catdynamics | August 14, 2012"New Particle Physics at the LHC and Its Connection to Dark Matter" is the name of the current workshop at the Aspen Center for Physics running through Sep 9th.
I'm hanging out for the first few days and the first presentation is on "what has the LHC Higgs done to supersymmetry"?
So, basic point is that supersymmetry sort of predicts that the Higgs mass (125 GeV) should be close to the Z mass (91 GeV), up to some corrections. So the mass corrections can be parametrised in perturbative theory, and how do you nail a ~ 30% correction and keep everything natural?
We talk about our feelings.
We…
catdynamics | August 14, 2012 Choose what the VLT observes - public vote on a science target one night this autumn
Ralph Cicerone Public Lecture - Contemporary Climate Change as Seen through Data - video of Ralph Cicerone lecture on Climate Change at the Aspen Center for Physics this summer
Cliff at Asymptotia summarises the "Future of Physics" public symposium at the Aspen Center for Physics.
With bonus pics of physicists gone wild!
How did I miss this?! - the Definitive Dunkin' Donuts study on which professions need coffee the most...
"scientists/lab technicians are the professions that need coffee the most,…
catdynamics | August 9, 2012Last talk of the LHC Shows the Way workshop, with the most provocative title.
Entries in this post may or may not be mangled misrepresentations of stuff the speaker made up just to be provocative...
Starting point: there is something at ~ 125 GeV and it is consistent with a boson, possibly a scalar, and quite likely a standard model Higgs boson.
Agreed.
Preliminary results for CMS experiments show branching ratio to ττ decay mode a little bit lower than normal.
ATLAS initially did simple crude analysis of this channel.
Now redone with more data and better technique.
ATLAS expect to make…
catdynamics | August 9, 2012The LHC Shows the Way workshop is about to end, and the slow live blog limps along with a presentation on the composite Higgs.
A model for having a light (~ 100 GeV ) scalar, is to have a composite Higgs instead of the alternative of either a true supersymmetric model or a light dilaton scalar.
As with such models in general, they violate unitarity if extrapolated to higher energies, so force a new energy scale, at, say, few TeV - like another particle there (cf old effective weak interaction theory).
Yes, if you work it out in detail, the effective coupling runsaway and you need to truncate…
catdynamics | August 8, 2012The Sloan Digital Sky Survey just released their largest 3-D data set, positions and redshifts, as part of their 9th data release.
Here is the fly through.
Awesome, eh?
catdynamics | August 7, 2012
More random topics that crossed my path:
bureaucratic entropy: "...In 1987, except at private research universities, where administrators outnumbered tenure-track faculty, colleges had approximately as many tenure-track faculty as full-time administrators. By 2008 there were more than twice as many administrators as tenure-track faculty at all types of institutions."
Cuts loom for US science.
Wise and Shine - UC Berkeley startup providing machine learning and big data services.
Significant astro and time domain data analysis group.
High Speed Trading goes berserk - morbidly fascinating…
catdynamics | August 7, 2012Back at the LHC Shows the Way workshop at the Aspen Center for Physics - more discussion of Higgs alternatives and peculiar branching ratios.
No, the branching ratios for the different decay modes of the 125 GeV boson that is putatively the Higgs are not anomalous at a statistically significant level, but, they are off a bit.
So, theorists go wild with ecstatic speculation - it is fun and not yet ruled out by data, what else can we do!
This morning Fan on 2:1 for Naturalness at the LHC? by Nima Arkani-Hamed, Kfir Blum, Raffaele Tito D'Agnolo, JiJi Fan
Later there will be discussion on jet…
catdynamics | August 6, 2012This spring, the Hubble outreach office started a Hubble Treasure Hunt
The challenge was to browse through the Hubble raw data archives, and look for undiscovered images, ones that had not been published and were interesting or beautiful.
There are a lot of Hubble images.
The finalists for the contest have now been announced, in two different categories: one for unprocessed images; the other for processed images.
The decision on the winners, will be done by public vote, and the selection of finalist images is up on the web and open for voting:unprocessed images are hereprocessed images are…
catdynamics | August 2, 2012Large Fluctuations and Collective Behavior in Solids is an overlapping workshop going on in parallel with the LHC stuff at the Aspen Center for Physics, while down the road the Republican Governors' meet at the Aspen Institute and Romney is down the valley while his peeps meet with the super PACs over lunch.
The kickoff colloquium for the Collective Behaviour crowd is from Bouchard on Fracture Physics.
Nice reminder that much of physics is not about Higgs bosons or speculations on supersymmetry. Also good reminder that superficially applied problems have deep issues of universality and…
catdynamics | August 2, 2012In which we ask, what would you do if you could change your own personal history?
A Kind of Magic! - No, that is not a non-Higgs boson, it is the Astronomy Magazine competition to win a signed copy of Brian May's PhD thesis in astronomy.
"To enter the contest, submit a short essay (200 to 500 words) that describes what you would do — what would your subject be and why? — if you could magically go back to school and earn a doctoral degree in astronomy.
How would you change the astronomy world? What research subject would entice you? Planetary science? Cosmology? Galaxy investigations? And what…
catdynamics | August 2, 2012Back at the LHC Shows the Way workshop and slow live blogging of the discussion, with random asides for other stuff...
Astronomy Magazine has a contest - win Brian May's PhD thesis! - now separate post with added bonus question
Today:
fake Higgs - are there some new bosons which are not Higgs, but which look like Higgs. Specifically looking at other scalar or pseudoscalars, or the possibility of spin-2 tensor particles.
Aside: cool 2D fluid flow web site - GPU powered 512k sim run live through WebGL - hypnotic turbulence to crash your browser
Look for general models where some particle…
catdynamics | July 31, 2012$3 million each for 9 theorists from Yuri Milner Foundation Fundamental Physics Prize
IAS big winner.
Milner Prize: Guth (MIT), Linde (Stanford); Arkani-Hamed, Maldacena, Seiberg and Witten (IAS); Kitaev (Caltech); Kontsevich (IASS); and, Sen (Chandra Institute).
String theory, inflation and quantum computing.
Heavy on IAS, the Techs and Russian expats.
All good choices.
Follows hard on the heels of the Simons Foundation Investigator awards.
Aleiner (Columbia); Brenner (Harvard); Glotzer (Michigan); Hastings (Duke); Hirata (Caltech); Kane (UPenn); Ooguri (Caltech); Pretorius (Princeton);…
catdynamics | July 31, 2012Continuing lazy live blog of the LHC Shows the Way workshop, with random interludes of alternative considerations, including the more esoteric aspects of German finance...
Patio session (informal presentation of in-progress results on blackboard, outside) - didn't catch speaker's name, got here a couple of minutes late.
Being reminded that Higgs is not the only scalar that may exist out there - could the LHC 125 GeV bump be a dilaton?
Paper by Csaki and collaborators coming out in August on arXiv.
Aside: the proliferation of chargeless scalars in quantum field theories has always bothered me…
catdynamics | July 26, 2012LHC Shows the Way workshop: general colloquium reviewing the LHC and the Higgs discovery.
Kyle Cramner from NYU: "We discovered the goddamned particle"
More slow live blog.
Cute opening video of LHC construction.
Factoid: kinetic energy of LHC beam is about that of a jumbo jet at cruise speed
Starting point: Standard Model is ridiculously successful, at the part per million quantitative level.
In the regime in which it is valid.
Add Higgs and you don't just get mass, you get coupling to fermion decay is proportional to the Higgs induced mass of the fermion.
Can calculate Higgs boson…
catdynamics | July 26, 2012The LHC Shows the Way workshop rolls on, looking at the implications of the Higgs at 125-126 GeV for supersymmetry.
I live blog, slowly.
Where are the sparticles.
Coloured supersymmetric partners, the quark and gluon supersymmetric partners, must be massive - greater than ~ 1,000 GeV
in some natural implementation of supersymmetry, natch, clever theorists can of course think of increasingly contrived ways to get around most any limit, at the expense of fewer and fewer people believing them.
Minimal supersymmetric extensions to the standard model, with the Higgs mass assumed to be 126 GeV and…
catdynamics | July 24, 2012For reasons too complicated to explain, I am at The LHC Show the Way workshop at the Aspen Center for Physics.
This is a three week workshop on the latest results from the LHC, to be followed by a four week workshop on new physics from the LHC and possible connections to dark matter.
The kickoff presentation is on the current status of the experimental results. Relayed from the ICHEP meeting.
Just for fun I'll do some liveblogging from the somewhat outside perspective of an astrophysicist.
The current run at the LHC will be extended to Dec 17, couple months beyond planned before going into a…
catdynamics | July 24, 2012This week I was treated to an impressive illustration of the power of modern security technology.
I was passing through Reagan National Airport, having been deflected from my previous schedule (which had originally included a stay at the hotel complex in Aurora, CO last thursday night - serendipitously I had cancelled the reservation and then couldn't get out of DC anyway).
I had an early morning flight, security check was busy, and I was directed to the millimeter wave scanner.
The scanners are basically low power THz active radar, and penetrate thin layers of dielectric materials, such as…
catdynamics | July 10, 2012Massive Reductions in Force announced at NRAO with additional major cutback at operations and facilities.
Forwarded without comment:
"Dear Colleagues,
This message is to inform you of actions NRAO is implementing to address an expected (non-ALMA) FY 2013 budget deficit of approximately $3M for our U.S.-based facilities: the Very Large Array, Very Long Baseline Array, and Green Bank Telescope.
After careful consideration of user community and Observatory priorities, and a comprehensive analysis of our options, we have been forced to conclude that a significant reduction-in-force and a…
catdynamics | July 9, 2012time for all new linkedy links here at the new digs
Quantum Frontiers - a new blog from the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, with kickoff by John Preskill hisself.
Question of the day: explain quantum mechanics in five words
My attempt: Probability Amplitudes, Observables don't Commute
Good to know John still does khakis and chalk, but we gots to know: does he still have the diet pepsi?
Took me years to break the habit... not that I was overly impressionable as a tender young grad turkey taking QFT or anything.
Subtleties of the Crappy Job Market - for Scientists, that is.…
catdynamics | July 7, 2012In which we remind people of the Ten Commandments of the God Particle.
Now with added footnotes.
I I am the Higgs. Thou shalt have no other Higgs before me.1
II Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the HIGGS thy God Particle am a jealous God Particle, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. 2
III Thou shalt not take the…