These are my personal notes from day four of the Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics Conference. The full conference materials are online: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1199289/timetable/#20230831 August 31, 2023 The fourth day kicked off with a focus on gravitational waves [Mavalvala]. The speaker began with a history of the technology. The LIGO […]
Physics
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These are my personal notes from day three of the Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics Conference. The full conference materials are online: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1199289/timetable/#20230830 August 30, 2023 We began the third day plenaries with a focus on dark matter. The first talk explore models for dark matter [Cirelli]. The potential […]
The plenaries on the second day began with beam-based neutrino physics [Wen]. The speaker reiterated the target parameters and discussed existing results and future facilities for measuring them. They began by noting that sin2(2theta13) is known by Daya Bay to 2.8%, and that Double Chooz has just updated their measurement […]
These are my personal notes from day one of the Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics Conference. The full conference materials are online: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1199289/timetable/#20230828 August 27, 2023 The rhythm of the TAUP conference is to have plenary sessions in the morning, followed by a lunch break, then parallel sessions throughout […]
To Vienna I write this while sitting on a plane flying just south of Ottawa. We are early in the flight. We departed Toronto a little behind schedule and will land in Vienna, Austria around 08:30 local time tomorrow. The in-flight meal has not been served, and we are in […]
It was October in the void. The white dwarf, Nain Blanc, had been, for some time, slurping up the hydrogen and helium from the vast gas envelope of its partner, a red giant, Géant Rouge. When they were younger, the two stars burned bright in the dark of empty space, […]
When I delivered Parts 1 and 2 of the last lecture of Physics 1303 (Introduction to Mechanics) on May 2 and 3, 2022, I had an inkling that these might be my last ever lectures to SMU undergraduates. I prepared them with joy and love and care. It was emotionally […]
Over the winter break, I have picked up my little muon detector data side project that started in the spring term of 2020. A few days ago, I remarked on how I wanted to take account of “weather” in the data – variations around a daily expectation given seasonal conditions […]
I am spending some time playing around with the cosmic ray muon data from an instrument in the SMU Physics Department. That instrument is located in the basement hallway of Fondren Science Building. I already setup a “dashboard” of information derived from the instrument, available here: https://blog.smu.edu/saso/projects/muon-observatory/. If you want […]
On Saturday, we took a break from the pandemic to go outside and look for a comet. We live in a Dallas suburb, but one which has grown a lot in 10 years. The skies are not quite as dark as they used to be, but we thought it might […]