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“You can do it quickly, you can do it cheaply, or you can do it right. We did it right.” These were some of the opening remarks from David Toback, leader of the Collider Detector at Fermilab, as he announced the results of a decadelong experiment to measure the mass of a particle called the W boson.

I am a high energy particle physicist, and I am part of the team of hundreds of scientists that built and ran the Collider Detector at Fermilab in Illinois – known as CDF.

After trillions of collisions and years of data collection and number crunching, the CDF team found that the W boson has slightly more mass than expected. Though the discrepancy is tiny, the results, described in a paper published in Science on April 7, 2022, have electrified the particle physics world. If the measurement is correct, it is yet another strong signal that there are missing pieces to the physics puzzle of how the universe works.

On September 1 and 2, 1859, telegraph systems around the world failed catastrophically. The operators of the telegraphs reported receiving electrical shocks, telegraph paper catching fire, and being able to operate equipment with batteries disconnected. During the evenings, the aurora borealis, more commonly known as the northern lights, could be seen as far south as Colombia. Typically, these lights are only visible at higher latitudes, in northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia.

What the world experienced that day, now known as the Carrington Event, was a massive geomagnetic storm. These storms occur when a large bubble of superheated gas called plasma is ejected from the surface of the sun and hits the Earth. This bubble is known as a coronal mass ejection.

The plasma of a coronal mass ejection consists of a cloud of protons and electrons, which are electrically charged particles. When these particles reach the Earth, they interact with the magnetic field that surrounds the planet. This interaction causes the magnetic field to distort and weaken, which in turn leads to the strange behavior of the aurora borealis and other natural phenomena. As an electrical engineer who specializes in the power grid, I study how geomagnetic storms also threaten to cause power and internet outages and how to protect against that.

In this one-hour public lecture Josh Frieman, director of the Dark Energy Survey, presents an overview of our current knowledge of the universe and describe new experiments and observatories. Over the last two decades cosmologists have made remarkable discoveries: Only 4 percent of our universe is made of ordinary matter — atoms, molecules, etc. The other 96 percent is dark, in forms unlike anything with which we are familiar. About 25 percent is dark matter, which holds galaxies and larger-scale structures together and may be a new elementary particle. And 70 percent is thought to be dark energy, an even more mysterious entity which speeds up the expansion of the universe. Josh Frieman is senior staff scientist at the Fermilab and Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. The Dark Energy Survey is a collaboration of 300 scientists from 25 institutions on 3 continents, which built and uses a powerful 570-Megapixel camera on a telescope in Chile to carry out a 5-year survey of 300 million galaxies and thousands of supernovae to probe dark energy and the origin of cosmic acceleration.

Existing quantum devices can actually do things that we cannot compute with classical computers. The question is only can we harness this computational power that is apparently there,” van Bijnen says. “Maybe doing arbitrary computational problems is a bit much to ask, so we are now looking at whether we can match problems well to available quantum hardware.” Many current experiments involving Rydberg atoms would likely not require any radical changes in instrumentation that is already being used, he adds.

A new measurement of a fundamental particle called the W boson appears to defy the standard model of particle physics, our current understanding of how the basic building blocks of the universe interact. The result, which was a decade in the making, will be heavily scrutinised, but if it holds true, it could lead to entirely new theories of physics.

“It would be the biggest discovery since, well, since the start of the standard model 60 years ago,” says Martijn Mulders at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, who has written a commentary on the result for the journal Science.

The standard model describes three distinct forces: electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. Particles called bosons serve as mediators for these forces between particles of matter. The weak force, which is responsible for radioactive decay, uses the W boson as one of its messengers.

Watch the full documentary on TUBI (free w/ads):
https://tubitv.com/movies/613341/consciousness-evolution-of-the-mind.

IMDb-accredited film, rated TV-PG
Director: Alex Vikoulov.
Narrator: Forrest Hansen.
Copyright © 2021 Ecstadelic Media Group, Burlingame, California, USA

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Miniaturization lies at the heart of countless technological advances. It is undeniable that as devices and their building blocks get smaller, we manage to unlock new functionalities and come up with unprecedented applications. However, with more and more scientists delving into materials with structures on the atomic scale, the gaps in our current understanding of nanomaterial physics are becoming more prominent.

For instance, the nanomaterial’s surface represents one such knowledge gap. This is because the influence of surface quantum effects becomes much more apparent when the surface-to-volume ratio of a material is high. In nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), a current hot topic in research, the physical properties of the nanomaterials greatly differ from their bulk counterparts when their size is reduced to a few atoms. A solid understanding of the mechanical properties of nanowires and nanocontacts—integral components of NEMS—is essential for advancing this technology. But, measuring them has proven a challenging task.

Against this backdrop, a research team from Japan recently achieved an unprecedented feat when they managed to precisely measure the elastic modulus of gold nanocontacts stretched down to a few atoms. The study, published in Physical Review Letters, was led by Prof. Yoshifumi Oshima of Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST). The rest of the team included post-doctoral research fellow Jiaqi Zhang and Professor Masahiko Tomitori from JAIST, and Professor Toyoko Arai of Kanazawa University.

But these particles would interact only weakly with ordinary matter, and only via the force of gravity. This description is eerily similar to what we know about dark matter, which does not interact with light yet has a gravitational influence felt everywhere in the universe. This gravitational influence, for instance, is what prevents galaxies from flying apart.

“The main advantage of massive gravitons as dark matter particles is that they only interact gravitationally, hence they can escape attempts to detect their presence,” Cacciapaglia said.

In contrast, other proposed dark matter candidates — such as weakly interacting massive particles, axions and neutrinos — might also be felt by their very subtle interactions with other forces and fields.

On his 143rd birthday, Inverse celebrates the world’s most iconic physicist — and interrogates the myth of his genius. Welcome to Einstein Week.

Brandenburg is a member of the STAR collaboration, a group of more than 700 scientists from 15 countries who use BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC (pronounced “Rick”), to smash gold nuclei together at 99.995 percent the speed-of-light.

For this experiment, the researchers were more interested in the near misses than the hits. Ultra-high-energy photons encircle the gold nuclei like an aura, and auras collide as nuclei zoom past one another. When photons (particles of light; massless, pure energy) collide, they generate an electron and a positron, its antimatter counterpart — both particles that have a mass. This is known as the Breit-Wheeler Process.