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 […]
Physics
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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 […]
In 1970, Hall, Lind, and Ristenen (Univ. of Colorado at Boulder) published a paper in the American Journal of Physics (AJP, vol. 38, No. 10) on “A Simplified Muon Lifetime Experiment for the Instructional Laboratory.” Basically, it articulates precisely the experiment at the heart of a similar instrument at SMU. […]
I have really thrown myself into physics, since I am stuck at home (a) because there is a pandemic and (b) because SMU won’t let me on campus until tomorrow (because I was abroad when they ended work-related international travel 2 weeks ago). This has been a grand opportunity. Here […]
Muons are a gateway drug. They are just difficult enough to detect that they are really not obvious to humans. They are just easy enough to stop in material that, once you learn to spot them, you want to stop them and watch them do what they do. What do […]
Let’s end this day on a note of wonder. It’s Pi Day! (March 14, or 3-14). Pi is an irrational number… it cannot be written as the ratio of two integers. It’s a number that represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its own diameter. It shows […]