Category: physics

The Elusive Higgs

Posted onAuthorCorbettLeave a comment

The two CERN collaborations, ATLAS and CMS, are trying to independently find the Higgs and confirm each other’s results. Each excludes a standard-model Higgs above 135GeV at above 95% confidence (to about 450 GeV if I recall) and ATLAS finds an excess around 126 GeV consistent with a Higgs at this mass. CMS finds a very slight excess, slightly displaced from (around 124 GeV) though roughly consistent with the ATLAS result. It’s not a detection yet (ATLAS would need more statistical significance on their excess), but it’s tantalizing. They’ll continue running and analyzing data next year, and hopefully we’ll know for sure! Read More …

NASA now accepting applications to the Astronaut candidate class of 2013

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NASA is now accepting applications to the Astronaut candidate class of 2013.

I’m absolutely applying. Although hoping to venture to space in any case via the private sphere, I still think NASA will best SpaceX to the first mission to Mars and as far as riding the wave into the future goes, that is the place to be. Read More …

Dr. Eleanor Dobson

TEDxZurich 2011: Ideas worth spreading from Zurich

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I am proud to have been on the organizing team of TEDxZurich 2011. With the help of great sponsors, including the Swiss National Television Network, at which the event was held, amazing speakers and performers, and a full house of 450 attendees, we celebrated and shared “ideas worth spreading”. I was on the speakers committee, moonlighted with a bit of tech help, and the day of was rushing around making sure all the speakers were happy and prepared for their big moment on stage. Here are the videos; it’s extremely hard to pick a favorite, but the speaker I am most proud of and moved by is Dr. Eleanor Dobson who gives us a peek into the belly of CERN and how modern big science is done. Dr. Dobson’s talk was one of the talks I helped curate, in conjunction with the TEDxZurich team, and came about after I heard her passion on the subject and suggested she speak. Don’t stop there though, there are 20 videos from the day and hundreds of ideas ready to run loose. Read More …

So a neutrino runs into a tachyon in a bar….

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

So a neutrino runs into a tachyon in a bar…. HHere’s a collection of interesting twitter snippets from physicists I follow on twitter about today’s neutrino webcast announcing the surprising, and frankly unbelievable, results that the OPERA collaboration observed superluminal neutrinos. I haven’t watched the webcast myself, nor read the paper beyond the abstract yet so can only comment that I believe it must be systematics. That said it would be insanely interesting to be proven otherwise. Finally, the following highlighted tweets are in reverse chronology, because, well… I’ve been here since the day after tomorrow, said the tachyon. What took you so long? Read More …

Fault tolerant computing

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

As a first step to writing my own simulation code while attempting to do something useful, a few days ago I started writing a code to explore failure and recovery from failure in a distributed computation. By failure in this case, I mean when one of the computation units goes down. My test system is N harmonic oscillators on N nodes (or processes on a shared memory machine). Read More …

Probing the dark matter issue in f(R)-gravity via gravitational lensing

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

A few days ago in gr-qc  journal club we discussed an interesting paper by a member of our own institute, Probing the dark matter issue in f(R)-gravity via gravitational lensing.1. Background Dark Matter We theoretically expect dark matter to exist based largely on  extensive observations of both dynamics (rotation curves and objects such as the Read More …