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high energy mayhem what s been exciting me lately in physics and math high energy mayhem what s been exciting me lately in physics and math high energy mayhem what s been exciting me lately in physics and math skip navigation about summer physics reading list may 18 2009 6 35 am posted in physics leave a comment i d like to use some part of this summer to learn some standard model physics my ignorance is growing rather inexcusable the plan is to first brush up on nonabelian gauge theories and then jump to the standard model as soon as is convenient the main text i m going to follow is srednicki s book on qft it provides an accessible route through the maze of theoretical machinery i ve made a list of sections i d like to cover in the book with prerequisite sections in brackets i certainly won t get through it all but any progress will be worth the effort put in i m hoping this path will be a good mix of neat theoretical concepts and connections to real world physics read more solitons the tireless lumps april 25 2009 11 26 pm posted in physics tagged gauge theory monopoles qft solitons comments 2 as kids tend to discover rather early on it s fun to throw stones into water as the stone hits the water it gives it energy and creates ripples that move outwards in concentric circles these ripples carry the energy outwards and as they move further out they eventually die out and the water is smooth again this is true even if you ignore the effect of friction the behavior of the water is well described by the wave equation very likely the first field equation that people are taught about in physics in one dimension it describes waves on a string or electric and magnetic waves in two dimensions it describes water waves in three sound waves waves are ubiquitous in our daily lives in contrast when you kick a soccer ball the energy you give it doesn t spread out it stays with the ball as it rolls away the difference between soccer balls and water waves is that in the former case the energy density is localized and in the latter it dissipates so the question arises are there any wave type phenomena with a localized non dissipative energy density solutions of field equations that have this property are called solitary waves we do hear of such objects from time to time moving lumps of water that don t die out like waves do and usually with catastrophic consequences these are the tsunamis the physics of tsunamis is rather involved but certain kinds of tsunamis involve solitary waves those that are caused due to sharp localized impulses such as an asteroid collision if these solutions have the further property that they retain their shapes after collision with each other they are known as solitons these objects show up in theories where non linear interactions balance out the tendency to disperse and they give rise to lots of interesting physics the discovery of the solitary wave is the kind of story that physicists love to tell it s a example of isaac asimov s principle the most exciting phrase to hear in science the one that heralds new discoveries is not eureka but that s funny the story is described in this article on the history and application of solitons in august 1834 the naval engineer john scott russell was watching a horse drawn barge on the union canal hermiston edinburgh as part of his work on hull design when the cable snapped and the barge suddenly stopped russel was impressed by what happened a mass of water rolled forward with great velocity assuming the form of a large solitary elevation a rounded smooth and well defined heap of water which continued its course along the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed i followed it on horseback and overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an hour preserving its original figure some 30 feet long and a foot to a foot and a half in height its height gradually diminished and after a chase of one or two miles i lost it in the windings of the channel i find it extremely cool that an idea that started off with a seemingly mundane observation of horse drawn boats can predict the existence of magnetic monopoles in certain gauge theories or can explain flux quantization in superconductors the important point is that rather than write off his observation as a quirk of nature john russell was the first person to follow through and experiment to try to understand this phenomenon read more the chubby pyramid october 29 2008 2 41 am posted in physics tagged chubby pyramid geometry stubby triangle leave a comment q why is it that manhole covers are round the question achieved notoriety when it started being used by microsoft as an interview question the answer that i ve always liked is that a circular manhole cover can never fall into a circular hole if you were to use a square for example it could easily fall through the diagonal so here s another puzzle is there any other shape for which this property holds that you can make a manhole cover out of it that will never fall into the manhole read more lhc delay september 20 2008 7 26 pm posted in physics tagged lhc leave a comment looks like the lhc will miss its run this year every once in a while one of the 1232 superconducting dipole magnets that bend the beam can heat up to above the critical temperature causing it go from being superconducting to normal conducting this rise in temperature is usually caused by some small misalignment in the beam causing a few stray particles to hit a magnet once this happens the current passing through the magnet s now significant resistance causes it to heat up like crazy parts of the magnet can be heated up from 271 to 700 deg c in under a second this is known as quenching and it comes as no surprise to particle physicists who have been dealing with it since superconducting magnets where first used in the tevatron they ve come up with effective ways of dumping the heat and dealing with the problem the lhc has failsafes built in to deal with quenches effectively and they should normally be back online after a quench in a matter of hours however in this case it seems that the quench was caused due to a faulty electrical connection between two magnets that likely melted at high current resulting in mechanical failure and a leakage of liquid helium into the tunnel the sector number 23 of the ring will have to be warmed up for repairs and the cooled down after the process which would take a few days to fix in a normally conducting machine will delay the lhc by two months this news comes as a bit of a disappointment as the experimentalists were hoping to use this years run with a lower energy beam to calibrate the detectors it looks like they ll now probably have to wait until the lhc runs at full energy in 2009 however as long as next years run is not delayed this should hopefully not be a setback to physics for more thorough coverage the us lhc blog has very informative coverage last december s issue of symmetry has an excellent fact filled article on quenching cern has put up a press release cv is a good place to find some thoughtful reporting john conway has already posted about the incident and you can see the incident and the progress of the warmup for yourself here dirac proves 0 1 september 8 2008 8 38 pm posted in physics tagged dirac paradox puzzle quantum mechanics leave a comment george jones put up a neat little puzzle on physicsforums following up on this taught me quite a bit about some of the mathematical subtleties of qm that physicists tend to gloss over suppose a is an observable i e a self adjoint operator with real eigenvalue a and normalized eigenket in other words suppose further that a and b are canonically conjugate observables so where i is the identity operator compute with respect to the matrix elements of this equation divided by in the first term let a act on the bra in the second let a act on the ket thus 0 1 this is my favourite proof of the well known equation 0 1 what gives when you re done racking your brains you can take a look here here and on the arxiv for solutions to this and more such qm puzzlers the last link is to a paper by f gieres called mathematical surprises and dirac s formalism in quantum mechanics which i found pretty fascinating apparently when we re taught as undergrads that state vectors in qm live in a hilbert space that s one of those white lies that teachers tell first beam august 30 2008 9 33 pm posted in physics tagged lhc leave a comment the clock is ticking to the imminent startup of the lhc that link is now my new home page as usual the good folks at cv are on the ball straight out of science fiction august 30 2008 9 17 pm posted in physics tagged cephalopod eye light polarization science comments 1 one of the things that i love about science is that it frees us from our parochial human centered world view it allows us to extend our range of experiences far beyond our limited innate faculties after all there is no good reason why the sensory apparatus on an east african plains ape should come close to sampling what s really out there in kurt vonnegut s slaughterhouse 5 the tralfamadorians try to describe what human experience must be like to each other they imagine it must be something like spending your entire life with a steel ball on your head with only one eyehole that was welded to six feet of pipe the analogy is fairly accurate read more done with quals august 30 2008 7 01 pm posted in physics tagged qualifiers comments 1 hope i passed it s a pretty painful ordeal i wasn t happy with some of the problems they seemed to test diligence and memory over skill in any case for the moment i can stop letting my schooling interfere with my education most hideous experience the first question on my quantum exam was to write out the full spectroscopic notation 1s2 2s2 blah blah blah for europium that s atomic number 63 needless to say those who didn t remember their high school chemistry myself very much included were floored blogging hiatus august 5 2008 8 56 am posted in physics tagged blogging leave a comment posting here has been slower than its usual trickle this is probably mostly because of the following i ve started studying for my phd qualifiers in late august am going through my old undergrad textbooks the physics community collectively owes david j griffiths a giant hug my dad put me onto the fantastic contraption a fun online physics puzzle game if you re old enough to have enjoyed playing the incredible machine this will appeal to you meanwhile take a look at matt springer s blog built on facts and his old posts from before his recent move over to scienceblogs there s some really great stuff there also sean carroll has been staking his bets on lhc discoveries over here at cosmic variance on tossing stuff into the air june 29 2008 9 15 am posted in physics tagged euler mechanics poinsot rotational dynamics comments 1 tie a book closed with a rubber band and toss it into the air it wobbles around in some manner but we know two things about it it conserves angular momentum and it conserves rotational kinetic energy let and be the principal moments of inertia of the book the moments of inertia around it s 3 principal axes and and be the angular velocities about these axes if you re unfamiliar with moments of inertia it s basically jut a measure of resistance to turning a small i corresponds to something that s light and compact while a big i corresponds to something that s heavy or spread out then the square of its angular momentum l is given by and its rotational energy t is given by both these quantities are conserved throughout the motion poinsot s construction now if we want to understand the exact motion of the body we d need to bust out the euler equations of motion a set of differential equations that govern the angular velocities but as long as we re just look for a qualitative idea there s a nice geometric method due to poinsot that s good for building insight about rotations read more older posts search biology pharyngula sandwalk the loom blogroll 3 quarks daily lectures asti online lectures physics an american physics student in england arxiv blog backreaction cosmic variance it s equal but it s different john baez s stuff superconformal brook uncertain principles science scienceblogs rss feeds all posts all comments meta create account log in create a free website or blog at wordpress com subscribe subscribed high energy mayhem sign me up already have a wordpress com account log in now privacy high energy mayhem subscribe subscribed sign up log in report this content view site in reader manage subscriptions collapse this bar loading comments write a comment email required name required website design a site like this with wordpress com get started