Experiment
Category archives for Experiment
Simulating Wires with Atoms and Light: “Conduction of Ultracold Fermions Through a Mesoscopic Channel”
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 6, 2012 
So, it’s been a while, but let’s see if we can’t hit the ground running with a good physics post. There have been a few notable physics events since I went on hiatus, but for a return to physics ResearchBlogging, we’ll go with something near and dear to my heart, ultracold atoms. Specifically, this Science…
Higgs Rumors Are the Price of Success
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 21, 2012 In which celebrity culture comes to particle physics. ———— It’s been about six months since we had a big flurry of Higgs Boson stories, and as enjoyable as the relative quiet has been, it means we’re due for another run. And, predictably enough, the usual suspects are stoking speculation about what, exactly, will be officially…
Single Photons Are Still Photons: “Wave-particle dualism and complementarity unraveled by a different mode”
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 4, 2012 
In which we do a little ResearchBlogging, taking a look at a slightly confusing paper putting a new twist on the double-slit experiment. ———— I’m off to California this afternoon, spending the rest of the week at DAMOP in Pasadena (not presenting this year, just hanging out to see the coolest new stuff in Atomic,…
Excellent Approximations and Lying to Children
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 31, 2012 In which I talk about the common complaint that we teach students physics that “isn’t true,” and the limits on that statement. ———— Frequent commenter Ron sent me an email pointing to this post by David Reed on “What we “know” that t’aint so…. and insist on teaching to kids!”: he science we teach is…
Entangled In the Past: “Experimental delayed-choice entanglement swapping”
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 4, 2012 Enough slagging of beloved popularizers– how about some hard-core physics. The second of three extremely cool papers published last week is this Nature Physics paper from the Zeilinger group in Vienna, producers of many awesome papers about quantum mechanics. Ordinarily, this would be a hard paper to write up, becase Nature Physics are utter bastards,…
Clock Synchronization Done Right: “A 920-Kilometer Optical Fiber Link for Frequency Metrology at the 19th Decimal Place”
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 2, 2012 I’ve been busily working on something new, but I’m beginning to think I’ve been letting the perfect be the enemy of the good-enough-for-this-stage, so I’m setting it aside for a bit, and trying to get caught up with some of the huge number of things that have been slipping. Which includes getting the oil changed…
A Confusing Light OPERA: How Does a Loose Fiber Optic Cable Cause a Signal Delay?
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 2, 2012 So, the infamous OPERA result for neutrino speeds seems to be conclusively disproven, traced to a problem with a timing signal. Matt Strassler has a very nice explanation of the test that shows that the whole thing can almost certainly be traced to a timing error that cropped up in 2008. This problem is generally…
Treating Big Molecules Like Electrons: “Real-time single-molecule imaging of quantum interference”
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 26, 2012 Richard Feyman famously once said that the double-slit experiment done with electrons contains everything that’s “‘at the heart of quantum physics.” It shows both particle and wave character very clearly: the individual electrons are detected one at a time, like particles, but the result of a huge number of detections clearly traces out an interference…
Neutrinos in the News
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 16, 2012 A little more tab clearance, here, this time a few recent stories dealing with those elusive little buggers, neutrinos. In roughly chronological order:< /p> The Daya Bay experiment in China has measured a key parameter for neutrino oscillation (arxiv paper), the phenomenon where neutrinos of one of the three observed types slowly evolve into one…
Experimental Particle Physics: Still Really Difficult
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 7, 2012 So, the news of the moment in high-energy physics is the latest results being reported from a conference in Europe. The major experimental collaborations are presenting their newest analyses, sifting through terabyte-size haystacks of data looking for the metaphorical needle that is the Higgs boson. And what are those results? It sort of depends on…
