What’s the News: In high school physics classes, students are often taught that static electricity develops when electrons detach from the surface of one object and jump to another, causing a difference in charge. Since opposite charges attract, the two objects are drawn to one another (like your hair to a balloon). But new research published in the journal Science shows that static electricity is caused by more than just the exchange of individual electrons, and instead involves the transfer of bigger (yet still tiny) clumps of material.
(more…)
No, you can’t see a black hole. What you might be able to see, though, is the way in which relativity predicts a spinning black hole will bend space, time, and light around it. Scientists say in a new study in Nature Physics that they are closer than ever to being able to see this effect in faraway black holes from our vantage point here on Earth.
Galaxies probably have spinning, supermassive black holes at their center, and spinning black holes possess two types of angular momentum, study coauthor Bo Thide explains. There’s spin angular momentum, which is analogous to what the Earth creates as it spins on its axis, and there’s orbital angular momentum, which is analogous to what the Earth creates as it orbits the sun. Thidé says that the second effect—orbital angular momentum—distorts light in a way that scientists who know what to look for might be able to see it from here.
“Around a spinning black hole, space and time behave in such an odd way; space becomes time, time becomes space, and the whole space-time is actually dragged around the black hole, becomes twisted around the black hole,” Professor Thidé explained. “If you have radiation source… it will then sense this twisting of spacetime itself. The light ray may think that ‘I’m propagating in a straight line’, but if you look at it from the outside, you see it’s propagating along a spiral line. That’s relativity for you.” [BBC News]
(more…)
Brian Greene: Back to blow your mind.
Having explained string theory to the masses in his bestseller The Elegant Universe and untangled the fabric of the cosmos in The Fabric of the Cosmos, the superstar physicist returns this month with The Hidden Reality, an ode to multiverse theory.
By now, the 11-dimension string theory models of his earlier books … are looking downright commonsensical. “The Hidden Reality” moves on to increasingly speculative and exotic discussions of a bubble multiverse (“Think of the universe as a gigantic block of Swiss cheese. …”) a holographic one, a brane-world scenario (courtesy of string theory), computer-driven simulations, questions of how probability relates to infinity, and the Many Worlds view of quantum mechanics. “A frequent criticism of the Many Worlds approach is that it’s just too baroque to be true,” Mr. Greene writes. [The New York Times]
Multiverse theory—the idea that our universe and its Big Bang were just one of many—is a favorite theme of science fiction (and “Family Guy”), as it allows us to have parallel selves in parallel universes. Greene explains the real science behind the idea with one of his litany of analogies: a simple deck of cards.
If you shuffle the deck infinitely many times, the card orderings must necessarily repeat. Similarly, in an infinite expanse of space, particle arrangements must repeat too—there just aren’t enough different particle configurations to go around. And if the particles in a given region of space the size of ours are arranged identically to how they are arranged here, then reality in that region will be identical to reality here. Except that maybe we’d be seeing the Jets and the Bears in the Super Bowl. [Wall Street Journal]
(more…)
Since 1983, the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab outside Chicago has been faithfully smashing particles and probing deeper into the mysteries of physics. But its time is nearly at an end.
The Large Hadron Collider—that big European underground ring you might have heard of—surpassed Tevatron in size and energy. The American collider’s operators had hoped to extend its life a few more years, especially with LHC still getting up to speed. But the money just wasn’t there, and so the announcement came yesterday that Tevatron would shut down in September.
From John Conway at DISCOVER blog Cosmic Variance:
In the fall, the Department of Energy’s High Energy Physics Advisory Panel recommended that the Tevatron be funded to run for three years beyond the planned end in September of 2011, largely in order to provide additional information in the search for the Higgs boson. … But in a letter to day to the chair of HEPAP, the head of the Office of Science at the Department of Energy, William Brinkman, wrote that “Unfortunately, the current budgetary climate is very challenging, and additional funding has not been identified. Therefore…operation of the Tevatron will end in FY2011, as originally scheduled.”
Conway’s lengthy eulogy for a particle accelerator is a great read, including plenty of the history of the rivalry between American physicists and the CERN physicists in Europe building their own huge smashers, leading up to the LHC.
Related Content:
80beats: New Revelations From Particle Colliders Past, Present & Future
80beats: Fermilab Particle Physicists Wonder: Are There 5 Higgs Bosons?
80beats: Ghost in the Machine? Physicists May Have Detected a New Particle at Fermilab
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Now that the Large Hadron Collider is smashing lead, the discoveries are coming fast and furious.
Earlier this month CERN’s smashing machine switched from sending protons zinging around its ring to sending heavy lead ions at relativistic speeds. Those energetic collisions, the physicists now say, have allowed them to use the LHC’s ALICE experiment to glimpse quark-gluon plasma, the “primordial soup” present just after the Big Bang.
During this time, the Universe would have been so hot and energetic that the particles making up the elements we know today were unable to form, leaving the constituents to float “free” as a primordial soup. Quarks and gluons were only able to condense into larger particles when universal energy conditions were low enough. Hadrons (i.e. particles made from quarks; including baryons like neutrons and protons) were only allowed to form 10-6 seconds after the Big Bang. [Discovery News]
(more…)
It’s a trap! (For antimatter.)
Researchers report this week in Nature that they’ve managed to corral atoms of antimatter in the lab and keep them around for about one-sixth of one second—an eternity in particle physics. The ability to trap these atoms means scientists could soon have the ability to study them directly, and perhaps answer one of the fundamental questions of the universe: Why the matter and antimatter present after the Big Bang didn’t annihilate each other completely and leave a matter-less universe behind.
Jeffery Hangst led the research team at CERN’s ALPHA collaboration.
It’s not easy, because of that mutual-annihilation issue. Hangst said the first trick was to combine the particles in a super-cold vacuum setting — less than 0.5 Kelvin, or -458.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That way, the particles don’t instantly jump away and fizzle out. The second trick is to build a magnetic trap to help contain the particles so that they don’t instantly decay. And there’s a third trick: designing a system capable of verifying that the atoms actually exist. “You must have a trap, and you must be cold, and you must be able to detect that you’ve done this,” Hangst said. [MSNBC]
(more…)
After analyzing light coming from distant quasars, some researchers have asked a physical constant a blunt question: Are you really constant at all? And since the “fine structure constant” that they’re interrogating is important for how physicists understand things like electrons’ behavior in atoms and fusion in stars, other physicists are asking their own question: Are your measurements correct?
The paper, which appeared last month in arXiv, argues that the constant might vary depending on location. This controversial claim is a new twist on a previous controversial claim–made over the past decade by some of the same physicists–which said that the constant varied with time.
Craig Hogan of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., acknowledges that “it’s a competent team and a thorough analysis.” But because the work has such profound implications for physics and requires such a high level of precision measurements, “it needs more proof before we’ll believe it.” [Science News]
(more…)
The smashing has started. Now the science can commence.
Last week we reported that the Large Hadron Collider’s operators at CERN targeted today to attempt the highest energy particle collisions ever. And to show the world that yes, in fact, the LHC can meet a deadline, today they slammed together the two proton beams, each carrying 3.5 trillion electron volts, to produce 7 TeV collisions. As the first data from the impacts were announced, physicists who had gathered at CERN applauded, jumped up and down, and clutched laptops displaying images of the collisions to their chests as if the computers were newborn babes [National Geographic].
While the physicists enjoy their moment of euphoria, they caution that it will be some time before the LHC’s collisions translate into new data that could reveal deeper secrets of the universe. “Major discoveries will happen only when we are able to collect billions of events and identify among them the very rare events that could present a new state of matter or new particles,” said Guido Tonelli, a spokesman for the CMS detector at the LHC. “This is not going to happen tomorrow. It will require months and years of patient work” [BBC News]. This round of collisions should last a year and a half or so. After a planned shutdown, the physicists plant to crank up the collider to its full power of 14 TeV.
For more about the long road to now and the future of LHC physics, follow DISCOVER blog Cosmic Variance.
Related Content:
Cosmic Variance: LHC Physics Begins!
Cosmic Variance: Highest Energy Ever
80beats: Rumors of the LHC’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
80beats: LHC Beam Zooms Past 1 Trillion Electron Volts, Sets World Record
80beats: Baguettes and Sabateurs from the Future Defeated: LHC Smashes Particles
DISCOVER: A Tumultuous Year at the LHC
Image: CERN
Are you ready for some subatomic smash-ups? Good, because the Large Hadron Collider is about ready to get serious. Everyone’s favorite long-delayed particle collider fended off rumors of its demise earlier in the month, and last week it reached a new energy record for its circulating proton beams: 3.5 trillion electron volts (TeV). That marked the highest particle energy ever accomplished by humans. A week from today, March 30, the LHC will start trying to smash those two beams together for the highest energy collisions yet.
“Just lining the beams up is a challenge in itself: it’s a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers [AFP]. So while the CERN scientists will fire up the machine and make their first attempt on March 30, they acknowledge that it could take a few hours or days to get everything set and start gathering data.
(more…)
Only the tiny bits of matter, atoms and molecules, have even been observed in a quantum state—until now. In a study in this week’s Nature, physicists report that they’ve put the largest object ever into that state where the weird rules of quantum mechanics apply, and things can be in two places at once. Research leader Andrew Cleland says: “There is this question of where the dividing line is between the quantum world and the classical world we know. We know perfectly well that things are not in two places at the same time in our everyday experience, but this fundamental theory of physics says that they can be” [BBC News].
The researchers’ “quantum resonator,” seen here, is a vibrating device that measures only in micrometers, but that’s large enough for us to see it with a little help from a scanning electron microscope. To see quantum mechanics in action, scientists try to put an object into its ground state, the point when no more energy can be removed from the system. Then they add a quantum of energy back in, which can oscillate between locations. Although only one quantum of energy is put in, any measurements will show either zero or one quanta; strictly, the atom has both [BBC News].
(more…)
A year and a half ago, the team led by Alexander Kashlinsky of NASA proposed the controversial and ominously named “dark flow,” a massive gravitational force that is tugging at galaxy clusters, and that Kashlinsky says could be coming from beyond the limits of our own visible universe. Now the team is back with a follow-up study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and Kashlinsky says the team has tracked the dark flow out twice as far as before.
A quick note on dark flow: The reason Kashlinsky noticed it is thanks to the cosmic microwave background, a signature left over from 380,000 years after the Big Bang that permeates the universe. “The hot X-ray-emitting gas within a galaxy cluster scatters photons from the cosmic microwave background (CMB),” the NASA press release says. “Because galaxy clusters don’t precisely follow the expansion of space, the wavelengths of scattered photons change in a way that reflects each cluster’s individual motion.” Using data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which mapped the microwave background, the team managed to find this tiny effect when they looked at huge clusters of galaxies, and found something totally unexpected.
(more…)
It sounded again today like the Large Hadron Collider—previously the victim of technical failure, hackers, and avian sabateurs—was cursed. The BBC reported that the world’s largest particle collider would have to shut down at the end of 2011, possibly for an entire year, to address its mechanical problems, according to LHC director Steven Myers. The report states that the faults will delay the machine reaching its full potential for two years [BBC News].
Just one problem, though: While the information came out as another “LHC is broken” news break, Myers actually put forth the intended schedule more than a month ago. The LHC team announced that it would actually extend the physics run through until December 2011, before shutting the accelerator down for a year. The only real delay here has been to the reporting of the story [The Times]. Brian Cox, one of the project scientists, spent the morning tweeting up a storm in protest to the news handling of what he says is just a scheduled shutdown. (A typical tweet reads: “For the very last time – the #lhc story is a pile of merde, as we say at CERN. Scheduled maintenance stops are not bloody news!”)
The LHC will keep running until late next year at 7 trillion electron volts (TeV), as planned. The engineers will go in after that to carry out the planned maintenance on systems in the tunnel that have proven problematic so far; their improvements should allow the LHC to approach what was the goal from the start, doing physics at 14 TeV. In any case, the machine’s upcoming resting time isn’t an emergency shutdown. Particle accelerators are regularly shut down for re-engineering. They are huge, complex instruments, and it’s just impossible to run them full-time like a domestic boiler [The Times].
Related Content:
80beats: LHC Beam Zooms Past 1 Trillion Electron Volts, Sets World Record
80beats: Baguettes and Sabateurs from the Future Defeated: LHC Smashes Particles
DISCOVER: A Tumultuous Year at the LHC
Discoblog: LHC Shut Down By Wayward Baguette, Dropped By Bird Saboteur
Image: Claudia Marcelloni / CERN
While the oft-troubled Large Hadron Collider is starting back up today after a weekend glitch, another big physics project is under way halfway around the world. The British and Japanese researchers behind the project called T2K (Tokai-to-Kamioka) announced their first neutrino detection, the initial step in an experiment to understand these mysterious subatomic particles.
Neutrinos are tiny particles that rarely interact with matter, making them incredibly difficult to study. But physicists have done it by looking for the signature left behind when one of the torrent of neutrinos flying through the Earth at any given time happens to crash into the nucleus of an atom within view of a neutrino detector. Japan’s Super Kamiokande is one of the largest neutrino detectors, and now it has a new mission under the T2K project. The goal is to understand a strange kind of subatomic metamorphosis. These particles come in three types or flavours: electron, muon and tau neutrinos. From earlier experiments, physicists know that neutrinos spontaneously change their flavour, oscillating back and forth from one kind to another. But the details are still hazy [New Scientist].
(more…)
Waltzing black holes, star-destroying black holes; it’s a black hole bonanza as the American Astronomical Society meets this week in Washington DC.
First, the orbiting pairs: Just about every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its heart that is millions if not billions the size of our sun. Logic would suggest that when two galaxies merge, astronomers would see the two great black holes orbiting each other, but so far they’ve had tough luck, astronomer Julie Comerford says. “We expect the universe to be littered with these waltzing black holes,” Comerford said. “But until recently, only a few had ever been found.” Those missing black hole pairs posed problems for theories of how galaxies merge and grow [Wired.com].
(more…)
