PhysMath Central Blog
Travis Brooks, posting on the new symmetry breaking blog, has analysed the titles of all 51 2007 Topcites from SPIRES (as well as abstracts from 37 of them and keywords from DESY for 27 of them) and thrown them at the TagCrowd.com generator to see what came out. Click on the image above, or here, to find out and get a flavour of HEP in 2007.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 12:18 Comments (0)
Looking and laughing at the LHC
Listening to comedian Bill Bailey on my iPod on the way to work isn't something which would usually warrant a mention on the blog here, but today was different. Today he was talking about the Large Hadron Collider and that the fact that the experiment has such a wide spectrum of success:
"The spectrum of success for this scientific experiment ranges from 'nothing will happen' when they switch it on...
- Turn it off, turn it on again.
...or, it will create a black hole under Switzerland. That seems to me to be huge margin of error. Nothing or Apocolypse."
He goes on to speculate that if it doesn't work, scientists will get bored and put other things in it, like Maltesers and satsumas.
And to complement that thought, some great photos from the latest issue of National Geographic of the LHC. Although they refer to the Higgs as 'The God Particle', something which annoys every physicist I know.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 10:56 Comments (2)
The title refers not to some ethereal thought experiment with antimatter, but rather to the existence of 'physics' outside of the realms of high-energy physics. The Incoherent Ponderer was upset with the recent Scientific American special report on The Future of Physics which seemed to focus exclusively on terascale/LHC physics:
I guess I am tired of arrogant statements like "physics" = "high energy physics", which is how a lot of popular media characterizes it. The irony, however, is that with ILC construction in serious peril, and with LHC not even operational yet (unclear what, if anything, they will find) - the REAL "future of physics" is arguably with biophysics, condensed matter or "materials" physics and AMO. I would expect that large particle collider experiments being phased out, with more useful data coming from cosmology (=astronomy).
At the same time, experiments in low-energy physics (condensed matter, optical, molecular, biophysics, materials and chemical physics) will continue to ramp up at an increasing rate.
It will be interesting to see how the proportion of students opting for a career in high-energy physics changes with the LHC switch-on and the potential non-appearance of the ILC over the coming 10 years.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 14:34 Comments (1)
Sign-up to fight the physics cutbacks
An email from Francisco Diego of the University College London Observatory is a call to action for UK-based scientists (or indeed anyone) to register their unhappiness with the current funding situation for physics & astronomy, which has lead to - amongst other things - the UK backing out of funding for the ILC.
There is now an approved (e)-petition online to collect signatures regarding the funding situation for physics and astronomy. Petitions with sufficient number of signees are forwarded to the government who then needs to come back with a response.
Its quick and easy;
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Physics-Funding/
Please sign it and then forward this on so that it might reach critical
mass.
You must be a British citizen or resident to sign the petition.
Also see this blog post from Imperial College for some more background to the story.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 13:58 Comments (1)
UK Physics Funding under pressure
Bad news for physics funding in the UK yesterday as the Science and Technology Facilities Council had its budget slashed by the somewhat bizarre-sounding Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. Due to higher than planned operating costs and a frozen budget, money is being redirected from other projects to cover this shortfall. As a result, the UK has backed out of funding the ILC, which was announced in 2 curt sentences, as follows:
"We will cease investment in the International Linear Collider. We do not see a practicable path towards the realisation of this facility as currently conceived on a reasonable timescale."
Much more on this story below:
UK Physics Investment Decimated
UK Physics on the chopping block
Ministers review physics funding - including a quote from PMC Physics A ed board memeber, Brian Cox.
Boffins slashed in big-science budget blunder bloodbath - comments are also worth reading.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 13:36 Comments (0)
API opens up arXiv to new apps
Good news from the people at arXiv as they announced at the recent e-sciences conference that they have released an arXiv API. From their new blog:
The arXiv API is an HTTP/Atom-based application programming interface that exposes the search and retrieval functionality of arXiv.org to application developers.
... You can visit the official arXiv API homepage for documentation, tutorials, and information on how to participate in the developer community, including our discussion list. Or you can follow this blog to find out the latest news concerning the API.
Details about the arXiv API developer's list, and an extended entry to the capabilities of the current API is available on a new dedicated section of the arXiv website.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 13:59 Comments (0)
Although the Large Hadron Collider is often portrayed in the press as a 'European' facility, particle physicists are close-knit, international community and the reality is that scientists from many different countries and continents have collaborated on this unique accelerator.
To highlight the USA's involvement in the LHC, the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation have launched a new website called US/LHC. To quote from their homepage:
More than 1200 physicists from 90 American universities and laboratories have joined with scientific colleagues from around the world to collaborate in LHC experiments at the horizon of discovery.
You can follow LHC start-up from a US-perspective courtesy of 4 blogs on the site written by Monica Dunford, Pamela Klabbers, Steve Nahn and Peter Steinberg. A combined blog listing and RSS feed is available from here.
Incidentally, the LHC is still on schedule for producing its first results in 2008, according to Robert Aymar.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 11:05 Comments (0)
Queen impressed by massive Diamond
Last week Queen Elizabeth II opened the UK's new national synchrotron facility, Diamond. Based in the Oxfrodshire countryside, Diamond is the largest science facility to be built in the UK in 40 years. It was funded largely by the UK government, but with a significant contribution from the Wellcome Trust.
Seven experimental stations went into operation at its launch:
Extreme conditions beamline for studying materials under intense temperatures and pressures.
Materials and magnetism beamline set up to probe electronic and magnetic materials at the atomic level.
Three macromolecular crystallography beamlines for understanding the structure of complex biological samples, such as proteins.
Microfocus spectroscopy beamline able to map the chemical make-up of complex materials, such as moon rocks and geological samples.
Nanoscience beamline capable of imaging structures and devices at a few millionths of a millimetre.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 12:45 Comments (0)
New article pubilshed in PMC Physics A
We are pleased to announce a new article published in PMC Physics A by Massimo Giovannini of CERN Theory Division.
Semi-analytical approach to magnetized temperature autocorrelations
Massimo Giovannini
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature autocorrelations, induced by a magnetized adiabatic mode of curvature inhomogeneities, are computed with semi-analytical methods. As suggested by the latest CMB data, a nearly scale-invariant spectrum for the adiabatic mode is consistently assumed. In this situation, the effects of a fully inhomogeneous magnetic field are scrutinized and constrained with particular attention to harmonics which are relevant for the region of Doppler oscillations. Depending on the parameters of the stochastic magnetic field a hump may replace the second peak of the angular power spectrum. Detectable effects on the Doppler region are then expected only if the magnetic power spectra have quasi-flat slopes and typical amplitude (smoothed over a comoving scale of Mpc size and redshifted to the epoch of gravitational collapse of the protogalaxy) exceeding 0.1 nG. If the magnetic energy spectra are bluer (i.e. steeper in frequency) the allowed value of the smoothed amplitude becomes, comparatively, larger (in the range of 20 nG). The implications of this investigation for the origin of large-scale magnetic fields in the Universe are discussed. Connections with forthcoming experimental observations of CMB temperature fluctuations are also suggested and partially explored.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 11:59 Comments (0)
Nobel Prize awarded to hard-disk pioneers
Congratulations are in order for French scientist Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg of Germany, who have won the 2007 Nobel Prize for physics. Their work in giant magnetoresistance allows information to be written and read from hard disks - a very real application of condensed matter research as it used in computer disks, iPods and a myriad of other modern marvels.
BBC News: Disk technology takes Nobel Prize
UPDATE (12 Oct): Research articles by the winners are now available for free to all who want to read them. Seems like the advantages of open access are being recognized by the APS. Of course all research in PhysMath Central is free to read and re-use in any way you wish.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 10:40 Comments (0)