Friday, April 27, 2012

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?



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Thursday, April 26, 2012

Infographics: Magnifying the Universe

I thought this kind of neat and wondered.....maybe a scientist could correct if any misrepresentation is evident in the following demonstration.



The Universe made possible by Number Sleuth

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Brian Greene: Why is our universe fine-tuned for life?




At the heart of modern cosmology is a mystery: Why does our universe appear so exquisitely tuned to create the conditions necessary for life? In this tour de force tour of some of science's biggest new discoveries, Brian Greene shows how the mind-boggling idea of a multiverse may hold the answer to the riddle.

Brian Greene is perhaps the best-known proponent of superstring theory, the idea that minuscule strands of energy vibrating in a higher dimensional space-time create every particle and force in the universe.



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Do Gamma rays hint at dark matter?




Using a new statistical technique to analyse publicly available data from NASA's Fermi Space Telescope, an astrophysicist in Germany says he may have spotted a tell-tale sign of exotic particles annihilating within the Milky Way. If proved to be real, this "gamma-ray line" would, he claims, be a "smoking-gun signature" of dark matter.

There is a wide body of indirect observational evidence that an invisible substance accounts for some 80% of the matter in the universe. Although physicists can measure the effects that this dark matter has on the visible universe, they have very little understanding of what this mysterious stuff actually is. As well as looking for direct evidence of dark matter by detecting it – or even producing it – here on Earth, researchers are also scouring the skies for signs of the particles that dark matter might produce when self-annihilating. An excess of high-energy positrons (anti-electrons) observed by the Italian-led PAMELA spacecraft in 2008, and confirmed by Fermi last year, might be such a signature. However, it is possible that these positrons are produced by processes unrelated to dark matter. See:Gamma rays hint at dark matter
Also a Physics World see: Has Fermi glimpsed dark matter?

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

What Does the Higgs Jet Energy Sound Like?

Top quark and anti top quark pair decaying into jets, visible as collimated collections of particle tracks, and other fermions in the CDF detector at Tevatron.
HiggsJetEnergyProfileCrotale  and HiggsJetEnergyProfilePiano use only the energy of the cells in the jet to modulate the pitch, volume, duration and spatial position of each note. The sounds being modulated in these examples are crotales (baby cymbals) and a piano string struck with a soft beater, then shifted up in pitch by 1000 Hz and `dovetailed'.

In HiggsJetRythSig we are simply travelling steadily along the axis of the jet of particles and hearing a ping of crotales for each point at which there is a significant energy deposit somewhere in the jet.

HiggsJetEnergyGate  uses just the energy deposited in the jet's cells. At each time point (defined by the distance from the point of collision) the energy is used to define the number of channels used from the piano sound file. So high energy can be heard as thick, burbly sound whilst low energy has a thinner sound. See: Listen to the decay of a god particle
LHCsound (LHCsound) / CC BY 3.0


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Monday, April 23, 2012

Songs of the Stars: the Real Music of the Spheres


With the discovery of sound waves in the CMB, we have entered a new era of precision cosmology in which we can begin to talk with certainty about the origin of structure and the content of matter and energy in the universe.-Wayne Hu



The Pythagoreans 2500 years ago believed in a celestial "music of the spheres", an idea that reverberated down the millennia in Western music, literature, art and science. Now, through asteroseismology (the study of the internal structure of pulsating stars), we know that there is a real music of the spheres. The stars have sounds in them that we use to see right to their very cores. This multi-media lecture looks at the relationship of music to stellar sounds. You will hear the real sounds of the stars and you will hear musical compositions where every member of the orchestra is a real (astronomical) star! You will also learn about some of the latest discoveries from the Kepler Space Mission that lets us "hear" the stars 100 times better than with telescopes on the ground See:Don Kurtz, University of Central Lancashire-Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 7:00 pm


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Near-Future Photon-Collider Setups

In the search for a quantum theory of gravity it is crucial to find experimental access to quantum gravitational effects. Since these are expected to be very small at observationally accessible scales it is advantageous to consider processes with no tree-level contribution in the Standard Model, such as photon-photon scattering. We examine the implications of asymptotically safe quantum gravity in a setting with extra dimensions for this case, and point out that various near-future photon-collider setups, employing either electron or muon colliders, or even a purely laser-based setup, could provide a first observational window into the quantum gravity regime. Can we see quantum gravity? Photons in the asymptotic-safety scenario






Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity: the hard facts 


October 22-25, 2012
Perimeter Institute

Scientific area: quantum gravity


 Quantum Gravity tries to answer some of the most fundamental questions about the quantum nature of spacetime. To make progress in this area it is mandatory to establish a contact to observations and experiments and to learn what the "hard facts" on quantum gravity are, that nature provides us with.

Quantum Gravity is a field where several approaches, based on different principles and assumptions, develop in parallel. At present it is not clear whether and how some of the approaches are compatible, and might share common properties. This meeting will draw on a diverse set of physicists who come to make proposals for quantum gravity phenomenology from a broad range of perspectives, including path-integral-inspired as well as canonical, and discrete as well as continuum-based approaches, providing a platform to exchange ideas with researchers working on theoretical and experimental aspects of different proposals.

This will be the third in a series of meetings, the first of which was held at PI (2007), the second at NORDITA (2010).

This meeting looks to the future and has two primary goals: 1) to assess the status of different proposals for QG phenomenology in the light of recent experimental results from Fermi, Auger, LHC etc. and 2) to discuss and stimulate new ideas and proposals, coming from a diverse set of viewpoints about quantum spacetime.

In order to allow for a fruitful exchange of ideas across different approaches, and between experimental and theoretical researchers, the workshop will lay a main focus on structured discussion sessions with short (15 min.) presentations. These are mainly intended for an exchange of ideas, and a discussion and development of new possibilities, thus participants are strongly encouraged to present new ideas and work in progress.



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Sunday, April 22, 2012

A Musical Score on Particles?

Schema created by Vicinanza with an example bubble chamber particle track, which has been converted into a melody and then orchestrated as music. Image courtesy Domenico Vicinanza.
Positrons – antiparticles of electrons, a trillionth of a meter in size – make no sound. But with a little help from the grid, music composer Domenico Vicinanza is giving positrons a voice to lift in song.

Vicinanza, a network engineer at DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), is an old hand at using GILDA (Grid INFN virtual Laboratory for Dissemination Activities) e-infrastructure, which is part of the European Grid Infrastructure, to blend science with music. In the past, he has derived music from volcanic seismograms with the City Dance Ensemble, and re-created 2,000-year-old Greek music with his troupe, the the Lost Sounds Orchestra.The smallest music in the universe


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Saturday, April 21, 2012

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
T^{\mu\nu} = (\rho + p) \, U^\mu U^\nu + p \, \eta^{\mu\nu}\,
where U is the velocity vector field of the fluid and where \eta_{\mu \nu} 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.

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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

A Blue Flash in Ice

Little is known about the ultra high-energy cosmic rays that regularly penetrate the atmosphere. Recent IceCube research rules out the leading theory that they come from gamma ray bursts. (Credit: NSF/J. Yang)

Future directions 

The lack of observation of neutrinos in coincidence with GRBs implies, at face value, that the theoretical models need to be revisited. “Calculations embracing the concept that cosmic ray protons are the decay products of neutrons that escaped the magnetic confinement of the GRB fireball are supported by the research community and have been convincingly excluded by the present data,” says Francis Halzen, IceCube principle investigator and a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "IceCube will continue to collect more data with a final, better calibrated and better understood detector in the coming years." Since April 2011, IceCube has collected neutrino data using the full detector array. With the larger detector, researchers can see more neutrinos, providing a “higher resolution” picture of the neutrino sky. See: Cosmic Rays: 100 years of mystery

See Also: IceCube Neutrino Observatory Explores Origin of Cosmic Rays




IceCube’s 5,160 digital optical modules are suspended from 86 strings reaching a mile and a half below the surface at the South Pole. Each sphere contains a photomultiplier tube and electronics to capture the faint flashes of muons speeding through the ice, their direction and energy – and thus that of the neutrinos that created them – tracked by multiple detections. At lower left is the processed signal of an energetic muon moving upward through the array, created by a neutrino that traveled all the way through the Earth.


“This result represents a coming-of-age of neutrino astronomy,” says Nathan Whitehorn from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the recent GRB research with Peter Redl of the University of Maryland. “IceCube, while still under construction, was able to rule out 15 years of predictions and has begun to challenge one of only two major possibilities for the origin of the highest-energy cosmic rays, namely gamma-ray bursts and active galactic nuclei.”


Redl says, “While not finding a neutrino signal originating from GRBs was disappointing, this is the first neutrino astronomy result that is able to strongly constrain extra-galactic astrophysics models, and therefore marks the beginning of an exciting new era of neutrino astronomy.” The IceCube Collaboration’s report on the search appears in the April 19, 2012, issue of the journal Nature. See: Where Do the Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays Come From? Probably Not from Gamma-Ray Bursts