...or at least, what the CMS [Compact Muon Solenoid] team are doing,[1] with some pictures of stuff going on in the detectors. New stuff is added at the top so read from the bottom if you want to start from the beginning. (See also their 23 November 2009 press release, which also has some purty pictures.[2])
I'll look up for additional feeds from the other teams, so check out this page every now and then.
References
[1] CMS team. CMS e-commentary for 2009 LHC beams. CERN. Accessed 23 November 2009.
[2] CERN (23 November 2009). Two circulating beams bring first collisions in the LHC. Accessed 23 November 2009.
Showing posts with label Physics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Physics. Show all posts
23 November 2009
13 November 2009
LHC back on track!
Finally! After roughly a year of wait (the LHC broke in mid-September of 2008), CERN announced on that the LHC now has protons committing suicide one again![1][2][3]
References
[1] "Particles are back in the LHC!", CERN Bulletin 45 (2009). Accessed 13 November 2009.
[2] CERN (30 October 2009). Particles are back in the LHC!. Accessed 13 November 2009.
[3] CERN (9 November 2009). Particles have gone half way round the LHC. Accessed 13 November 2009.
References
[1] "Particles are back in the LHC!", CERN Bulletin 45 (2009). Accessed 13 November 2009.
[2] CERN (30 October 2009). Particles are back in the LHC!. Accessed 13 November 2009.
[3] CERN (9 November 2009). Particles have gone half way round the LHC. Accessed 13 November 2009.
15 October 2009
Artificial black holes!
Two Chinese researchers, Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui, from the State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves at the Southeast University in Nanjing, China, have apparently created artificial black holes![1,2]
Bending light
Now everyone has heard of black holes (picture). Dense regions of matter, which are so dense that light cannot escape from them. Yadda yadda yadda. Booooooring! (Okay, not really. Black holes are pretty cool.)
Now if you want to bend light, there are two ways to do it. The one that comes to mind when thinking of black holes is gravitational lensing (picture), that is when a chunk of mass bends light because of its gravity. However there's a much simpler way to do so. Simply take something like a chunk of glass and witness Snell's Law (picture). Ta-dah!
If you have a dense enough chunk of mass, the lensing effect will be so big that light will start "bending inwards" (for lack of a better way to describe this), and light will not be able to escape. And that's your Grandma's black hole. An astute reader with a keen sense of inquiry (such as yourself) would at this point suspect that since this happens for mass, perhaps it also happens for optical materials as well.
Metamaterials
Now these you might not have heard of. Metamaterials are essentially optical materials (glass is an optical material for example) that are specifically engineered to have uncommon properties (such as negative refractive indices). What a negative refractive index means is that a ray of light will bend inwards, as if the ray came from the opposite angle (picture) instead of bending in the usual way. What this means is that you can create a a material where light keeps "bending inwards", thus will never be able to get out, just like in Grandma's black hole.
The mathematical properties of these artificial black holes are exactly the same (as far as light is concerned) than for the "normal" black holes. So we now have black holes that we can build in labs, move around, experimentally study, and fits in your pocket. The really cool thing about them is since the mathematics are the same for the "artificial" or the "normal" black holes, then whatever knowledge we gain by studying the artificial ones yields knowledge about the normal ones.
References
[1] 14 October 2009. "Artificial Black Hole Created in Chinese Lab", Technology Review. Accessed 15 October 2009.
[2] Qiang Cheng, Tie Jun Cui (2009). "An electromagnetic black hole made of metamaterials", arXiv:0910.2159 [physic.optics]. (Lots of pretty pictures at the end.)
Bending light
Now everyone has heard of black holes (picture). Dense regions of matter, which are so dense that light cannot escape from them. Yadda yadda yadda. Booooooring! (Okay, not really. Black holes are pretty cool.)
Now if you want to bend light, there are two ways to do it. The one that comes to mind when thinking of black holes is gravitational lensing (picture), that is when a chunk of mass bends light because of its gravity. However there's a much simpler way to do so. Simply take something like a chunk of glass and witness Snell's Law (picture). Ta-dah!
If you have a dense enough chunk of mass, the lensing effect will be so big that light will start "bending inwards" (for lack of a better way to describe this), and light will not be able to escape. And that's your Grandma's black hole. An astute reader with a keen sense of inquiry (such as yourself) would at this point suspect that since this happens for mass, perhaps it also happens for optical materials as well.
Metamaterials
Now these you might not have heard of. Metamaterials are essentially optical materials (glass is an optical material for example) that are specifically engineered to have uncommon properties (such as negative refractive indices). What a negative refractive index means is that a ray of light will bend inwards, as if the ray came from the opposite angle (picture) instead of bending in the usual way. What this means is that you can create a a material where light keeps "bending inwards", thus will never be able to get out, just like in Grandma's black hole.
The mathematical properties of these artificial black holes are exactly the same (as far as light is concerned) than for the "normal" black holes. So we now have black holes that we can build in labs, move around, experimentally study, and fits in your pocket. The really cool thing about them is since the mathematics are the same for the "artificial" or the "normal" black holes, then whatever knowledge we gain by studying the artificial ones yields knowledge about the normal ones.
References
[1] 14 October 2009. "Artificial Black Hole Created in Chinese Lab", Technology Review. Accessed 15 October 2009.
[2] Qiang Cheng, Tie Jun Cui (2009). "An electromagnetic black hole made of metamaterials", arXiv:0910.2159 [physic.optics]. (Lots of pretty pictures at the end.)
27 May 2009
I'm so pumped...
I've been working on something for the last year or so, and I switched my master's thesis to this topic because that's where my passion was. So I've jumped head first in that project, essentially being in Limbo since last January as far as my master's degree is concerned. It's been an uphill fight to convince people that I knew what I was talking about, and that I've got original and pertinent material for my thesis.
In a nutshell, I'm proposing a new scheme to classify subatomic particles. The current scheme (adopted in 1986)[1] is so weird that it literally takes weeks to teach at the grad-level, is so complex that it's de facto impossible to memorize it, and is based on a fundamentally meaningless concept called isospin (we know this since 1964),[2] and which needs us to bend over backwards to accommodate it since 1974.[3]
I am (as I'm writing this) preparing an upcoming talk on the topic, which will be presented at CAPC2009 (Canadian Association of Physics Congress) in two weeks. Until tonight, I really only had a solution for half the scheme, and "ideas" (which were not all that elegant) to fix the other half. That talk will also be reviewed by my department this Friday and will essentially decide if I can keep doing my master's or not. I was fiddling with some tentative new rules and I came up with something so stunningly simple, so elegant, so physical, so natural... At first I was expecting my idea be published and read with a reaction similar to "Yeah that'd be nice, but it's not worth undoing 50 years of tradition", with the adoption of my idea as being nothing more than a fantasy. But what I've come up with is so damned simple I've now allowed myself to wonder if there is any way it won't be adopted.
So now I'm pumped, and I've got no doubts that I'll be able to finish my master's (of course, I could be wrong here, but that's my feeling right now). And while I'm still holding myself back from any preemptive celebrations of my master's success, or of the adoption of my idea (cause let's face it, I would be shit-canning 50+ years of tradition in a very conservative area of science, and such paradigm shift is rarely met with open-arms by the old coots who developed and grew up with the old one), it suddenly doesn't seem all that ludicrous anymore.
Notes & References
[1] M. Aguilar-Benítez et al. (Particle Data Group) (1986). "Review of Particle Properties". Physics Letters B 170 1
[2] The quark model shows that isospin looking meaningful is simply a consequence of the mass of up and down quarks being so similar.
[3] The discovery of the charm quark forces us to move away from isospin as a sound basis of nomenclature, the reasons are rather technical, but essentially it comes down to a unnatural choice of a linear combination of quarks as the basis of nomenclature rather than the natural choice of the individual quarks themselves.
In a nutshell, I'm proposing a new scheme to classify subatomic particles. The current scheme (adopted in 1986)[1] is so weird that it literally takes weeks to teach at the grad-level, is so complex that it's de facto impossible to memorize it, and is based on a fundamentally meaningless concept called isospin (we know this since 1964),[2] and which needs us to bend over backwards to accommodate it since 1974.[3]
I am (as I'm writing this) preparing an upcoming talk on the topic, which will be presented at CAPC2009 (Canadian Association of Physics Congress) in two weeks. Until tonight, I really only had a solution for half the scheme, and "ideas" (which were not all that elegant) to fix the other half. That talk will also be reviewed by my department this Friday and will essentially decide if I can keep doing my master's or not. I was fiddling with some tentative new rules and I came up with something so stunningly simple, so elegant, so physical, so natural... At first I was expecting my idea be published and read with a reaction similar to "Yeah that'd be nice, but it's not worth undoing 50 years of tradition", with the adoption of my idea as being nothing more than a fantasy. But what I've come up with is so damned simple I've now allowed myself to wonder if there is any way it won't be adopted.
So now I'm pumped, and I've got no doubts that I'll be able to finish my master's (of course, I could be wrong here, but that's my feeling right now). And while I'm still holding myself back from any preemptive celebrations of my master's success, or of the adoption of my idea (cause let's face it, I would be shit-canning 50+ years of tradition in a very conservative area of science, and such paradigm shift is rarely met with open-arms by the old coots who developed and grew up with the old one), it suddenly doesn't seem all that ludicrous anymore.
Notes & References
[1] M. Aguilar-Benítez et al. (Particle Data Group) (1986). "Review of Particle Properties". Physics Letters B 170 1
[2] The quark model shows that isospin looking meaningful is simply a consequence of the mass of up and down quarks being so similar.
[3] The discovery of the charm quark forces us to move away from isospin as a sound basis of nomenclature, the reasons are rather technical, but essentially it comes down to a unnatural choice of a linear combination of quarks as the basis of nomenclature rather than the natural choice of the individual quarks themselves.
17 March 2009
Mosquito death ray
No, this is not the newest indie pop band. This is literally about shooting mosquitos with laser beams in order to send 'em straight to mosquito hell.
Now if this ain't badass, I don't know what is.
The laser, which has been dubbed a "weapon of mosquito destruction" fires at mosquitoes once it detects the audio frequency created by the beating of its wings.
The laser beam then destroys the mosquito, burning it on the spot.
Developed by some of the astrophysicists involved in what was known as the "Star Wars" anti-missile programs during the Cold War, the project is meant to prevent the spread of malaria.
Lead scientist on the project, Dr. Jordin Kare, told CNN that the laser would be able to sweep an area and "toast millions of mosquitoes in a few minutes."
Now if this ain't badass, I don't know what is.
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