speakers are publicly available here:
http://indico.fnal.gov/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=3532

So even if you aren't able to be at Fermilab for these lectures you can still enjoy them. Much thanks to the Fermilab visual media services!

D0 sees new physics!!!

So some big news from Fermilab was just recently released. (See press release here). The interesting thing here is that the result gives an indication of why we observe an abundance of matter over anti-matter in the universe. In one interpretation (and this might be a bit of an over-reach) this could be experimental evidence for physics that isn't explained in our current best theory of particle physics (The Standard Model) and help explain the existence of everything we observe in the universe!

With such big claims I think this result deserves a little bit more of an explanation. So one of the big mysteries in particle physics is why do we observe so much matter in the universe (basically everything we can see with our telescopes) and observe so little anti-matter IF the universe started with the Big Bang in which the universe was created with a sea of matter and anti-matter and was governed by the laws of particle physics in the early universe.
Basically, up till these very new results (with the exception of the B_s results discovered at Fermilab) there was no experimental evidence that matter and anti-matter behaved differently in any way significant enough to account for the HUGE difference in the abundance of matter over anti-matter that we see in the universe. However, this new result is a big clue along that path showing a very significant difference between the symmetric theory known as the Standard Model and what we observe experimentally.
Now the D0 experiment had to use some really sophisticated techniques to do this experiment and using aspects of their experiment that CDF (its sister experiment at the Tevatron and my home) is not capable of doing.
So what does this mean...could mean a lot of different things. But I'm a big fan of making a measurement and letting it speak for itself. So here is what we can say, this is the first statistically significant evidence that the Standard Model gets the CP violation wrong, Fermilab/D0 were the first to get there, and there is evidence that our Standard Model isn't the whole story and we need to keep looking because the new physics we have been searching for to explain the universe is right around the corner!

Great Physics Article

I found this really great article on Physics.org titled


THE TOP 4 BONKERS THINGS ABOUT THE UNIVERSE

It is a really fun read and raises an interesting question about our universe and the possible histories.

Basically, using some of the ideas of the inflationary model of the Big Bang and certain interpretations of Quantum Mechanics the article posits what I think could be called a "many worlds" approach to the understanding of our universe and history.

Great find for today!

Some follow-up reading about the multi-verse

Elvis is alive and kicking... in a parallel universe 

Parallel worlds

 

Radiolab...Science you can listen too

So in my attempts to finish a PhD, become an expert rock climber, have a wedding, and conduct life I rarely get as much time to follow all the interesting aspects of science and modern research that I would like to.

However thanks to my local National Public Radio (NPR) station I was exposed to this wonderful show out of New York called RadioLab

There smart and interesting shows often discuss ongoing and current science issues into many of the fascinating questions I think we all ask.

Now certainly this doesn't count as any of the hard, or maybe not even as the important science. But if you are looking for a science show that broadcasts many of its clips online for FREE and is really entertaining, this is it!

They recently did a show on death and laughter that I thought were really great and encourage everyone to listen to.