Tag: particle physics
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Emulating magnetic monopoles in Bose-Einstein condensates
Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical objects that act like the isolated north or south pole of a magnet. Ordinarily when you break a magnet in half, you end up with two smaller magnets, but some theories predict independent existence for monopoles — though they obviously must be rare in nature, because we haven’t seen one yet.…
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Madame Wu and the backward Universe
(Since my weekly round-up experiment seems to have failed horribly, I’m going to try to go back to linking and summarizing individual articles I’ve written around the web on this blog. We’ll see if I keep it up!) Chien-Shiung Wu is one of those physicists that everyone should know about, but not enough do. A…
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The week in review (August 25-31)
Welcome to the weekly round-up of stories I wrote this week, wherever they hide. A tour of physics, Angry Birds style (Double X Science): The odds are good that you’ve played Angry Birds, even if (like me) you don’t own a device that will run the game. My colleague Rhett Allain wrote a book for…
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Much ado about nothing in today’s dark matter non-announcement
OK, I might be feeling a little cranky about this, but my article for Ars Technica is a little more measured. I’ll have a longer analysis for Galileo’s Pendulum tomorrow, for those who want it. The short version: the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) is a particle detector installed on the International Space Station. For several…
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A Manly conversation
Writer/editor David Manly posed a series of questions to scientists and writers, soliciting short responses on topics of broad interest. Those interviewed were shark researcher David Schiffman, paleontology writer/sauropod snogger Brian Switek, and me. If you want to know who would win an arm-wrestling contest between a human and a Tyrannosaurus, or how we know…
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Will we ever know the identity of dark matter?
Forgive me if I get excited for a moment, but…today marks my first contribution to BBC Future! The feature I contributed is part of the “Will we ever?” series, in which science writers ask some big questions about what research may or may not be able to answer in the future. My article pondered whether…
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How big is a proton?
It’s fundamental and natural to ask this question about an object: “how big is it?” For many things—most everyday objects, people, planets, stars—size is easy to measure. However, other things are more challenging, including the size of a proton: one of the three particles that make up every ordinary bit of matter. The major challenge…
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High-energy cosmic rays are sped on their way by exploding stars
Where do cosmic rays originate? Cosmic rays are mostly high-energy protons from deep space that hit Earth’s upper atmosphere, creating showers of other particles that can be detected at the surface. Some of these protons are so incredibly high energy—meaning they’re moving just a whisker slower than the speed of light—that only exceptional astronomical events…
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Too many heavy particles could mean trouble for the Standard Model
The Standard Model (SM) of particles and interactions provides a successful description of most of the matter we know of. However, physicists have known for many years that it is not complete: the SM predicted massless neutrinos, and has no place for dark matter. A new result from the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear…
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