Particle physicists from the international ZEUS collaboration have found the proverbial needle in a haystack. They identified a mere 15 Z0 bosons in over 500 million collision events at DESY’s former electron–proton accelerator HERA. Z0 particles are carriers of the weak nuclear force, one of four fundamental forces in the universe. Although Z0 bosons have been intensely studied at other particle accelerators, they have never been directly observed in electron–proton collisions before. Z0 production is the rarest process ever measured at HERA.
The LHC accelerator is running on ‘woman power’, such is a saying at CERN. One of the great top female researchers is the particle physicist Fabiola Gianotti, who for four years has been the head of one of the two large international research groups responsible for detecting the Higgs particle in the ATLAS experiment on 4 July 2012. Fabiola Gianotti has been awarded the Niels Bohr Institute’s Medal of Honour 2013.
Cornell physicists have figured out why science works. Or rather, they’ve posited a theory for why scientific theories work – a meta theory.
Researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute have observed for the first time the extremely rare decay of the Bs meson into two muons. They have determined its decay frequency with sufficient accuracy using data collected by the CMS detector at CERN. Their result agrees with the predictions of the standard model of particle physics.
Darach Watson has been awarded the Lundbeck Foundation Research Prize for Young Scientists for his outstanding and innovative research in astrophysics, where he has developed a groundbreaking method for measuring distances in the cosmos using the light from distant quasars. The result was selected by Physics World as one of the year’s most important breakthroughs in physics.
Terahertz waves are invisible, but incredibly useful; they can penetrate many materials which are opaque to visible light and they are perfect for detecting a variety of molecules. Terahertz radiation can be produced using tiny quantum cascade lasers, only a few millimetres wide. This special kind of lasers consists of tailor made semiconductor layers on a nanometer scale.
In response to an application submitted by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), theoretical physicist Professor Jairo Sinova from Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, USA has been selected for an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, one of the most eminent and highest endowed research posts in Germany.
Manchester scientists working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) have reported the world’s most precise measurement of the difference between matter and antimatter – known as CP violation – during the decay of charm particles.
Biophotonic Solutions Inc. (BSI), the world leader in automated laser pulse compression, announces that its "MIIPS" laser pulse characterization and compression technology was used in a two-dimensional (2D) electronic spectroscopy setup for photosynthesis experiments by researchers at the University of Chicago (UChicago).
Last year’s Physics Slam was such a rousing success that the Fermilab Arts and Lecture Series is doing it again.
Speakers were invited from LJMU and the universities of Durham, Leicester, Lancaster, Manchester, Liverpool; while audience members included local scientists and students from LJMU and the University of Liverpool.
In August, MIT researchers identified an exoplanet with an extremely brief orbital period: The team found that Kepler 78b, a small, intensely hot planet 400 light-years from Earth, circles its star in just 8.5 hours — lightning-quick, compared with our own planet’s leisurely 365-day orbit. From starlight data gathered by the Kepler Space Telescope, the scientists also determined that the exoplanet is about 1.2 times Earth’s size — making Kepler 78b one of the smallest exoplanets ever measured.
By Jennifer Chu
31 Oct 2013
New evidence of heavy elements spread evenly between the galaxies of the giant Perseus cluster supports the theory that the universe underwent a turbulent and violent youth more than 10 billion years ago. That explosive period was responsible for seeding the cosmos with the heavy elements central to life itself.
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has named a journalist and a children's book author as winners of the 2013 AIP Science Communications Awards for their works on the discovery of the Higgs boson and a dog's imaginary trip to the Moon.
After its first run of more than three months, operating a mile underground in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a new experiment named LUX has proven itself the most sensitive dark matter detector in the world.