Blog Profile / The Gauge Connection
| URL : | http://marcofrasca.wordpress.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / Physics | |
| Posts on Regator: | 253 | |
| Posts / Week: | 1.1 | |
| Archived Since: | December 19, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Quote of the day
“With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.“ (Attributed to von Neumann by Enrico Fermi, as quoted by Freeman Dyson in “A meeting with Enrico Fermi” in Nature 427 (22 January 2004) p. 297) Filed under: Quote Tagged: Enrico Fermi, Freeman Dyson, John von Neumann
Nobel prize to Serge Haroche e David Wineland
This year Nobel prize went to quantum optics for experiments that could be useful on the road to quantum computation. The awarded are Serge Haroche of the College de France and David Wineland from NIST (US). They performed groundbreaking studies working with cavities and ion traps on single atoms and photons. I have had the [...]
Enrico Fermi’s birthday
Today is Enrico Fermi‘s birthday. Fermi has been a real Prometheus moving mankind to the age of nuclear energy for civil aims. His contributions to our current understanding of physics are enormous and we know as one of the greatest Italian scientist making an extraordinary pair with Galileo Galilei. The prominence of Italians on physics [...]
Confinement revisited
Today it is appeared a definitive updated version of my paper on confinement (see here). I wrote this paper last year after a question put out to me by Owe Philipsen at Bari. The point is, given a decoupling solution for the gluon propagator in the Landau gauge, how does confinement come out? I would [...]
Warp drive at NASA
I am currently a twitter user. One of my followings is Jeri Ryan. She has been Seven of Nine in Star Trek Voyager saga. Yesterday, it comes out of the blue what I read in one of her twits: NASA is developing warp drive! Indeed, Jeri was pointing to this link. This is a Gizmodo’s [...]
ATLAS and CMS papers published
Papers by ATLAS and CMS have appeared in Physics Letters B and can be freely downloaded. They report on the discovery of the Higgs-like particle on July 4th. CMS Collaboration (2012). Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC Physics Letters B DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2012.08.021 ATLAS [...]
Higgs boson and conformal symmetry
So far, I believed to be the only man on Earth to trust a complete absence of mass terms in the Standar Model (we call this conformal symmetry). I was wrong. Krzysztof Meissner and Hermann Nicolai anticipated this idea. Indeed, in a model where mass is generally banned, there is no reason to believe that [...]
The man passed away, the legend will always survive
Neil Armstrong passed away yesterday (see here). He was the first man to put his feet on the Moon. He started all my dreams when I was just nine and that July’s night I was staring at his extraordinary enterprise together with Buzz Aldrin (see here) and Michael Collins on the Apollo 11. Now, I am [...]
‘t Hooft and quantum computation
Gerard ‘t Hooft is one of greatest living physicists, one of the main contributors to the Standard Model. He has been awarded the Nobel prize in physics on 1999. I have had the opportunity to meet him in Piombino (Italy) at a conference on 2006 where he was there to talk about his view on [...]
Curiosity touched down successfully!
I was excited this morning while I was looking at the last minutes of flight of Curiosity there at JPL. This remembered when I was nine and, with my father, I looked at man on the moon. This time Iwas with my sons and we shared happiness with all the people that worked hard for [...]
Papers by ATLAS and CMS on Higgs just appeared
As promised by the two collaborations at CERN, their papers have been today appeared on arXiv: “Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC“ “Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC“ [...]
Running coupling and Yang-Mills theory
Forefront research, during its natural evolution, produces some potential cornerstones that, at the end of the game, can prove to be plainly wrong. When one of these cornerstones happens to form, even if no sound confirmation at hand is available, it can make life of researchers really hard. It can be hard time to get [...]
H->WW channel at ATLAS
Today is started Higgs Hunting conference at Orsay (France). Data for WW decay of Higgs boson from ATLAS have been made public. The talk is here. The data provide a clear excess in this channel and the rate is somewhat higher with respect to the Standard Model expectations of about 1.5 sigma. Gamma-Gamma channel remains [...]
Quote of the day
“So far, the h particle does indeed walk and quack very much like a Higgs boson.“ John Ellis and Tevong You Filed under: Particle Physics, Physics, Quote Tagged: CERN, Higgs particle
QCD 12 and Higgs’ tears
I have spent this week in Montpellier being a participant to QCD 12, a biannual conference organized by Stephan Narison. It is the third time that I go to Montpellier for this conference and there are always very good reasons for being there. Essentially, the quality of physics and beauty of the city are already [...]
Higgs particle finally found!
After a two hours seminar, both CMS and ATLAS spokepersons confirmed a 5 sigmas discovery of a new particle that is consistent with the Higgs particle of the Standard Model. The mass is in agreement with previous clues on last December seminar from CERN: About 125 GeV for both experiments. Congratulations for the great discovery [...]
QCD@Work 2012
This week has been of great interest for me being one of the participants to QCD@Work 2012. I have had my contribution accepted by the organizers and so I gave a talk. The conference was held in a really beautiful city, Lecce here in Italy. This conference is organized jointly by University of Bari and [...]
“Please do not believe the blogs”
CERN does not confirm rumors that were spreading about Higgs particle in the blogosphere recently (see here). We have not to wait too long anyway as ICHEP is just a few days ahead. Filed under: Media, Particle Physics, Physics, Rumors Tagged: ATLAS, CERN, CMS, Fabiola Gianotti, Higgs particle
Millenium prize on Yang-Mills theory: The situation in physics
Yang-Mills theory with the related question of the mass gap appears today an unsolved problem and, from a mathematical standpoint, the community did not recognized anybody to claim the prize so far. But in physics the answer to this question has made enormous progress mostly by the use of lattice computations and, quite recently, with [...]
Turing machine and Landauer limit
My inactivity period was due to a lack of real news around the World. But I was not inactive at all. My friend Alfonso Farina presented to me another question that occupied my mind for the last weeks: What is the energy cost for computation? The first name that comes to mind in such a [...]