Search

The article focuses on the budgetary constraints faced by U.S. particle physicists, as they unveil a plan for the next decade with a conservative approach. Topics discussed include the completion of existing projects, support for ongoing experiments, and prioritization of smaller-scale initiatives, such as detecting dark matter particles and studying dark energy.

To learn about Oppenheimer the scientist, Science spoke with David C. Cassidy, a physicist and historian emeritus at Hofstra University. NEWS This week, the much anticipated movie Oppenheimer hits theaters, giving famed filmmaker Christopher Nolan's take on the theoretical physicist who during World War II led the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. [Extracted from the article]

The article reports that physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) are resurrecting particle detector into tomblike pit and mentions that workers eased silver tanks shipping containers. Topics discussed include insulated sarcophagus while technicians mill about on top, U.S. physicists who chose the risky technology for neutrino experiment and lack of signs of physics at particle colliders.

The article focuses on the megaproject, two intertwined efforts called the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), which will not be completed to its original specs until the mid-2030s. Topics include comments from physicists involved in the project, a rival in Japan called Hyper-Kamiokande (Hyper-K), and the plan of Hyper-K and DUNE to search for neutrinos from supernova explosions and signs that protons can decay.

The article discusses the experiment of Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) physicists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) on the neutrinos weigh. Topics discussed include the study on beta decay by physicist James Chadwick, the mass of the neutrino concluded by physicist Enrico Fermi, and the association between cosmology and KATRIN experiment.

The article features physicist Rainer Weiss who dreamed up a way to detect gravitational waves. Topics covered include the discovery of a pulse of waves via the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the extraordinary life led by Weiss and his growth in an environment of benign neglect. Also mentioned is his experience in working for Jerrold Zacharias who studied beams of atoms and molecules.

The article discusses a dispute related to China’s Recruitment Program of Foreign Experts (Thousand Talents plan). Topics include theoretical physicist Ulf Leonhardt, who was promised a high salary if he agreed to spend three months at South China Normal University's (SCNU's) Centre for Optical and Electromagnetic Research (COER) in Guangzhou, COER's diversion of grant money and salary due Leonhardt and his partner Jana Silberg, and COER researcher Sailing He's denial of fraud.

The article discusses unity and generous budgets, the Department of Energy (DOE), the field's main U.S. sponsor starting on the projects on the list. Topics include physicists wanting the U.S. to build a huge experiment to fire elusive particles called neutrinos long distances through Earth to study how they oscillate from one type to another; and scientists having a path forward in their search for particles of dark matter that appears to pervade the galaxies and bind them with its gravity.

The article discusses the teams of physicists at A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), two detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) which are being used to search for the Higgs boson and study supersymmetry (SUSY). The ATLAS and CMS collaborations both involve thousands of scientists who compete with each other to make discoveries. Physicists including Martijn Mulders, Sara Strandberg, and Maria Spiropulu discuss competition between groups, concerns about unethical behavior, and the culture of CMS and ATLAS. INSET: U. S. Physicists, a Long Way From Home.

The article presents the discussion on physicists with an experiment called DAMA claiming the particles of dark matter including crystals of thallium-doped sodium iodide.

The article highlights the development of the Large Hadron Collider at the European particle physics laboratory CERN which will smash particles at unprecedented energy and may open new realms of discovery. Researchers hope to put the largest and most complex experimental device ever built through its warm-up laps. It was designed to smash particles at energies seven times higher than the previous record and should blast out the one bit of matter missing from physicists' theory of the known particles.

The article presents information on the mystery related to the alignment of the electrons in high-temperature superconductors (HTS). Even after two decades of the discovery of HTS physicists are unable to understand the pairing and gliding of electrons within the material at temperatures around 138 Kelvin. The electrons in HTS slide so closely and intensely that the motion of one electron can not be disentangled from the others. To explore the nature of HTS, various theories have been given like high-temperature superconductivity arises from the interaction of electrons and not from phonons. Another theory states that electrons in the HTS act like little magnets to produce superconductivity. But there is no unanimity among scientists related to any one theory.

Now, SIOM physicist Wentao Wang, Feng, and colleagues have improved the output of their plasma wakefield accelerator enough to do something potentially useful with it: power an FEL. To make that possible, SIOM physicists had to shrink the spread in the electrons' energy to 0.5%. "It is hard to say how long it will take to reach the hard x-ray wavelengths, maybe a decade or longer", says Ruxin Li, an SIOM physicist and team member. [Extracted from the article]

To achieve the surface code, Google researchers still have to improve the individual physical qubits and reduce their error rate by a further 30%, or less than a factor of two, says Kevin Satzinger, a Google physicist. PHOTO (COLOR): Google researchers experimented on their Sycamore chip, designed to demonstrate quantum error correction. Google Physicists at Google have taken an important step toward protecting delicate information in their nascent quantum computer from errors that can obliterate it. [Extracted from the article]

For decades, physicists have measured the magnetism of the muon, a heavier, unstable cousin of the electron, which behaves like a tiny bar magnet. PHOTO (COLOR): Muons twirl as they circulate in this ring-shaped accelerator at Fermilab, like race cars perpetually spinning out. [Extracted from the article]

PHOTO (COLOR): Chien-Shiung Wu was born in Liuhe, China, a town north of Shanghai, and emigrated to the United States in 1936. © 2021 U.S. Postal Service Lee and Yang shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of parity violation, but Wu did not. [Extracted from the article]

PHOTO (COLOR): A conception of a compact fusion power plant, developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alexander Creely U.S. fusion scientists, notorious for squabbling over which projects to fund with their field's limited budget, have coalesced around an audacious goal. "By identifying [a power plant] as a goal, that can trigger more research in those areas that support that mission", says Stephanie Diem, a fusion physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. [Extracted from the article]

The article looks at debates around the existence of the sterile neutrino (ST) subatomic particle. Topics discussed include a gathering of scientists in September 2011 to discuss whether staging a dedicated experiment to detect STs is worthwhile, the three types of known neutrinos, electron, muon, and tau, and how scientists must detect STs from the sudden appearance or disappearance of ordinary neutrinos. Information about the movement patterns of neutrinos is presented. Experimental evidence for STs from the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is considered.

Historically, physicists often have found new particles at proton colliders and studied them in detail at electron-positron colliders. Now, CERN physicists envision a future in which, around 2040, they build a huge circular electron-positron collider to study the Higgs. CERN may also have competition in the presumed collider arms race, as physicists in China have similar plans to build big circular colliders. [Extracted from the article]

PHOTO (COLOR): By looking for x-rays coming from the sky between the stars, a team of physicists claims to have ruled out one possible type of dark matter. An ordinary neutrino can interact with an atomic nucleus; sterile neutrinos would only interact with other neutrinos, arising when an ordinary neutrino morphs into a sterile one through a process called neutrino mixing. Very rarely, a sterile neutrino would decay into an ordinary neutrino and an x-ray, which would have an energy equal to half the sterile neutrino's mass. [Extracted from the article]

PHOTO (COLOR): Physicists used a special technique to help photons travel further down standard optical fibers. Physicists in China have forged a mysterious quantum connection between particles, called entanglement, over dozens of kilometers of standard optical fiber, setting a new record. [Extracted from the article]

PHOTO (COLOR): NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has mapped the entire sky and found a faint, unexplained excess of gamma rays (inset) coming from around the center of our galaxy. Physicists think the entire Milky Way Galaxy lies embedded in a vast cloud of dark matter, like the swirl of color within a marble, with the dark matter densest in the middle. [Extracted from the article]

The neutrino can weigh no more than 1.1 electron volts (eV) - less than one-500,000th the mass of an electron - say experimenters with the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. So KATRIN physicists argue that their better, directly measured limit on neutrino mass is likely to make cosmology models more reliable. [Extracted from the article]

The article examines whether it is possible for a perfect crystal to flow. It is reported that physicists Eunseong Kim and Moses Chan at the Pennsylvania State University, have designed an aluminum cylinder 13 millimeters wide and 5 millimeters tall which sits atop a slender post of beryllium copper. The device hardly looks like the heart of a breakthrough physics experiment. Yet it produced perhaps the weirdest stuff ever made. In 2004, while Kim was a graduate student, he and physicist Chan used the can to squeeze ultracold helium into a crystalline solid that appears to flow without resistance — like a liquid with no viscosity. Kim and Chan's results have touched off a flurry of activity among experimenters and a debate among theorists as to whether it's even possible for a perfect crystal to flow. They are rejuvenating helium physics, a small field that has played a large role in shaping modern physics. Kim and Chan had previously seen signs of such "superfluid" flow in solid helium crammed into the pores of a spongelike glass. But on January 3, 2004 they saw the first clear evidence that it could occur in a pure crystal. INSET: The Quirks and Culture of Helium..

The article focuses on quantum theory of gravity. Candidate theories can be tested directly only with particle collisions a million, billion times more energetic than any produced with a particle accelerator. Only a decade ago, questioning special relativity would have struck many as heretical, says Robert Bluhm, a theoretical physicist at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Physicists are now testing special relativity with everything from enormous particle accelerators, to tiny electromagnetic traps that can hold a single electron for months, to bobs of metal twisting on the ends of long fibers. INSET: Doubly Special, Twice as Controversial.

This article presents information related to String Theory. In 1984, Schwarz and Michael Green, a physicist at the University of Cambridge in the Great Britain found a way around key mathematical pitfalls in string theory, which assumes that every elementary particle is a tiny vibrating string and that space has more dimensions than one can see. String theory promises to reconcile Einstein's theory of gravity with the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics which answer the deepest conceptual questions in particle physics and even explain how the universe sprang into existence. INSET: The Children of the Revolution.

Physicists working with Cornell University's Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) particle collider of Cornell University, Ithace, New York, embark on the venerable machine's final mission: to decipher the strong force that binds quarks to one another. In a circular tunnel, electrons and their antimatter partners, positrons, whirl at near light speed through the 768-meter-long CESR. Speeding in opposite directions, the electrons and positrons slam into each other to produce more massive particles in the heart of the accelerator's mate, the three-story-tall particle detector CLEO, which squats in a cavernous hall on the other side of a cement wall. Those exotic particles quickly explode into more-familiar ones, and barrellike CLEO faithfully tracks the shards. INSET: Laurels for CESR and CLEO.

The article discusses the discovery of gravitational wave by the physicists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Louisiana. It states that the researchers sensed a wave that extended space by one part and made the entire Earth expand and contract by 1/100,000 of a nanometer. It mentions that the gravitation wave came from objects as massive as sun spiraling to within 210 kilometers before merging.

An interview with sociologist Harry Collins is presented in which he discusses his work with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project. He comments on his interest in controversial sciences, how he became involved with LIGO physicists, and his goals as a sociologist of science.

The article discusses the anticipated publication of a study by physicist Robert Laughlin in the Physical Review Letters and Physical Review B containing his research on condensed matter physics as of December 2013, with a focus on the origins of high-temperature superconductivity. Topics include criticisms of Laughlin's research, Laughlin's feud with physicist Philip Anderson, and the Mott insulator state.

The article discusses news in the field of particle physics and the question of whether particles of dark matter have been observed in associated experimentation. The article references theorist Dan Hooper and colleagues and their hypothesis that particles of dark matter have been observed based on 3 experiments noted in the article. Other physicists are said to believe that their research rules out particles of dark matter. Cosmologist Rocky Kolb is cited regarding the magnitude of the research effort that will be needed to discover the nature of dark matter.