Particle physicists might seem like a dry bunch, but they have their fun. Why else would there be such a thing as a “strange quark”? When it comes to the fundamental nuclear forces, though, they don’t mess around: the strongest force in nature is known simply as the “strong force,” and it’s the force that literally holds existence together.
Posted in cosmology
Public access site for The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and associated information about cosmology.
We can never see these more distant regions. Still, the observable Universe alone should be big enough for most people. Indeed, for scientists like Casey and Sheth, it remains a constant source of fascination.
We’re not even at the centre of our Solar System or at the centre of our galaxy
“Everything that we’ve learned about the Universe – how big it is, all the amazing objects that are in it – we do that simply by collecting these photons of light that have travelled millions and millions of light years only to come and die on our detectors, our cameras or radio telescopes,” says Sheth.
Small fusion is very possible as fusion is a nuclear process that scales elegantly.
Sometime in the not distant future that we may see the practical development of successful small fusion reactors. Even integrated circuit scale pure fusion reactors may be possible.
The universe will cease to exist around the same time our sun is slated to die, according to new predictions based on the multiverse theory.
Posted in education, engineering, physics, space
Andrei Linde, the Harald Trap Friis Professor of Physics at Stanford University, will give the Applied Physics/Physics colloquium on Tues., May 8, 2018 entitled “Reverse Engineering the Universe.” This lecture will be held in the Hewlett Teaching Center, Room 200.
Event Sponsor:
Applied Physics/Physics Colloquium
Posted in cosmology, engineering
From harnessing the power of a black hole to giving stars a nudge, the prospect of playing with solar systems puts our engineering feats on Earth into perspective.
Circa 2014
One second after the Big Bang, the Higgs boson should have caused a Big Crunch, collapsing the universe to nothing. But gravity saved the day.
Researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park and Towson University are reporting that they have created multiple universes inside a laboratory-created multiverse — a world first.
To be exact, the researchers created a metamaterial — like those used to fashion invisibility cloaks — that, when light passes through it, multiple universes are formed within it. These universes, called Minkowski spacetimes, are similar to our own, except they more neatly tie up Einstein’s theory of special relativity by including time as a fourth dimension.
While this is rather extraordinary, the experimental setup is actually quite simple — though definitely rather unconventional. The multiverse is created inside a solution of cobalt in kerosene. This fluid isn’t usually considered a metamaterial, but lead researcher Igor Smolyaninov and co found that by applying a magnetic field, the ferromagnetic nanoparticles of cobalt line up in neat columns. When light passes through these columns, it behaves as if it’s in a Minkowski universe.
The Standard Model is a remarkably successful but incomplete theory. Supersymmetry (SUSY) offers an elegant solution to the Standard Model’s limitations, extending it to give each particle a heavy “superpartner” with different spin properties (an important quantum number distinguishing matter particles from force particles and the Higgs boson). For example, sleptons are the spin 0 superpartners of spin 1/2 electrons, muons and tau leptons, while charginos and neutralinos are the spin 1/2 counterparts of the spin 0 Higgs bosons (SUSY postulates a total of five Higgs bosons) and spin 1 gauge bosons.
If these superpartners exist and are not too massive, they will be produced at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and could be hiding in data collected by the ATLAS detector. However, unlike most processes at the LHC, which are governed by strong force interactions, these superpartners would be created through the much weaker electroweak interaction, thus lowering their production rates. Further, most of these new SUSY particles are expected to be unstable. Physicists can only search for them by tracing their decay products—typically into a known Standard Model particle and the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP), which could be stable and non-interacting, thus forming a natural dark matter candidate.
On 20 May, 2019, at the Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP) conference in Puebla, Mexico, and at the SUSY2019 conference in Corpus Christi, U.S., the ATLAS Collaboration presented numerous new searches for SUSY based on the full LHC Run 2 dataset (taken between 2015 and 2018), including two particularly challenging searches for electroweak SUSY. Both searches target particles that are produced at extremely low rates at the LHC, and decay into Standard Model particles that are themselves difficult to reconstruct. The large amount of data successfully collected by ATLAS in Run 2 provides a unique opportunity to explore these scenarios with new analysis techniques.
