Tag: particle physics
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Meet the glueball, the missing Standard Model particle
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Glueballs are the missing frontier of the Standard Model There should be particles made entirely of gluons, but we don’t know how to find them For Ars Technica: The…
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Of GUTs, glory, and the death of a proton
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Do protons decay? Is it possible that these fundamental building blocks of atoms have a finite lifetime? For Symmetry Magazine: The stuff of daily existence is made of atoms,…
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Why are there three copies of each type of particle?
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] The mystery of particle generations Why are there three almost identical copies of each particle of matter? For Symmetry Magazine: The Standard Model of particles and interactions is remarkably…
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Emmy Noether and her wonderful theorem
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Mathematician to know: Emmy Noether Noether’s theorem is a thread woven into the fabric of the science For Symmetry Magazine: We are able to understand the world because it…
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Of symmetries, the strong force and Helen Quinn
[ I am reviving the Bowler Hat Science blog as a quick way to link all my new publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all my stories! ] Of symmetries, the strong force and Helen Quinn From Symmetry: Modern theoretical physicists spend much of their time examining the symmetries governing particles and…
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Weird X-Rays Spur Speculation about Dark Matter Detection
[ I am reviving the Bowler Hat Science blog as a quick way to link all my new publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all my stories! ] Weird X-Rays Spur Speculation about Dark Matter Detection From Scientific American: Many major discoveries in astronomy began with an unexplained signal: pulsars, quasars and…
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The dark horse of the dark matter hunt
[ I am reviving the Bowler Hat Science blog as a quick way to link all my new publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all my stories! ] The dark horse of the dark matter hunt From Symmetry Magazine: The ADMX experiment seems to be an exercise in contradictions. Dark matter, the…
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Does antimatter fall up or down?
[ I am reviving the Bowler Hat Science blog as a quick way to link all my new publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all my stories! ] Does antimatter fall up or down? From NOVA Nature of Reality: There are two kinds of matter in the universe: ordinary matter, which makes…
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Four quarks for Muster Mark!
Today, researchers with the LHCb experiment at CERN announced the confirmation of a weird object that first appeared in detectors in 2008. This object is made up of four quarks, where other particles are made of two or three quarks (or zero, in the case of electrons, neutrinos, and the like). But what sort of…
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We are bound by symmetry
Physics is largely a matter of finding patterns in natural processes and translating that to mathematical expression. That’s a horribly oversimplified view, of course, but there’s no question that physics (and other branches of science) seeks to find symmetries. The huge successes of modern particle physics have largely arisen from identifying symmetries — and when…
