Professor Graham Ross: Quarks and gluons

Professor Graham Ross from the University of Oxford, winner of the 2012 Dirac Medal awarded by the Institute of Physics for his work in developing the standard model of particles and forces that has led to many new insights into the origins and nature of the universe.  See: Gold Metal Winners

Computational Dilemma

Riemannian Geometry, also known as elliptical geometry, is the geometry of the surface of a sphere. It replaces Euclid's Parallel Postulate with, "Through any point in the plane, there exists no line parallel to a given line." A line in this geometry is a great circle. The sum of the angles of a triangle in Riemannian Geometry is > 180°.

Friedman Equation What is p density.

What are the three models of geometry? k=-1, K=0, k+1

 Negative curvature Omega=the actual density to the critical density

 If we triangulate Omega, the universe in which we are in, Omega m(mass)+ Omega(a vacuum), what position geometrically, would our universe hold from the coordinates given? The basic understanding is the understanding of the evolution of Euclidean geometries toward the revelation of a dynamical understanding in the continued expression of that geometry toward a non Euclidean freedom within context of the universe..

Maybe one should look for "a location" and then proceed from there?

    TWO UNIVERSES of different dimension and obeying disparate physical laws are rendered completely equivalent by the holographic principle. Theorists have demonstrated this principle mathematically for a specific type of five-dimensional spacetime ("anti–de Sitter") and its four-dimensional boundary. In effect, the 5-D universe is recorded like a hologram on the 4-D surface at its periphery. Superstring theory rules in the 5-D spacetime, but a so-called conformal field theory of point particles operates on the 4-D hologram  A black hole in the 5-D spacetime is equivalent to hot radiation on the hologram--for example, the hole and the radiation have the same entropy even though the physical origin of the entropy is completely different for each case. Although these two descriptions of the universe seem utterly unalike, no experiment could distinguish between them, even in principle. by Jacob D. Bekenstein

Consider any physical system, made of anything at all- let us call it, The Thing. We require only that The Thing can be enclosed within a finite boundary, which we shall call the Screen(Figure39). We would like to know as much as possible about The Thing. But we cannot touch it directly-we are restricted to making measurements of it on The Screen. We may send any kind of radiation we like through The Screen, and record what ever changes result The Screen. The Bekenstein bound says that there is a general limit to how many yes/no questions we can answer about The Thing by making observations through The Screen that surrounds it. The number must be less then one quarter the area of The Screen, in Planck units. What if we ask more questions? The principle tells us that either of two things must happen. Either the area of the screen will increase, as a result of doing an experiment that ask questions beyond the limit; or the experiments we do that go beyond the limit will erase or invalidate, the answers to some of the previous questions. At no time can we know more about The thing than the limit, imposed by the area of the Screen. Page 171 and 172 0f, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, by Lee Smolin

    Holography encodes the information in a region of space onto a surface one dimension lower. It sees to be the property of gravity, as is shown by the fact that the area of th event horizon measures the number of internal states of a blackhole, holography would be a one-to-one correspondence between states in our four dimensional world and states in higher dimensions. From a positivist viewpoint, one cannot distinguish which description is more fundamental.Pg 198, The Universe in Nutshell, by Stephen Hawking

The problem is the further you go in terms of particle reductionism you meet a problem with discreteness in terms of "continuity of expression." I know what to call it and it is of value in science investigation. Which means the paradigmatic values with which one is govern by using discreteness in terms of lets say computational values might suffer?

While one might think that it would be easy to accept a foundational approach toward some computational view of reality that view suffers under the plight of what exists in terms of information out there?

If such a view of computational validation works in terms of viewing "a second life" then how would you approach the resolvability of mathematical functions that exist in abstractness and are applied to the nature of our expressions? Why has computations not solved the mathematical hypothesis of lets say Riemann?

 Joel:I wonder if this is related to the issue of "non-computability" of the human mind, put forward by Roger Penrose. Is this why we humans can do mathematics whereas a computer cannot ?

There are some interesting quotes here in following article that come real close to what is implied by that difference.

You raised a question that has always been a troubling one for me. On a general level how could such views have been arrived at that would allow one to access such a mathematical world?

The idea being that to get to the truth one had to turn inside and find the very roots of all thought in some geometrical form. The closer to that truth, the very understanding and schematics drawn in that form. Not all can say the search for such truth resides within? Why the need for such geometry in relativism? Riemann Hypothesis as a function of reality? Why has a computer not solved it?

My views were always general as to what we may have hoped to create in some kind of machine or mechanism. I just couldn't see this functionality in relation to the human brain as 1's and 0's.

I might say it never occurred to me the depth that it has occupied Penrose's Mind. The start of your question and the related perspectives of the authors revealed in the following discourse have raised a wide impact of views that seek to exemplify what is new to me as to what you are asking.

Yet the real world has made major advancements in terms of digital physics and hyper physics. Has any of this touched the the nature of consciousness. This would then lead to Penrose angle in relation to what consciousness is capable of and what a machine is capable of. That would be my guess.

Can one gleam the understanding of what exists all around them without the knowledge of how one can look at what is available to us in terms of our observations? You have to be able to use "distance" in order to arrive at the conclusion about the current state in terms of the geometry in order to understand how such perceptions are relevant characterization toward explaining the space and what may drive the universe in terms of it's expression.

So there are many on going experiments that help to further question that perspective test it and validate it.

The problem is that at a certain length things break down. How can consciousness then be imparted to what is geometrically inherent in our expressions of the reality in which we live? Topology? Continuity of expression?

 Paul- Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

"On the right (Where do we come from?), we see the baby, and three young women - those who are closest to that eternal mystery. In the center, Gauguin meditates on what we are. Here are two women, talking about destiny (or so he described them), a man looking puzzled and half-aggressive, and in the middle, a youth plucking the fruit of experience. This has nothing to do, I feel sure, with the Garden of Eden; it is humanity's innocent and natural desire to live and to search for more life. A child eats the fruit, overlooked by the remote presence of an idol - emblem of our need for the spiritual. There are women (one mysteriously curled up into a shell), and there are animals with whom we share the world: a goat, a cat, and kittens. In the final section (Where are we going?), a beautiful young woman broods, and an old woman prepares to die. Her pallor and gray hair tell us so, but the message is underscored by the presence of a strange white bird. I once described it as "a mutated puffin," and I do not think I can do better. It is Gauguin's symbol of the afterlife, of the unknown (just as the dog, on the far right, is his symbol of himself). 

One then ponders how such a universe is part of something much greater in expression that one might want to see how this continuity of expression is portrayed in our universe. How such a balance is struck to maintain this feature as a geometrical understanding?

You have to go outside the box.  Cosmologists are limited by this perspective. Others venture well beyond the constrains applied by them. About a beginning and an end and all that in between. Birth and death are set within the greater expression of such a universe,  on and on.

 
See:

1. What is Happening at the Singularity?
2. Space and Time: Einstein and Beyond

Where is LHC Headed?

The speakers are: Michael Peskin (author of the famous QFT textbook) Nima Arkani-Hamed, Riccardo Rattazzi, Gavin Salam, Matt Strassler and Raman Sundrum (or Randall-Sundrum fame).

Particle Constructs

Several large experimental groups are hot on the trail of this elusive subatomic particle which is thought to explain the origins of particle mass.  Higgs Update Today

What use the Higg's Mechanism?

Just as one might look at GRB examples of motivation that come to us in natural cosmic particle collisions, by looking back in time is it not to strange to wonder how such compositions are given to the contacts  and explorations of where any beginnings may materialize. So we are given clues?

The structure is being detail as if in association to identifying the elements in between Mendeleev's elemental table components? Seaborg's octaves? It is an analogy in comparison as you might track LHC components of particle expressions?

this increases his resistance to movement, in other words, he acquires mass, just like a particle moving through the Higgs field

Latest research can pinpoint what I am saying yet it is through such expressions we might ask how is it an Einstein crossing the room can gather so many minds and ideas to it? Can we say then that consciousness is much the same, yet, it isn't the idea of a heat death that such notions are not palatable with what happens in the brain but the idea that new ideas can enter. You see?

See Also:

• What Does the Higgs Jet Energy Sound Like?

• Higgs Update Today  

• Ambigram, Higgs, and Feynman rules

Lagrangian Worlds

Diagram of the Lagrange Point gravitational forces associated with the Sun-Earth system.

In a certain sense a perfect fluid is a generalization of a point particle. This leads to the question as to what is the corresponding generalization for extended objects. Here the lagrangian formulation of a perfect fluid is much generalized by replacing the product of the co-moving vector which is a first fundamental form by higher dimensional first fundamental forms; this has as a particular example a fluid which is a classical generalization of a membrane; however there is as yet no indication of any relationship between their quantum theories.A Fluid Generalization of Membranes.

Perfect fluid

The energy-momentum tensor of a perfect fluid contains only the diagonal components.

In physics, a perfect fluid is a fluid that can be completely characterized by its rest frame energy density ρ and isotropic pressure p.
Real fluids are "sticky" and contain (and conduct) heat. Perfect fluids are idealized models in which these possibilities are neglected. Specifically, perfect fluids have no shear stresses, viscosity, or heat conduction.
In tensor notation, the energy-momentum tensor of a perfect fluid can be written in the form

where U is the velocity vector field of the fluid and where is the metric tensor of Minkowski spacetime.
Perfect fluids admit a Lagrangian formulation, which allows the techniques used in field theory to be applied to fluids. In particular, this enables us to quantize perfect fluid models. This Lagrangian formulation can be generalized, but unfortunately, heat conduction and anisotropic stresses cannot be treated in these generalized formulations.

Perfect fluids are often used in general relativity to model idealized distributions of matter, such as in the interior of a star.

 See also

• Equation of state
• Ideal gas
• Fluid solutions in general relativity

 References

• The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, by S.W.Hawking and G.F.R.Ellis, Cambridge University Press, 1973. ISBN 0-521-20016-4, ISBN 0-521-09906-4 (pbk.)

 External links

• Mark D. Roberts, [A Fluid Generalization of Membranes http://www.arXiv.org/abs/hep-th/0406164 hep-th/0406164].

See Also:

In summary, experiments at RHIC have shown that a very dense QCD medium is formed in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Other measurements, namely elliptic flow and baryon-to-meson ratios, indicate that this medium is characterized by partonic degrees offreedom and that its expansion and cooling is well described by hydrodynamical models with high viscosity. Thus, this medium is more similar to a liquid than to a gas of gluons and quarks.Review on Heavy-Ion Physics

• Quark Soup: Applied Superstring Theory- 

Music of the Quantum

The weird quantum nature of the atomic world challenges us to revise the way we view the world around us. We learn that our everyday world - built out of the myriad superposition of matter waves, has an unexpected capacity for new kinds of behavior and "self organization" that we are only just beginning to fathom. Music of the Quantum World









See Also: Superconductivity Dance Flash Mob

The Belle B Factory Experiment

Existing standard hadrons and exotic hadrons. At the B Factory experiment, a series of new exotic mesons containing charm quarks (c) have been discovered. Unlike these exotic mesons, the newly discovered Z_b particles contain bottom quarks (b) and have an electric charge. If only one bottom quark and one anti-bottom quark ( b ) are contained, the resulting particle is electrically neutral. Thus, the Z_b must also contain at least two more quarks (e.g., one up quark (u) and one anti-down quark ( d )).

The Belle B Factory experiment, which began in 1999 with the aim of elucidating the origin of particle-anti-particle symmetry breaking (CP violation), has contributed to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 awarded to Drs. Kobayashi and Maskawa. Moreover, data obtained from electron--positron collisions with the world's highest luminosity achieved at the KEKB accelerator have resulted in a series of unexpected discoveries of exotic hadrons, opening a new research frontier in particle physics. Data taking at the Belle Experiment has already been completed, but a vast amount of data is still awaiting detailed analysis. Moreover, an upgraded version of the KEKB/Belle Experiment, called SuperKEKB/Belle II is currently being prepared. Belle II aims to collect 50 times more data than the earlier experiment......... See: Belle Discovers New Heavy 'Exotic Hadrons'

Also See:

•  Belle Discovers New Heavy ‘Exotic Hadrons’

• Belle experiment makes exotic discovery

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The Belle experiment is a particle physics experiment conducted by the Belle Collaboration, an international collaboration of more than 400 physicists and engineers investigating CP-violation effects at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation (KEK) in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan

The Belle detector, located at the collision point of the e−e+ asymmetric-energy collider (KEKB), is a multilayer particle detector. Its large solid angle coverage, vertex location with precision on the order of tens of micrometres (provided by a silicon vertex detector), good pion–kaon separation at the momenta range from 100 MeV/c till few GeV/c (provided by a novel Cherenkov detector), and few-percent precision electromagnetic calorimetry (CsI(Tl) scintillating crystals) allow for many other scientific searches apart from CP-violation. Extensive studies of rare decays, searches for exotic particles and precision measurements of B mesons, D mesons, and tau particles have been carried out and have resulted in almost 300 publications in physics journals.

Highlights of the Belle experiment so far include

• the first observation of CP-violation outside of the kaon system (2001)
• observation of: and
• measurement of ϕ₃ using the Dalitz plot
• measurement of the CKM quark mixing matrix elements | V_ub | and | V_cb |
• observation of direct CP-violation in and
• observation of transitions
• evidence for
• observations of a number of new particles including the X(3872)

The Belle experiment operated at the KEKB accelerator, the world's highest luminosity machine. The instantaneous luminosity exceeded 2.11×10³⁴ cm⁻²·s⁻¹. The integrated luminosity collected at the ?(4S) resonance mass is ~710 fb⁻¹ (corresponds to 771 million BB meson pairs). Most data is recorded on the ?(4S) resonance, which decays to pairs of B mesons. About 10% of the data is recorded below the ?(4S) resonance in order to study backgrounds. In addition, Belle has carried out special short runs at the ?(5S) resonance to study B
s mesons as well as on the ?(3S) resonance to search for evidence of Dark Matter and the Higgs Boson.

The Belle II B-factory, an upgraded facility with two orders of magnitude more luminosity, has been approved in June 2010.^[1] The design and construction work is ongoing.

 See also

• B-factory
• B–B oscillation

 External links

• Official Belle Website

 References

1. ^ KEK press release

Asymptotic freedom

 Witten: One thing I can tell you, though, is that most string theorist's suspect that spacetime is a emergent Phenomena in the language of condensed matter physics.

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In physics, asymptotic freedom is a property of some gauge theories that causes interactions between particles to become arbitrarily weak at energy scales that become arbitrarily large, or, equivalently, at length scales that become arbitrarily small (at the shortest distances).

Asymptotic freedom is a feature of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the quantum field theory of the nuclear interaction between quarks and gluons, the fundamental constituents of nuclear matter. Quarks interact weakly at high energies, allowing perturbative calculations by DGLAP of cross sections in deep inelastic processes of particle physics; and strongly at low energies, preventing the unbinding of baryons (like protons or neutrons with three quarks) or mesons (like pions with two quarks), the composite particles of nuclear matter.

Asymptotic freedom was discovered by Frank Wilczek, David Gross, and David Politzer who in 2004 shared the Nobel Prize in physics.

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Bag Model of Quark Confinement

In dealing with the nature of quark confinement, one visualization is that of an elastic bag which allows the quarks to move freely around, as long as you don't try to pull them further apart. But if you try to pull a quark out, the bag stretches and resists.

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Robert Laughlin:The true origin of these rules is the tendancy of natural systems to organize themselves according to collective principles. Many phenomena in nature are like pointillist paintings. Observing the fine details yields nothing but meaningless fact. To correctly understand the painting one must step back and view it as a whole. In this situation a huge number of imperfect details can add up to larger entities of great perfection. We call this effect in the physical world emergence.

Article linked in quote is only a snapshot now?  But links work to specific pages. Maybe you will find appropriate quote?:) So it is nice to see the memory of things if if you try to erase them.

Jet Manifestation: A World Unto Itself.

The Landscape Again and again....

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(September 20, 2010) Leonard Susskind gives a lecture on the string theory and particle physics. He is a world renown theoretical physicist and uses graphs to help demonstrate the theories he is presenting.

String theory (with its close relative, M-theory) is the basis for the most ambitious theories of the physical world. It has profoundly influenced our understanding of gravity, cosmology, and particle physics. In this course we will develop the basic theoretical and mathematical ideas, including the string-theoretic origin of gravity, the theory of extra dimensions of space, the connection between strings and black holes, the "landscape" of string theory, and the holographic principle.

This course was originally presented in Stanford's Continuing Studies program.

Stanford University:
http://www.stanford.edu/

Stanford Continuing Studies Program:
http://csp.stanford.edu/

Stanford University Channel on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/stanford

 Playlist

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Quarks, gluons and anti-quarks are the constituents of protons, neutrons and (by definition) other hadrons.  It is a fascinating aspect of the physics of our world that when one of these particles is kicked out of the hadron that contains it, flying out with high motion-energy, it is never observed macroscopically. Instead, a high-energy quark (or gluon or anti-quark) is transformed into a spray of hadrons [particles made from quarks, antiquarks and gluons].  This spray is called a “jet.” [Note this statement applies to the five lighter flavors of quark, and not the top quark, which decays to a W particle and a bottom quark before a jet can form.] See: Jets: The Manifestation of Quarks and Gluons

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 Quark Soup: Applied Superstring Theory- 

See Also:

• Quark Soup: Applied Superstring Theory
•  How Particles Came to be? 
•  
• The First Few Microseconds, by Michael Riordan and Willaim A. Zajc
  

  For the past five years, hundreds of scientists have been using a powerful new atom smasher at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island to mimic conditions that existed at the birth of the universe. Called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, pronounced "rick"), it clashes two opposing beams of gold nuclei traveling at nearly the speed of light. The resulting collisions between pairs of these atomic nuclei generate exceedingly hot, dense bursts of matter and energy to simulate what happened during the first few microseconds of the big bang. These brief "mini bangs" give physicists a ringside seat on some of the earliest moments of creation. 

  
  During those early moments, matter was an ultrahot, superdense brew of particles called quarks and gluons rushing hither and thither and crashing willy-nilly into one another. A sprinkling of electrons, photons and other light elementary particles seasoned the soup. This mixture had a temperature in the trillions of degrees, more than 100,000 times hotter than the sun's core.

The Developmental Jet Process

As a layman I have been going through the research of those better educated then I in order to construct a accurate syntactically written developed scientific process as I have become aware of it. This is what I have been doing for the last number of years so as to get some idea of the scientific process experimentally driven to this point.

Theoretical development is important to myself,  as well as,   the underlying quest for a foundational perspective of how we can push back perspective with regard to the timeline of the universe in expression.

This has to be experimentally written in the processes we now use to help formulate an understanding of how the universe came into being by examining local events with the distribution of the cosmological data we are accumulating. A Spherical Cow anyone?

Jets: Article Updated An update here as well, "Two-Photons: Data and Theory Disagree"

I do appreciate all those scientist who have been giving their time to educating the public. This is a big thank you for that devotion to the ideal of bringing society forward as to what we as a public are not privy too. As too, being not part of that 3% of the population who are far removed from the work being done in particle research.

Almost a year ago, I had an e-mail exchange, and planned a phone call, with Maria Spiropulu of CMS. She looked particularly excited about something and the mortals may be learning what the cause was today.

CMS turned out to be much more "aggressive" relatively to the "conservative" ATLAS detector and it has already provided us with some hints. But what they published today, in the paper called: See: CMS: a very large excess of diphotons

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Measurement of the Production Cross Section for Pairs of Isolated Photons in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

The integrated and differential cross sections for the production of pairs of isolated photons is measured in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV with the CMS detector at the LHC. A data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36 inverse picobarns is analysed. A next-to-leading-order perturbative QCD calculation is compared to the measurements. A discrepancy is observed for regions of the phase space where the two photons have an azimuthal angle difference, Delta(phi), less than approximately 2.8. 

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Tscan

Tscan ("Trivial Scanner") is an event display, traditionally called a scanner, which I developed. It is a program that shows events graphically on the computer screen.

It was designed to be simple ("trivial") internally, and to have a simple user interface. A lot of importance was given to giving the user a large choice of options to display events in many different ways.

Tscan proved to be a very useful tool for the development of fitters. A particularly useful feature is the ability to show custom data for every photpmultiplier tube (PMT). Instead of the usual time and charge, it can show expected charge, scattered light, likelihood, chi-squared difference, patches, and any other data that can be prepared in a text format.

See:Trivial Scanner

Credit: Super-Kamiokande/Tomasz Barszczak Three (or more?) Cerenkov rings

Multiple rings of Cerenkov light brighten up this display of an event found in the Super-Kamiokande - neutrino detector in Japan. The pattern of rings - produced when electrically charged particles travel faster through the water in the detector than light does - is similar to the result if a proton had decayed into a positron and a neutral pion. The pion would decay immediately to two gamma-ray photons that would produce fuzzy rings, while the positron would shoot off in the opposite direction to produce a clearer ring. Such kinds of decay have been predicted by "grand unified theories" that link three of nature's fundamental forces - the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces. However, there is so far no evidence for such decays; this event, for example, did not stand up to closer scrutiny.

See:

• Picture of the Week

Update

See Also:

• CMS Physics Results
• The Plot Of The Week - Z Plus Jets
• B-Quark Jets: Keys To New Discoveries
• CMS Bosons!
• Two Jets, Two Protons, Nothing Else
• A Short Story Of Dijet Resonances
• New CMS Results On Dijet Resonances

2010 ion run: completed!

What Does the Higgs Jet Energy Sound Like?

ALICE Enters New Territory

A computer screen in the ALICE control room shows an event display on the night of the first heavy-ion collisions in the LHC in November 2010.

A basic process in QCD is the energy loss of a fast parton in a medium composed of colour charges. This phenomenon, "jet quenching", is especially useful in the study of the QGP, using the naturally occurring products (jets) of the hard scattering of quarks and gluons from the incoming nuclei. A highly energetic parton (a colour charge) probes the coloured medium rather like an X-ray probes ordinary matter. The production of these partonic probes in hadronic collisions is well understood within perturbative QCD. The theory also shows that a parton traversing the medium will lose a fraction of its energy in emitting many soft (low energy) gluons. The amount of the radiated energy is proportional to the density of the medium and to the square of the path length travelled by the parton in the medium. Theory also predicts that the energy loss depends on the flavour of the parton.

Jet quenching was first observed at RHIC by measuring the yields of hadrons with high transverse momentum (p_T). These particles are produced via fragmentation of energetic partons. The yields of these high-p_T particles in central nucleus–nucleus collisions were found to be a factor of five lower than expected from the measurements in proton–proton reactions. ALICE has recently published the measurement of charged particles in central heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. As at RHIC, the production of high-p_T hadrons at the LHC is strongly suppressed. However, the observations at the LHC show qualitatively new features (see box). The observation from ALICE is consistent with reports from the ATLAS and CMS collaborations on direct evidence for parton energy loss within heavy-ion collisions using fully reconstructed back-to-back jets of particles associated with hard parton scatterings (CERN Courier January/February 2011 p6 and March 2011 p6). The latter two experiments have shown a strong energy imbalance between the jet and its recoiling partner (G Aad et al. 2010 and CMS collaboration 2011). This imbalance is thought to arise because one of the jets traversed the hot and dense matter, transferring a substantial fraction of its energy to the medium in a way that is not recovered by the reconstruction of the jets.See: ALICE enters new territory in heavy-ion collisions

Click no Image for larger viewing

QGP Advances

Even the famous helium-3, which can flow out of a container via capillary forces, does not count as a perfect fluid.What black holes teach about strongly coupled particles by Clifford V. Johnson and Peter Steinberg....May of Last Year.

If helium-3 is used in cooling energy containment and was to be considered within LHC, wouldn't such example be applicable as to thinking about capillary routes as holes? Energy loss attributed too?

Layman wondering.

The notion of a perfect fluid arises in many fields of physics. The term can be applied to any system that is in local equilibrium and has negligible shear viscosity η. In everyday life, viscosity is a familiar property associated with the tendency of a substance to resist flow. From a microscopic perspective, it is a diagnostic of the strength of the interactions between a fluid’s constituents. The shear viscosity measures how disturbances in the system are transmitted to the rest of the system through interactions. If those interactions are strong, neighboring parts of the fluid more readily transmit the disturbances through the system (see figure 1). Thus low shear viscosities indicate significant interaction strength. The ideal gas represents the opposite extreme—it is a system with no interactions and infinite shear viscosity.


Perfect fluids are easy to describe, but few substances on Earth actually behave like them. Although often cited as a low-viscosity liquid, water in fact has a substantial viscosity, as evidenced by its tendency to form eddies and whorls when faced with an obstacle, rather than to flow smoothly as in ideal hydrodynamics. Even the famous helium-3, which can flow out of a container via capillary forces, does not count as a perfect fluid. What black holes teach about strongly coupled particles

The interesting thing for me as a layman  was about the theoretic in String Theory research is the idea of pushing perspective back in terms of the Microseconds. So for me it was about looking at collision processes and see how these may be applied to cosmological data as we look out amongst the stars.

At the recent seminar, the LHC’s dedicated heavy-ion experiment, ALICE, confirmed that QGP behaves like an ideal liquid, a phenomenon earlier observed at the US Brookhaven Laboratory’s RHIC facility. This question was indeed one of the main points of this first phase of data analysis, which also included the analysis of secondary particles produced in the lead-lead collisions. ALICE's results already rule out many of the existing theoretical models describing the physics of heavy-ions.

See: 2010 ion run: completed!

This is an important development in my view and I have been following for some time. The last contention in recognition for me was determinations of "the initial state" as to whether a Gas or a Fluid. How one get's there. This is phenomenologically correct as to understanding expressions of theoretic approach and application. Don't let anyone tell you different.

While we understand Microscopic blackholes quickly dissipate, it is of great interest that if such high energy collision processes are evident in our recognition of those natural processes, then we are faced with our own planet and signals of faster then light expressions through the mediums of earth?We have created many backdrops (Calorimeters) experimentally for comparisons of energy expressions. ICECUBE.

It is a really interesting story about the creation of our own universe in conjunction with experimental research a LHC

Our work is about comparing the data we collect in the STAR detector with modern calculations, so that we can write down equations on paper that exactly describe how the quark-gluon plasma behaves," says Jerome Lauret from Brookhaven National Laboratory. "One of the most important assumptions we've made is that, for very intense collisions, the quark-gluon plasma behaves according to hydrodynamic calculations in which the matter is like a liquid that flows with no viscosity whatsoever."

Proving that under certain conditions the quark-gluon plasma behaves according to such calculations is an exciting discovery for physicists, as it brings them a little closer to understanding how matter behaves at very small scales. But the challenge remains to determine the properties of the plasma under other conditions.

"We want to measure when the quark-gluon plasma behaves like a perfect fluid with zero viscosity, and when it doesn't," says Lauret. "When it doesn't match our calculations, what parameters do we have to change? If we can put everything together, we might have a model that reproduces everything we see in our detector." See:Probing the Perfect Liquid with the STAR Grid

Update:

• Heavy Ion Collisions: A Few CMS Results

A Conformal Field Theory Approach?

Using the anti–de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence to relate fermionic quantum critical fields to a gravitational problem, we computed the spectral functions of fermions in the field theory. By increasing the fermion density away from the relativistic quantum critical point, a state emerges with all the features of the Fermi liquid. See:String Theory, Quantum Phase Transitions, and the Emergent Fermi Liquid

Spacetime in String Theory Dr. Gary Horowitz, UCSB

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Conformal Field Theory

A conformal field theory is a quantum field theory (or statistical mechanics model at the critical point) that is invariant under the conformal group. Conformal field theory is most often studied in two dimensions where there is a large group of local conformal transformations coming from holomorphic functions.

If your not sure what I mean,  have a look at what is happening on the surface of the sphere, as a means from which  a 2D description,  is describing the black hole in a 5d space. Have you seen this image before?

String theorists describe the physics of black holes in five-dimensional spacetime. They found that these five-dimensional objects provide a good approximation of the quark-gluon plasma in one fewer dimension, a relationship similar to the one between a three-dimensional object and its two-dimensional shadow. Image: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Recreating the conditions present just after the Big Bang has given experimentalists a glimpse into how the universe formed. Now, scientists have begun to see striking similarities between the properties of the early universe and a theory that aims to unite gravity with quantum mechanics, a long-standing goal for physicists.

“Combining calculations from experiments and theories could help us capture some universal characteristic of nature,” said MIT theoretical physicist Krishna Rajagopal, who discussed these possibilities at the recent Quark Matter conference in Annecy, France.

One millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a hot, dense sea of freely roaming particles called quarks and gluons. As the universe rapidly cooled, the particles joined together to form protons and neutrons, and the unique state of matter known as quark-gluon plasma disappeared.See: String theory may hold answers about quark-gluon plasma

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Bekenstein Bound 

TWO UNIVERSES of different dimension and obeying disparate physical laws are rendered completely equivalent by the holographic principle. Theorists have demonstrated this principle mathematically for a specific type of five-dimensional spacetime ("anti–de Sitter") and its four-dimensional boundary. In effect, the 5-D universe is recorded like a hologram on the 4-D surface at its periphery. Superstring theory rules in the 5-D spacetime, but a so-called conformal field theory of point particles operates on the 4-D hologram. A black hole in the 5-D spacetime is equivalent to hot radiation on the hologram--for example, the hole and the radiation have the same entropy even though the physical origin of the entropy is completely different for each case. Although these two descriptions of the universe seem utterly unalike, no experiment could distinguish between them, even in principle. by Jacob D. Bekenstein

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Consider any physical system, made of anything at all- let us call it, The Thing. We require only that The Thing can be enclosed within a finite boundary, which we shall call the Screen(Figure39). We would like to know as much as possible about The Thing. But we cannot touch it directly-we are restrictied to making measurements of it on The Screen. We may send any kind of radiation we like through The Screen, and record what ever changes result The Screen. The Bekenstein bound says that there is a general limit to how many yes/no questions we can answer about The Thing by making observations through The Screen that surrounds it. The number must be less then one quarter the area of The Screen, in Planck units. What if we ask more questions? The principle tells us that either of two things must happen. Either the area of the screen will increase, as a result of doing an experiment that ask questions beyond the limit; or the experiments we do that go beyond the limit will erase or invalidate, the answers to some of the previous questions. At no time can we know more about The thing than the limit, imposed by the area of the Screen.

Page 171 and 172 0f, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin

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Juan Maldacena:

The strings move in a five-dimensional curved space-time with a boundary. The boundary corresponds to the usual four dimensions, and the fifth dimension describes the motion away from this boundary into the interior of the curved space-time. In this five-dimensional space-time, there is a strong gravitational field pulling objects away from the boundary, and as a result time flows more slowly far away from the boundary than close to it. This also implies that an object that has a fixed proper size in the interior can appear to have a different size when viewed from the boundary (Fig. 1). Strings existing in the five-dimensional space-time can even look point-like when they are close to the boundary. Polchinski and Strassler1 show that when an energetic four-dimensional particle (such as an electron) is scattered from these strings (describing protons), the main contribution comes from a string that is close to the boundary and it is therefore seen as a point-like object. So a string-like interpretation of a proton is not at odds with the observation that there are point-like objects inside it.

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Holography encodes the information in a region of space onto a surface one dimension lower. It sees to be the property of gravity, as is shown by the fact that the area of th event horizon measures the number of internal states of a blackhole, holography would be a one-to-one correspondance between states in our four dimensional world and states in higher dimensions. From a positivist viewpoint, one cannot distinquish which discription is more fundamental.

Pg 198, The Universe in Nutshell, by Stephen Hawking

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In 1919, Kaluza sent Albert Einstein a preprint --- later published in 1921 --- that considered the extension of general relativity to five dimensions. He assumed that the 5-dimensional field equations were simply the higher-dimensional version of the vacuum Einstein equation, and that all the metric components were independent of the fifth coordinate. The later assumption came to be known as the cylinder condition. This resulted in something remarkable: the fifteen higher-dimension field equations naturally broke into a set of ten formulae governing a tensor field representing gravity, four describing a vector field representing electromagnetism, and one wave equation for a scalar field. Furthermore, if the scalar field was constant, the vector field equations were just Maxwell's equations in vacuo, and the tensor field equations were the 4-dimensional Einstein field equations sourced by an EM field. In one fell swoop, Kaluza had written down a single covariant field theory in five dimensions that yielded the four dimensional theories of general relativity and electromagnetism. Naturally, Einstein was very interested in this preprint .(sorry link now dead)

Quark Soup: Applied Superstring Theory

Author(s)
Alex Buche-University of Western Ontario / Perimeter Institute

Robert Myers-Perimeter Institute

Aninda Sinha-Perimeter Institute

Quark Soup: Applied Superstring Theory

It is believed that in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang, our universe was dominated by a strongly interacting phase of nuclear matter at extreme temperatures. An impressive experimental program at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island has been studying the properties of this nuclear plasma with some rather surprising results. We outline how there may be a deep connection between extra-dimensional gravity of String Theory and the fundamental theories of subatomic particles can solve the mystery of the near-ideal fluid properties of the strongly coupled nuclear plasma.

See Also:

Canadian Association of Physicists

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Part of the understanding of the research goes back to the beginning of this QGP endeavor that brings us to today's level of understanding  enhanced by phenomenological positions now that allows us to move forward in our predictions and speculations. 

The Phenix

PHENIX, the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment, is an exploratory experiment for the investigation of high energy collisions of heavy ions and protons. PHENIX is designed specifically to measure direct probes of the collisions such as electrons, muons, and photons. The primary goal of PHENIX is to discover and study a new state of matter called the Quark-Gluon Plasma.

Back in 2005, what is it we saw and what we building along the way experimentally had constraints which lead our birdseye view of the process  as if from a distance looking toward the specifics of collision processes,  allowed us to be taken ever closer to the beginnings of the universe in expression.

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In summary, experiments at RHIC have shown that a very dense QCD medium is formed in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Other measurements, namely elliptic flow and baryon-to-meson ratios, indicate that this medium is characterized by partonic degrees offreedom and that its expansion and cooling is well described by hydrodynamical models with high viscosity. Thus, this medium is more similar to a liquid than to a gas of gluons and quarks.Review on Heavy-Ion Physics

2010 ion run: completed!

First direct observation of jet quenching.

At the recent seminar, the LHC’s dedicated heavy-ion experiment, ALICE, confirmed that QGP behaves like an ideal liquid, a phenomenon earlier observed at the US Brookhaven Laboratory’s RHIC facility. This question was indeed one of the main points of this first phase of data analysis, which also included the analysis of secondary particles produced in the lead-lead collisions. ALICE's results already rule out many of the existing theoretical models describing the physics of heavy-ions.

See: 2010 ion run: completed!

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After a very fast switchover from protons to lead ions, the LHC has achieved performances that allowed the machine to exceed both peak and integrated luminosity by a factor of three. Thanks to this, experiments have been able to produce high-profile results on ion physics almost immediately, confirming that the LHC was able to keep its promises for ions as well as for protons.

A seminar on 2 December was the opportunity for the ALICE, ATLAS and CMS collaborations to present their first results on ion physics in front of a packed auditorium. These results are important and are already having a major impact on the understanding of the physics processes that involve the basic constituents of matter at high energies.

In the ion-ion collisions, the temperature is so high that partons (quarks and gluons), which are usually constrained inside the nucleons, are deconfined to form a highly dense and hot soup known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP). This type of matter existed about 1 millionth of a second after the Big Bang. By studying it, scientists hope to understand the processes that led to the formation of nucleons, which in turn became the nuclei of atoms. See:LHC completes first heavy-ion run

See Also: Jets: Article Updated

QGP Research Advances

“We can say that the system definitely flows like a liquid,” says Harris.

One of the first lead-ion collisions in the LHC as recorded by the ATLAS experiment on November 8, 2010. Image courtesy CERN.

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Scientists from the ALICE experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have publicly revealed the first measurements from the world’s highest energy heavy-ion collisions. In two papers posted today to the arXiv.org website, the collaboration describes two characteristics of the collisions: the number of particles produced from the most head-on collisions; and, for more glancing blows, the flow of the system of two colliding nuclei.
Both measurements serve to rule out some theories about how the universe behaves at its most fundamental, despite being based on a relatively small number of collisions collected in the first few days of LHC running with lead-ion beams.

In the first measurement, scientists counted the charged particles that were produced from a few thousand of the most central lead-ion collisions—those where the lead nuclei hit each other head-on. The result showed that about 18,000 particles are produced from collisions of lead ions, which is about 2.2 times more particles than produced in similar collisions of gold ions at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

See: ALICE experiment announces first results from LHC’s lead-ion collisions

Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP)

Blackhole substances are perhaps the most-perfect fluids in existence because they have ultra-low viscosity.

No matter what you call it, though, that substance and others similar to it could be the most-perfect fluids in existence because they have ultra-low viscosity, or resistance to flow, said Dam Thanh Son, an associate physics professor in the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington.

Son and two colleagues used a string theory method called the gauge/gravity duality to determine that a black hole in 10 dimensions - or the holographic image of a black hole, a quark-gluon plasma, in three spatial dimensions - behaves as if it has a viscosity near zero, the lowest yet measured.

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2. A quark-gluon plasma, with the same quarks, but with "bags" disappeared and gluons flying around in their place. See: Just in case anyone forgot...

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One of the things I worked a lot on in earlier months this year (and late ones of last year) was the lead article in a cluster of articles that has appeared in the last few days in May’s special edition of Physics Today. They are sort of departmental-colloquium-level articles, so for a general physics audience, more or less. It’s about some of the things I’ve told you about here in the past (see e.g. here and here), concerning exciting and interesting applications of string theory to various experiments in nuclear physics, as well as atomic and condensed matter physics (although we do not have an article on the latter in this cluster). I had a fun time working with Peter Steinberg on the article and remain grateful to him for getting us all together in the first place to talk about this topic way back in that AAAS symposium of 2009. It was there that Steven Blau of Physics Today got the excellent idea to approach us all to do an article, which resulted in this special issue....See: The Search For Perfection…

Clifford gives a link to the PDF version of the online article "What black holes teach about strongly coupled particles" I am not sure the article is free anymore as it now requires registry. Clifford has adjusted to this by giving "his" pdf link.

Cover: In contrast with everyday liquids such as the oil and water shown on the cover, a so-called perfect fluid has exceedingly low shear viscosity. But unlike a superfluid, the perfect fluid is not in a single quantum state. Three articles in this issue explore the connection to string theory (beginning on page 29) and the possible existence of perfect fluids in two very different regimes: ultracold fermionic atoms (page 34) and ultrahot nuclear matter (page 39). (Photo by Stefan Kaben.)

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See Also:

Physics Bits and Bites

The quest for Quantum Ideal liquids