The high energy physics reader's digest
This is part one of our coverage of the CDF W mass result covering its implications. Read about the details of the measurement in a sister post here! Last week the physics world was abuzz with the latest results from an experiment that stopped running a decade ago. Some were heralding this as the beginning …
Continue reading “Too Massive? New measurement of the W boson’s mass sparks intrigue”
Recontres de Moriond is probably the biggest ski-vacation conference of the year in particle physics, and is one of the places big particle physics experiments often unveil their new results. For the last few years the buzz in particle physics has been surrounding ‘indirect’ probes of new physics, specifically the latest measurement of the muons …
Title : “Suggestive evidence for Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering from reactor antineutrinos” Authors : J. Colaresi et al. Link : https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.09672 Neutrinos are the ghosts of particle physics, passing right through matter as if it isn’t there. Their head-on collisions with atoms are so rare that it takes a many-ton detector to see them. Far …
Continue reading “A hint of CEvNS heaven at a nuclear reactor”
Based on the paper Penrose process for a charged black hole in a uniform magnetic field It has been over half a century since Roger Penrose first theorized that spinning black holes could be used as energy powerhouses by masterfully exploiting the principles of special and general relativity [1, 2]. Although we might not be …
Continue reading “Exciting headways into mining black holes for energy!”
Title : “First evidence for off-shell production of the Higgs boson and measurement of its width” Authors : The CMS Collaboration Link : https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.06923 CMS Analysis Summary : https://cds.cern.ch/record/2784590?ln=en If you’ve met a particle physicist in the past decade, they’ve almost certainly told you about the Higgs boson. Since its discovery in 2012, physicists have …
References: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.07158 (CMS) and https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.05120 (ATLAS) If you are looking for love at the Large Hadron Collider this Valentines Day, you won’t find a better eligible bachelor than the b-quark. The b-quark (also called the ‘beauty’ quark if you are feeling romantic, the ‘bottom’ quark if you are feeling crass, or a ‘beautiful bottom quark’ …
Continue reading “How to find a ‘beautiful’ valentine at the LHC”
Based on the paper The black hole information puzzle and the quantum de Finetti theorem Black holes are some of the most fascinating objects in the universe. They are extreme deformations of space and time, formed from the collapse of massive stars, with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape …
Continue reading “Towards resolving the black hole information paradox!”
Title: “Search for an Excess of Electron Neutrino Interactions in MicroBooNE Using Multiple Final State Topologies” Authors: MicroBooNE Collaboration References: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.14054.pdf This is the second post in a series on the latest MicroBooNE results, covering the theory side. Click here to read about the experimental side. Few stories in physics are as convoluted as the …
Continue reading “The Mini and Micro BooNE Mystery, Part 2: Theory”
Title: “Search for an Excess of Electron Neutrino Interactions in MicroBooNE Using Multiple Final State Topologies” Authors: The MiniBoone Collaboration Reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.14054 This is the first post in a series on the latest MicroBooNE results, covering the experimental side. Click here to read about the theory side. The new results from the MicroBoone experiment received …
Continue reading “The Mini and Micro Boone Mystery, Part 1 Experiment”
Title: First direct detection constraints on Planck-scale mass dark matter with multiple-scatter signatures using the DEAP-3600 detector. Reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09405. Here is a broad explainer of the paper via breaking down its title. Direct detection. The term in use for a kind of astronomy, ‘dark matter astronomy’, that has been in action since the 1980s. The …