Merry Christmas to all!
More about the Sesame experiment:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20533763
http://www.sesame.org.jo/sesame/
Back when I was a Higgs skeptic:
http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/09/08/higgs-skeptic/
Posts Tagged ‘advent calendar 2012’
Where was the Higgs boson hiding? We searched or it directly and indirectly. Now that we have the answer, we can look indirectly for other things!
Electroweak fit: http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.0975
Particle physics is awesome enough all by itself. It gets even more awesome when we see the spin off technologies that have been developed over the decades!
The basics of radiation and hadron therapy are summed up quite well on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_beam_radiotherapy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_therapy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_therapy
Images taken from:
Bragg peak: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BraggPeak.png
Paul Scherrer Institut gantry: http://www.psi.ch/history-of-psi
Radiative therapy dose map: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360301607005068
What is cooler than cooling? Stochastic cooling!
A nice paper on stochastic cooling: http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0308044.pdf
Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_cooling
How could the LHC cause the end of the world?! Well… it can’t. It poses no threat at all to the fabric of the cosmos.
When it comes to the Standard Model the g-2 measurements give us both the best agreement between theory and experiment, and one of the biggest discrepancies that just won’t seem to go away! Lepton universality is one of the most stringently tested symmetries we have, and yet it does not stand up to the most precise measurements. This is a very big hint that there should be new physics out there!
How does the moon affect the LHC? What about the TGV and LEP?
LEP and the moon: http://jwenning.web.cern.ch/jwenning/documents/EnergyCal/tide_slrep.pdf
LEP and the TGV: http://cds.cern.ch/record/309231/files/sl-96-036.pdf
LHC and the moon: http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2012/06/07/is-the-moon-full-just-ask-the-lhc-operators/
There are probably only three generations of matter. Why is this? How do we know? That would happen if there was a fourth generation? The Z boson holds the answers!
Plot taken from http://pdg.lbl.gov/2012/reviews/rpp2012-rev-cross-section-plots.pdf
The discovery of the J/Psi in 1974 changed the world of particle physics forever! The discovery of the fourth quark was great evidence in support of the quark model of hadrons and Cabibbo’s quark mixing.
What’s the deal with the X(3872)? Why are we still finding new mesons at low mass? There’s still new physics to be found at lower energies!
Apologies to CDF for not mentioning them by name, they saw a very clear signal for the X(3872) as well!
Some excellent talks on the X(3872) can be found in the Charm 2010 conference: http://indico.ihep.ac.cn/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=1452
I’m still playing catch-up! More to come tomorrow.
