Something going on in the world of high energy particle physics

Two months ago there was an article put on arxiv about an experiment performed at Fermilab which showed some strange results. The experiment involved smashing protons and antiprotons together and see what happens. What happened was that they saw a signal that they didn't expect and which supposedly goes beyond standard models of particle physics. This is quite exciting since we are always trying to figure out new ways to learn about nature and the world around us.

I am no expert in particle physics but it seems that this blog post explains what is going on in good detail and hopefully in a manner that most people can understand.

The reason I bring this up now is because back then this signal was not taken really seriously, it was called a 3-sigma event which means basically that it didn't have statistical significance to it, it might just be a fluke. But recently this signal got a 5-sigma significance which is really exciting.

Too bad the Tevatron (which is the accelerator that performed this experiment) is supposed to be shut down soon.

High temperature superconductors

This says it all.

It would be excellent to get easy to produce hight temperature superconductors. High speed railways for everyone!!! :-)

Some cool things

Here are a few cool things I have found during my wanderings over the net lately:

A draft to a paper to be published in Scientific American about the limit of quantum computing.

A blog about cool stuff found on the preprint site for papers on physics stuff.

A blog post about why linux doesn't cut it in the mainstream and an experiment the author is conducting to try to prove his hypothesis (won't be a conclusive experiment, but could give reason to further experiments in sociology :-) )

Solar evidence points to human causes of climate change, take that climate warming by human intervention sceptics! :-)

The most powerful laser ever built.

That all for now.

A little update

I am so close to finishing my masters now I think, that I have begun for serious to apply for Ph.D. programs.

So far I have applied for one at DTU, a really interesting project there that is about making quantum feedback controllers so that measurements that have to be so precise that the quantum noise that follows every experiment made is the lower bound of the precision in the experiment. Usually experiments have lots more uncertainty in them, the equipment that is used has some uncertainty but using feedback controllers than you can try to minimize this uncertainty.

The other position is in Stuttgart, in the group of Prof. Tilman Pfau. They are investigating a lot of things but they are searching for a Ph.D. student in their dipolar BEC of chromium atoms. Sounds fancy ayyhh?? :-)

So I am going down to Stuttgart in october and giving them a talk and they will show me around the lab and we will have a little discussion about the prognosis of me being hired in the position .... jaaaayyyy! :-)

So not much blogging going on, but I will update this when I know something about my future plans.

Gaussian cooling

In my experiments at school I do laser cooling of Mg atoms. For this we use a Gaussian beam (that is a beam that has the intensity shape of a 2D Gaussian in the direction of the beam) to get a good distribution of light on the atoms. But I wonder what would happen if we had non-Gaussian beams? See the pictures here to see how Gaussian and non-Gaussian beams look like (the Gaussian beam is the TEM00 one).

Storing an image in a single photon!

Yes, you read it right, storing an whole image (like of yourself taken with a normal camera) in a single photon. That is impossible you would think! But what hasn't been done today with modern technology in quantum optics? They have teleported information across a small distance here Copenhagen amongst other things. But this headline is actually just what your guts tell you, bullshit.

For the past few days many news media (including specialized science media like physorg.com) have botched up a science breakthrough and made it into something it isn't. I don't know whose to blame (if it is the science writers or the people who made the press release because the news was out before the article got published so most science writers didn't read the article) but when a team of science writers all make the same mistake what is the public to think?

The mistake they made is saying that an experiment that researchers at University of Rochester could carry a whole image in a single photon when all the experiment did was slow light down and make the light continue to withhold information during and after the slowing which had not been done before.

You know that you can get information about the shape of a thing by shining light on it and look at its shadow, right? So you know how a cross section of the thing looks like without looking at the thing itself. Or you can have a mask and shine a light through the pattern in it and the pattern will emerge on the wall behind the mask. Thats just what these researchers did. They shone a lot of light through a mask and recorded the light afterwards, but in between the mask and the detector they let the light go through a certain gas that was specially prepared so it would slow the light down and allso not make the light loose information about the original pattern. What got the science writers confused was that they managed to do this for very low light levels, so low in fact that in each light pulse there were less then one photon (0.8 actually, now how is that possible?), but they still sent a lot of those pulses to recreate the original image, they did not send one photon through the mask and then detected it and recreated the image using only that one photon, no sirrrreeeeee.

Exploding doors!

At school yesterday we were talking about the main entrence to H. C. Ørsted institute. It has 4 doors on each side of a small hall and each door (8 in all) have big windows in them, there are pumps that keep the doors from slamming when released if open. The thing about these doors is that they open out instead of in like most doors do and a colleague of mine was wondering of why that is. Apparantly they did this design because if an explosion would happen inside the building (the doors are in the chemistry part of the building, we physicists dont do explosions that often) then the doors would fly open and not shatter the glass in the doors. He and another colleague thought this was bullshit but I am not so certain, I think glass can be strong enough to press open the doors (even though there is this dampening pump on them). What do you think?