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
   

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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.

• Cherenkov light: Not just for physics anymore (Symmetry)
• First planes at the Pole (The Antarctic Sun)
• The magical neutrino (the guardian)
• Computing from the end of the Earth (insideHPC)
• Entertaining with IceCube (Lekue)

State of Fear Revisited

Cooling the Warming Debate

See:

• The State of Fear

See Also:

•  ICARUS Proves Neutrinos At Least 10 Times Faster Than Light

• Getting Science Through: Misunderstood Terms In Science Communication

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:
October 23rd, 2011 at 5:00 am

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

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

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

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 A search for excited leptons in pp collisions at ps = 7 TeV

 

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

Aaron O'Connell: Making sense of a visible quantum object

And so that's what we did. We turned off the lights, and then we put it in a vacuum and sucked out all the air, and then we cooled it down to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Now, all alone in the elevator, the little chunk of metal is free to act however it wanted. And so we measured its motion. We found it was moving in really weird ways. Instead of just sitting perfectly still, it was vibrating. And the way it was vibrating was breathing something like this -- like expanding and contracting bellows. And by giving it a gentle nudge, we were able to make it both vibrate and not vibrate at the same time -- something that's only allowed with quantum mechanics.

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

• Hunting neutrinos...

• The IceCube experiment

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See Also: LAGUNA large neutrino observatory design moves forward