Monday, October 31, 2011

Justin Hall-Tipping: Freeing energy from the grid




The grid of tomorrow is no grid, and energy, clean efficient energy, will one day be free. If you do this, you get the last puzzle piece, which is water. Each of us, every day, need just eight glasses of this, because we're human. When we run out of water, as we are in some parts of the world and soon to be in other parts of the world, we're going to have to get this from the sea, and that's going to require us to build desalination plants. 19 trillion dollars is what we're going to have to spend. These also require tremendous amounts of energy. In fact, it's going to require twice the world's supply of oil to run the pumps to generate the water. We're simply not going to do that. But in a world where energy is freed and transmittable easily and cheaply, we can take any water wherever we are and turn it into whatever we need.

VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization

VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization | Video on TED.com

Gran Sasso and Fermilab

Gran Sasso

***
deconstruction: soudan mural
The Soudan mural is next to the 6000-ton MINOS detector. Mural artists: Joseph Giannetti, Leila Giannetti, Mick Pulsifer. Funded by a grant from the University of Minnesota. (Credit: Fermilab Visual Media Services)
***
Fermilab experiment weighs in on neutrino mystery
Scientists of the MINOS experiment at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today (June 24) the results from a search for a rare phenomenon, the transformation of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos. The result is consistent with and significantly constrains a measurement reported 10 days ago by the Japanese T2K experiment, which announced an indication of this type of transformation.

The results of these two experiments could have implications for our understanding of the role that neutrinos may have played in the evolution of the universe. If muon neutrinos transform into electron neutrinos, neutrinos could be the reason that the big bang produced more matter than antimatter, leading to the universe as it exists today.

The Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) at Fermilab recorded a total of 62 electron neutrino-like events. If muon neutrinos do not transform into electron neutrinos, then MINOS should have seen only 49 events. The experiment should have seen 71 events if neutrinos transform as often as suggested by recent results from the Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) experiment in Japan. The two experiments use different methods and analysis techniques to look for this rare transformation.
To measure the transformation of muon neutrinos into other neutrinos, the MINOS experiment sends a muon neutrino beam 450 miles (735 kilometers) through the earth from the Main Injector accelerator at Fermilab to a 5,000-ton neutrino detector, located half a mile underground in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in northern Minnesota. The experiment uses two almost identical detectors: the detector at Fermilab is used to check the purity of the muon neutrino beam, and the detector at Soudan looks for electron and muon neutrinos. The neutrinos’ trip from Fermilab to Soudan takes about one four hundredths of a second, giving the neutrinos enough time to change their identities.

For more than a decade, scientists have seen evidence that the three known types of neutrinos can morph into each other. Experiments have found that muon neutrinos disappear, with some of the best measurements provided by the MINOS experiment. Scientists think that a large fraction of these muon neutrinos transform into tau neutrinos, which so far have been very hard to detect, and they suspect that a tiny fraction transform into electron neutrinos.

The observation of electron neutrino-like events in the detector in Soudan allows MINOS scientists to extract information about a quantity called sin213 (pronounced sine squared two theta one three). If muon neutrinos don’t transform into electron neutrinos, this quantity is zero. The range allowed by the latest MINOS measurement overlaps with but is narrower than the T2K range. MINOS constrains this quantity to a range between 0 and 0.12, improving on results it obtained with smaller data sets in 2009 and 2010. The T2K range for sin213 is between 0.03 and 0.28.
“MINOS is expected to be more sensitive to the transformation with the amount of data that both experiments have,” said Fermilab physicist Robert Plunkett, co-spokesperson for the MINOS experiment. “It seems that nature has chosen a value for sin213 that likely is in the lower part of the T2K allowed range. More work and more data are really needed to confirm both these measurements.”
The MINOS measurement is the latest step in a worldwide effort to learn more about neutrinos. MINOS will continue to collect data until February 2012. The T2K experiment was interrupted in March when the severe earth quake in Japan damaged the muon neutrino source for T2K. Scientists expect to resume operations of the experiment at the end of the year. Three nuclear-reactor based neutrino experiments, which use different techniques to measure sin213, are in the process of starting up.
“Science usually proceeds in small steps rather than sudden, big discoveries, and this certainly has been true for neutrino research,” said Jenny Thomas from University College London, co-spokesperson for the MINOS experiment. “If the transformation from muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos occurs at a large enough rate, future experiments should find out whether nature has given us two light neutrinos and one heavy neutrino, or vice versa. This is really the next big thing in neutrino physics.”
The MINOS experiment involves more than 140 scientists, engineers, technical specialists and students from 30 institutions, including universities and national laboratories, in five countries: Brazil, Greece, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Funding comes from: the Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation in the U.S., the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the U.K; the University of Minnesota in the U.S.; the University of Athens in Greece; and Brazil's Foundation for Research Support of the State of São Paulo (FAPESP) and National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

Fermilab is a national laboratory supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy, operated under contract by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC.
For more information about MINOS and related experiments, visit the Fermilab neutrino website: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/experiments/intensity/

See: 

Intensity Frontier


See Also: The Reference Frame: CMS: a very large excess of diphotons

Thursday, October 27, 2011

TRIUMF Dragon

ISAC and DRAGON, the Detector of Recoils And Gammas Of Nuclear reactions

TRIUMF has long been addressing big questions about the origins of matter in our universe by studying the interactions among elementary particles or essential nuclei.  The DRAGON experiment at TRIUMF is an apparatus designed to measure the rates of nuclear reactions that are important in astrophysics and the formation of the chemical elements. The big question we are asking is, "Where do the elements around us come from?" and "What happens inside a supernova and what does it produce?"  One new experiments at TRIUMF, S1227, recently looked at a process that creates lithium and neutrinos within ancient stars. See: A New Look Inside Ancient Stars

ICECUBE Neutrinos

Another Big thank you to ICECUBE Blog.


The IceCube project at the South Pole needed a new server cluster to reconstruct raw data, so it selected Dell PowerEdge servers for the HPC solution.



The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has just completed construction in Antarctica as of January 2011, and will help scientists search for elusive neutrinos that can help us map out the universe in new and exciting ways. I traveled to the South Pole in November and December 2009 to participate in this project, and reported back to classrooms across the US. This stop-motion animated video is an introduction to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, answering basic questions such as: What is a neutrino? how can we detect them? How does IceCube work? See: Dell Powers IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antartica

XKCD Significant-Speed of Light Issue?

You got to love it when correlations can be made, and a thank you to the ICECUBE Blog
If the histograms and data are exactly right, the paper quotes a one-in-ten-thousand (0.0001) chance that this bump is a fluke. That's pretty small; although bear in mind that lots of distributions like this get plotted. If you plot 100 different distributions, the chances become about one in a hundred (0.01) that you'll see something odd in one of them. The Tevatron goes bump

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/significant.png

ICECUBE Blogging Research Material and more

In regards to Cherenkov Light

Thinking outside the box See: A physicist inthe cancer lab

Ackerman became interested in physics in middle school, reading popular science books about quantum mechanics and string theory. As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she traveled to CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, to work on one of the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle collider in the world. Then she spent a summer at SLAC working on BaBar, an experiment investigating the universe’s puzzling shortage of antimatter, before starting her graduate studies there in 2007.

 Linking Experiments(Majorana, EXO); How do stars create the heavy elements? (DIANA); What role did neutrinos play in the evolution of the universe? (LBNE). In addition, scientists propose to build a generic underground facility (FAARM) ...

 Dialogos of Eide: Neutrinoless Double Beta DecayCOBRA · CUORICINO and CUORE · EXO · GERDA · MAJORANA · MOON · NEMO-3 and SuperNEMO · SNO+. See Also:Direct Dark Matter Detection.

Also From my research:

  1. Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay
  2. A first look at the Earth interior from the Gran Sasso underground laboratory
  3. Mysterious Behavior of Neutrinos sent Straight through the Earth
    *** 
     
ICECUBE Blog put up some links that I wanted to go through to see what is happening there. Their links provided at bottom of blog post here. Each link of theirs I have provided additional information in concert while I explore above.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

The Eternally Existing, Self-Reproducing, Frequently Puzzling Inflationary Universe

The Eternally Existing, Self-Reproducing, Frequently Puzzling Inflationary Universe

Since I cannot comment at Sean's Blog either,  I might as well comment here too:)

27.   Moshe Says:
Igor, I am not sure I understand. We have an initial value problem, so today’s observations are determined once you specify an initial state at some time in the distant past. If you specify the time to be the beginning of the big bang evolution, with the correct but very contrived initial state (nearly homogeneous with just the right kind of fluctuations) then you get no conflict with observation. By contruction, same applies to inflation, because it reproduces that initial state and all subsequent evolution. The only point of inflation is to make that initial state the outcome of prior evolution. By construction all current observations will then be identical, but the initial state will be more natural and less contrived. As I understand Sean’s statement, quantifying this intuitive notion of naturalness is tricky, and it is not always clear inflation indeed comes ahead. I hope I am not mangling things…
And, for the record, in my mind the notion of “naturalness” is one instance of “algorithmic compression”, which is the whole point of seeking a scientific explanation. Without invoking such criteria, by definition (for example) the particle data group review book would be always the best “theory” of particle physics, and you’d never need to learn about gauge theories and spontaneous symmetry breaking and all that stuff.

See Also:

Why Penrose is one of many crackpots when it comes to inflation

Saturday, October 22, 2011

CMS Physics Results

Link on Title.

  • All CMS public results can be found in CDS , and are categorized by subject (group) in this page.
  • Publications and preprints on collision data, ordered by time, are available at this link.
  • Publications on cosmic-ray data can be found here; the paper on muon charge ratio is available here .
  • The complete list of publications is here.
  • Preliminary results on collision data at 0.9, 2.36 and 7 TeV are described in Physics Analysis Summaries; Monte Carlo studies can be found here.
  • Public performance plots are shown in Detector Performance Summaries.

See Also:CMS Physics Analysis Summaries

Thursday, October 20, 2011

What is a Higgs Boson? Lepton fizz?



Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln describes the nature of the Higgs boson. Several large experimental groups are hot on the trail of this elusive subatomic particle which is thought to explain the origins of particle mass

See:Why does anything have substance? Hunting the Higgs boson

*** 
 
A search for excited leptons is carried out with the CMS detector at the LHC, using
36 pb��1 of pp collision data recorded at ps = 7 TeV. The search is performed for associated
production of a lepton and an oppositely charged excited lepton pp ! `` ,
followed by the decay ` ! `g, resulting in the ``g final state, where ` = e, m. No
excess of events above the standard model expectation is observed. Interpreting the
findings in the context of ` production through four-fermion contact interactions and
subsequent decay via electroweak processes, first upper limits are reported for ` production
at this collision energy. The exclusion region in the compositeness scale L and
excited lepton mass M` parameter space is extended beyond previously established
limits. For L = M` , excited lepton masses are excluded below 1070 GeV/c2 for e
and 1090 GeV/c2 for m at the 95% confidence level.
See Also : Lepton fizz


Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Aspera

Home Site Located in Title


A European Network For Astroparticle Physics in Europe

ASPERA is a network of national government agencies responsible for coordinating and funding national research efforts in Astroparticle Physics



***

See Also: LAGUNA large neutrino observatory design moves forward

The Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics (COUPP)

The Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics (COUPP) collaboration looks for bubbles in chambers filled with a compound containing carbon, fluorine and iodine. The fluid is superheated beyond the boiling point but has no rough surface to form bubbles. When a specific type of particle interacts in the chamber, it can deposit enough energy to boil the fluid and make a bubble. Electrons do not produce bubbles, while a dark matter particle interacting with a nucleus can – making this the key for dark matter detection. See:Bubble chamber gets more precise in dark matter search

Bold added for emphasis.

See Also: Bubble chamber gets more precise in dark matter search

***

The accelerating universe is the observation that the universe appears to be expanding at an increasing rate, which in formal terms means that the cosmic scale factor a(t) has a positive second derivative,[1] implying that the velocity at which a given galaxy is receding from us should be continually increasing over time[2] (here the recession velocity is the same one that appears in Hubble's law; defining 'velocity' in cosmology is somewhat subtle, see Comoving distance#Uses of the proper distance for a discussion). In 1998, observations of type Ia supernovae suggested that the expansion of the universe has been accelerating[3][4] since around redshift of z~0.5.[5] The 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics were both awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt, and Adam G. Riess for the 1998 discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae.[6][7]

***

In cosmology, baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) refers to an overdensity or clustering of baryonic matter at certain length scales due to acoustic waves which propagated in the early universe.[1] In the same way that supernova experiments provide a "standard candle" for astronomical observations,[2] BAO matter clustering provides a "standard ruler" for length scale in cosmology.[1] The length of this standard ruler (~150 Mpc in today's universe[3]) can be measured by looking at the large scale structure of matter using astronomical surveys.[3] BAO measurements help cosmologists understand more about the nature of dark energy (the acceleration of the universe) by constraining cosmological parameters.[1]
***

SDSS III: 2008-2014

In mid-2008, SDSS-III was started. It comprises four separate surveys, each conducted on the same 2.5m telescope: [9][10]

Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS)

The SDSS-III's Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) will map the spatial distribution of luminous red galaxies (LRGs) and quasars to detect the characteristic scale imprinted by baryon acoustic oscillations in the early universe. Sound waves that propagate in the early universe, like spreading ripples in a pond, imprint a characteristic scale on the positions of galaxies relative to each other [12] .

***
See Also:

        Saturday, October 15, 2011

        Particles that can hit the Earth's atmosphere at high speeds.


        Source: University of Chicago Library

        Enrico Fermi's notebook of December 1948 contains four pages that represent the genesis of his theory of cosmic rays, particles that can hit the Earth's atmosphere at high speeds. In these pages, he worked out the acceleration of cosmic rays due to a series of collisions with magnetic clouds moving through the universe, a process later named Fermi acceleration.SEE:Archive: Logbook

        ***


        Wednesday, October 12, 2011

        Seeing Underlying Structures

         There is  gap between,  "Proton Collision ->Decay to Muons and Muon Neutrinos ->Tau Neutrino ->[gap] tau lepton may travel some tens of microns before decaying back into neutrino and charged tracks." Use the case of Relativistic Muons?


         An analysis of four Fermi-detected gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) is given that sets upper limits on the energy dependence of the speed and dispersion of light across the universe. The analysis focuses on photons recorded above 1 GeV for Fermi detected GRB 080916C, GRB 090510A, GRB090902B, and GRB 090926A. Upper limits on time scales for statistically significant bunching of photon arrival times were found and cataloged. In particular, the most stringent limit was found for GRB 090510A at redshift z & 0.897 for which t < 0.00136 sec, a limit driven by three separate photon bunchings. These photons occurred among the first seven super-GeV photons recorded for GRB 090510A and contain one pair with an energy difference of E & 23.5 GeV. The next most limiting burst was GRB 090902B at a redshift of z & 1.822 for which t < 0.161, a limit driven by several groups of photons, one pair of which had an energy difference E & 1.56 GeV. Resulting limits on the differential speed of light and Lorentz invariance were found for all of these GRBs independently. The strongest limit was for GRB 090510A with c/c < 6.09 x 10−21. Given generic dispersion relations across the universe where the time delay is proportional to the photon energy to the first or second power, the most stringent limits on the dispersion strengths were k1 < 1.38 x 10−5 sec Gpc−1 GeV−1 and k2 < 3.04 x 10−7 sec Gpc−1 GeV−2 respectively. Such upper limits result in upper bounds on dispersive effects created, for example, by dark energy, dark matter or the spacetime foam of quantum gravity. Relating these dispersion constraints to loop quantum gravity
        energy scales specifically results in limits of M1c2 > 7.43 x 1021 GeV and M2c2 > 7.13 x 1011 GeV respectively. See: Limiting properties of light and the universe with high energy photons from Fermi-detected Gamma Ray Bursts


        The point here is that Energetic disposition of flight time and Fermi Calorimetry result point toward GRB emission and directly determination of GRB emission allocates potential of underlying structure W and the electron-neutrino fields?

        Fig. 3: An electron, as it travels, may become a more complex combination of disturbances in two or more fields. It occasionally is a mixture of disturbances in the photon and electron fields; more rarely it is a disturbance in the W and the electron-neutrino fields. See: Another Speed Bump for Superluminal Neutrinos Posted on October 11, 2011 at, "Of Particular Significance"
        ***
        What I find interesting is that Tamburini and Laveder do not stop at discussing the theoretical interpretation of the alleged superluminal motion, but put their hypothesis to the test by comparing known measurements of neutrino velocity on a graph, where the imaginary mass is computed from the momentum of neutrinos and the distance traveled in a dense medium. The data show a very linear behaviour, which may constitute an explanation of the Opera effect: See: Tamburini: Neutrinos Are Majorana Particles, Relativity Is OK


        See Also:

        Sunday, October 09, 2011

        The World as a Hologram

        UC Berkeley's Raphael Bousso presents a friendly introduction to the ideas behind the holographic principle, which may be very important in the hunt for a theory of quantum gravity. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Summer Lecture Series" [3/2006] [Science] [Show ID: 11140]

        Science vs. Spirituality: Deepak Chopra And Leonard Mlodinow Discuss 'War Of The Worldviews'

        Article linked in Title.



        The debate between science and spirituality is framed as a knock down fight for truth with winner take all. But does it have to be that way? Deepak Chopra is a physician and one of the most highly regarded spiritual teachers in the world; and Leonard Mlodinow teaches at Cal Tech and co-authored, along with Stephen Hawking, "The Grand Design." Chopra and Mlodinow wrote "War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality" to help start an intelligent and civil conversation about this very hot subject.

        In this hour long video, Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow debate science and spirituality moderated by Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, Senior Religion Editor for The Huffington Post. This conversation was streamed live on Oct. 4, 2011 on the date of the publication of "War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality" by Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow.

        ***

        Lee Smolin: "Here is a metaphor due to Eric Weinstein that I would have put in the book had I heard it before. Let us take a different twist on the landscape of theories and consider the landscape of possible ideas about post standard model or quantum gravity physics that have been proposed. Height is proportional to the number of things the theory gets right. Since we don’t have a convincing case for the right theory yet, that is a high peak somewhere off in the distance. The existing approaches are hills of various heights that may or may not be connected, across some ridges and high valleys to the real peak. We assume the landscape is covered by fog so we can’t see where the real peak is, we can only feel around and detect slopes and local maxima.

        See:

        Saturday, October 08, 2011

        Subtly Shaded Map of Moon Reveals Titanium Treasure Troves

        A map of the Moon combining observations in visible and ultraviolet wavelengths shows a treasure trove of areas rich in Titanium ores. Not only is Titanium a valuable mineral, it is key to helping scientists unravel the mysteries of the Moon’s interior.  Mark Robinson and Brett Denevi will be presenting the results from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission today at the joint meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences. >EPSC-DPS JOINT MEETING 2011 PRESS NOTICE
        ISSUED 13:15 CEST ON FRIDAY 7TH OCTOBER
        Ref. PN: EPSC11/14
         

        It seems this Europlanet is a little bit behind the times. Check label below on Plato's Nightlight Mining Company. What more can I say?

        See Also: LROC “Treasure Map” Reveals Titanium Deposits

        Friday, October 07, 2011

        Cohen-Glashow Argument

        Bee:And for all I know you need a charge for Cherenkov radiation and neutrinos don't have one.



        Fig. 1: Cerenkov radiation involves the nearly continuous emission of photons by a charged particle moving faster than the speed of light in its vicinity. The charged particle gradually radiates away its energy. Cohen-Glashow emission involves the occasional creation, near a speeding neutrino, of an electron-positron pair, in which the neutrino loses a large fraction of its energy in one step.


        But these details almost don’t matter, because Cohen and Glashow then put another chunk of powerful evidence on the table. They point out that neutrinos have been observed, at two other experiments, SuperKamiokande and IceCube, 100 to 1000 times more energetic than the neutrinos in OPERA’s beam. These neutrinos come out of the earth having traveled many hundreds or thousands of kilometers across interior of the planet. The fact that these neutrinos did not lose most of their energy while traveling all that distance implies that they, too, did not undergo CG emission. In short, they must have traveled very close to, and conservatively no more than about fifteen parts per billion faster than, the speed of light in empty space. (The limit from IceCube data may be as good as ten parts per trillion!)See: Is the OPERA Speedy Neutrino Experiment Self-Contradictory?

        Thursday, October 06, 2011

        Geometry Leads us to the Truth?

        "The end he (the artist) strives for is something else than a perfectly executed print. His aim is to depict dreams, ideas, or problems in such a way that other people can observe and consider them." - M.C. Escher




        I too have always been interested at the idea of what we can see deeper then what we observe on the surface. As if an abstraction in the geometry may be leading when considering Polytopes and allotrope s or even Penrose Tilings as to the Truth?:)


        A remarkable mosaic of atoms

        In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves. However, the configuration found in quasicrystals was considered impossible, and Dan Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 has fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter. See: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 Dan Shechtman
        I do not think one can ever imagine what goes through my mind and I guess that's part of my artistic journey is to better learn how to describe what I am seeing. It goes back some time as to what I learn about myself and how some of these geometers see. I did not ever feel apart from them as I tried to look deeper into reality and see what the basis is and how  we might describe that.

        You must also know I now sport an interesting tattoo that I will share shortly. Maybe even consider it as a line break, and as a pointer. You'll see why when I upload picture. So,  that has been my thing when I look at all this science and those espouse the teaching of,  that I tried to find my place in it. I mean I could be so wrong in a long of things.....but isn't that part of the evolution of being?  Learning about those mistakes and dealing with the responsibility of finding that truth within self?

        If the heart was free from the impurities of sin, and therefore lighter than the feather, then the dead person could enter the eternal afterlife.

        My second tattoo will be as in the picture showing below on this blog site demonstrating and seen above is an ancient idea about "our heart" in relation to "the truth."  How we weight that against one another and how the choices we make will have us asking whether we acted in accordance with that truth. That is "the final judgement" and if this is understood then we can access whether or not we have much more to learn. I know that setting right past mistakes is not an easy thing but if you at least start then that is part of the success of not of having to repeat them. Maybe repeat many times until you finally actually get it.

        Well then,how does one simplify that picture of such Judgement in the Hall of Ma'at as to know that this message is alive and well in today's world and just as valid? How well will the tattooist portray this design? I'll have to give it to her  so she has some time to look at it and decipher.:)

         See Also:

        Wednesday, October 05, 2011

        Proton Collision ->Decay to Muons and Muon Neutrinos ->Tau Neutrino ->

        .....tau lepton may travel some tens of microns before decaying back into neutrino and charged tracks




         Before I comment on the result, let me give you a little background on the whole thing. Opera is a very innovative concept in neutrino detection. Its aim is to detect tau neutrino appearance in a beam of muon neutrinos. A Six-Sigma Signal Of Superluminal Neutrinos From Opera!

        The OPERA result is based on the observation of over 15000 neutrino events measured at Gran Sasso, and appears to indicate that the neutrinos travel at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light, nature’s cosmic speed limit. Given the potential far-reaching consequences of such a result, independent measurements are needed before the effect can either be refuted or firmly established. This is why the OPERA collaboration has decided to open the result to broader scrutiny. The collaboration’s result is available on the preprint server arxiv.orghttp://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897.

        In order to perform this study, the OPERA Collaboration teamed up with experts in metrology from CERN and other institutions to perform a series of high precision measurements of the distance between the source and the detector, and of the neutrinos’ time of flight. The distance between the origin of the neutrino beam and OPERA was measured with an uncertainty of 20 cm over the 730 km travel path. The neutrinos’ time of flight was determined with an accuracy of less than 10 nanoseconds by using sophisticated instruments including advanced GPS systems and atomic clocks. The time response of all elements of the CNGS beam line and of the OPERA detector has also been measured with great precision.

        ***

        By classifying the neutrino interactions according to the type of neutrino involved (electron-neutrino or muon-neutrino) and counting their relative numbers as a function of the distance from their creation point, we conclude that the muon-neutrinos are "oscillating." See: STATEMENT: EVIDENCE FOR MASSIVE NEUTRINOS FOUND by Dave Casper

         ***
        We present an analysis of atmospheric neutrino data from a 33.0 kiloton-year (535-day)exposure of the Super-Kamiokande detector. The data exhibit a zenith angle dependent de ficit of muon neutrinos which is inconsistent with expectations based on calculations of the atmospheric neutrino flux. Experimental biases and uncertainties in the prediction of neutrino fluxes and cross sections are unable to explain our observation. . Evidence for oscillation of atmospheric neutrinos



        See:

        Tuesday, October 04, 2011

        Cherenkov radiation


        Taking the formalisms of electromagnetic radiation and supposing a tachyon had an electric charge—as there is no reason to suppose a priori that tachyons must be either neutral or charged—then a charged tachyon must lose energy as Cherenkov radiation[15]—just as ordinary charged particles do when they exceed the local speed of light in a medium. A charged tachyon traveling in a vacuum therefore undergoes a constant proper time acceleration and, by necessity, its worldline forms a hyperbola in space-time. However, as we have seen, reducing a tachyon's energy increases its speed, so that the single hyperbola formed is of two oppositely charged tachyons with opposite momenta (same magnitude, opposite sign) which annihilate each other when they simultaneously reach infinite speed at the same place in space. (At infinite speed the two tachyons have no energy each and finite momentum of opposite direction, so no conservation laws are violated in their mutual annihilation. The time of annihilation is frame dependent.) Even an electrically neutral tachyon would be expected to lose energy via gravitational Cherenkov radiation, because it has a gravitational mass, and therefore increase in speed as it travels, as described above. See: Tachyon
         ***
        An early set of experiments with a facility called the solar neutrino telescope, measured the rate of neutrino emission from the sun at only one third of the expected flux. Often referred to as the Solar Neutrino Problem, this deficiency of neutrinos has been difficult to explain. Recent results from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory suggest that a fraction of the electron neutrinos produced by the sun are transformed into muon neutrinos on the way to the earth. The observations at Sudbury are consistent with the solar models of neutrino flux assuming that this "neutrino oscillation" is responsible for observation of neutrinos other than electron neutrinos. See: Detection of Neutrinos

        P.I. Chats: Faster-than-light neutrinos?

        Measurements by GPS confirm that the neutrinos identified by the Super-Kamiokande detector were indeed produced on the east coast of Japan. The physicists therefore estimate that the results obtained point to a 99.3% probability that electron neutrino appearance was detected.Neutrino Oscillations Caught in the Act



        The Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS) is one of four INFN national laboratories.




        PERIMETER INSTITUTE RECORDED SEMINAR ARCHIVE



        PIRSA:11090135  ( Flash Presentation , MP3 , PDF ) Which Format?
        P.I. Chats: Faster-than-light neutrinos?
        Abstract: Can neutrinos really travel faster than light? Recently released experimental data from CERN suggests that they can. Join host Dr. Richard Epp and a panel of Perimeter Institute scientists in a live webinar to discuss this unexpected and puzzling experimental result, and some theoretical questions it might raise.
        Date: 28/09/2011 - 12:15 pm
        Thanks Phil 

        ***



        Using the NuMI beam to search for electron neutrino appearance.

        The NOνA Experiment (Fermilab E929) will construct a detector optimized for electron neutrino detection in the existing NuMI neutrino beam. The primary goal of the experiment is to search for evidence of muon to electron neutrino oscillations. This oscillation, if it occurs, holds the key to many of the unanswered questions in neutrino oscillation physics. In addition to providing a measurement of the last unknown mixing angle, θ13, this oscillation channel opens the possibility of seeing matter/anti-matter asymmetries in neutrinos and determination of the ordering of the neutrino mass states.See:The NOνA Experiment at Fermilab (E929)

        ***

        Image from a neutrino detection experiment. (Credit: Image courtesy of Southern Methodist University)

        Hunting Oscillation of Muon to Electron: Neutrino Data to Flow in 2010; NOvA Scientists Tune Design


        Bee:And for all I know you need a charge for Cherenkov radiation and neutrinos don't have one.

        Monday, October 03, 2011

        Latest News At Cern


         What's new @CERN ? a new video programme launched on webcast.cern.ch , every first Monday of the Month. For the first one, the themes are the results of the LHC experiments about Higgs boson, standard model and supersymmetry, and also neutrinos of OPERA experiment faster than the speed of light.


        Thanks Lubos



         STANDARD MODEL OF PARTICLE PHYSICS:

        http://www.youtube.com/user/Best0fScience#g/c/4A8C50311C9F7369

        1) First Second Of The Universe:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HXPYO5YFG0
        2) Force And Matter:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5QXZ0__8VU
        3) Quarks:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxQwkdu9WbE
        4) Gluons:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYPem05vpS4
        5) Electrons, Protons And Neutrons:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi91qyjuknM
        6) Photons, Gravitons & Weak Bosons:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHVC6F8SOFc
        7) Neutrinos:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7QAaH0oFNg
        8) The Higgs Boson / The Higgs Mechanism:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_HrQVhgbeo

        The Cassiopeia Project is an effort to make high quality science videos available to everyone. If you can visualize it, then understanding is not far behind.

        http://www.cassiopeiaproject.com

        Neural Connections?



        Wiki Growth Over Time 

        This is a project conducted by ChrisDavis and IgorNikolic to visualize the growth of wiki.tudelft.nl since its beginning in late 2004. Since then, it has grown to over 10,000 pages, and is now part of the officially supported ICT infrastructure of Delft University of Technology. This wiki is meant to be a free-form repository of information where people contribute content that helps with their research. This often takes the form of pages documenting articles that people have read, "how to" pages, and records of conferences and meetings.Project Motivation


        This is a visualization of the evolution of wiki.tudelft.nl from the very beginning, 5 years ago. Each node is a page, links are connections between pages. Graph is laid out using a force-directed algorithm, where the edges (links between pages) pull the nodes (pages) together, and the nodes (pages) repel each other. This means that the more tightly connected nodes will be closer together than weakly connected ones, which are pushed to the outside. The entire thing is created using Prefuse (http://prefuse.org/), wiki is using the TWiki engine (http://twiki.org). The soundtrack is from DJ Cary's Eastern Grooves compilation from Magnatune.com. More info about this can be found at http://wiki.tudelft.nl/bin/view/Main/WikiGrowthOverTime

        Licensed under Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

        See:Browse Movies Upload
        Evolution of a wiki
         ***

        Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. Lines are color-coded according to their corresponding RFC 1918 allocation as follows:
        • Dark blue: net, ca, us
        • Green: com, org
        • Red: mil, gov, edu
        • Yellow: jp, cn, tw, au, de
        • Magenta: uk, it, pl, fr
        • Gold: br, kr, nl
        • White: unknown
        See: