ResearchBlogging
Category archives for ResearchBlogging
What Goes Around Is Really Round: “Improved measurement of the shape of the electron”
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 27, 2011 The big physics story of the week is undoubtedly the new limit on the electric dipole moment (EDM) of the electron from Ed Hinds’s group at Imperial College in the UK. As this is something I wrote a long article on for Physics World, I’m pretty psyched to see this getting lots of media attention,…
Active Engagement Works: “Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class”
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 16, 2011 Physics is a notoriously difficult and unpopular subject, which is probably why there is a large and active Physics Education Research community within physics departments in the US. This normally generates a lot of material in the Physical Review Special Topics journal, but last week, a PER paper appeared in Science, which is unusual enough…
Proving Einstein Wrong…ish: Measurement of the Instantaneous Velocity of a Brownian Particle
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 2, 2011 Last summer, there was a fair bit of hype about a paper from Mark Raizen’s group at Texas which was mostly reported with an “Einstein proven wrong” slant, probably due to this press release. While it is technically true that they measured something Einstein said would be impossible to measure, that framing is a little…
Treating Photons Like Atoms: “Bose-Einstein condensation of photons in an optical microcavity”
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 26, 2011 This paper made a big splash back in November, with lots of news stories talking about it; it even made the #6 spot on Physics World‘s list of breakthroughs of the year. I didn’t write it up then because I was hellishly busy, and couldn’t take time away from working on the book-in-progress to figure…
Bouncing Neutrons for Fun and Science: “Realization of a gravity-resonance-spectroscopy technique”
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 21, 2011 Several people blogged about a new measurement of gravitational states of neutrons done by physicists using ultracold neutrons from the Institut Laue-Langevin in France. I had to resort to Twitter to get access to the paper (we don’t get Nature Physics here, and it’s way faster than Inter-Library Loan), but this is a nice topic…
Wave Nature Gets Bigger: “Quantum interference of large organic molecules”
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 18, 2011 It’s been a while since I wrote up a ResearchBlogging post, but since a recent paper forced me to update my “What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics” slides with new pictures, I thought I should highlight the work on the blog as well. Not that you could’ve missed it, if you follow physics-y…
2010: The Year in Blog
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 2, 2011 Because I’m sure everybody is as fascinated by blog stats as I am, here’s the traffic to this blog for 2010, in graphical form: In case you can’t numerically integrate that in your head, I’ll tell you that the total number of pageviews represented there is a bit more than 908,000. We have yet to…
Interference of Independent Photon Beams: The Pfleegor-Mandel Experiment
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 19, 2010 Earlier this week, I talked about the technical requirements for taking a picture of an interference pattern from two independent lasers, and mentioned in passing that a 1967 experiment by Pfleegor and Mandel had already shown the interference effect. Their experiment was clever enough to deserve the ResearchBlogging Q&A treatment, though, so here we go:…
Trapped Antihydrogen
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 17, 2010 The big physics-y news story of the moment is the trapping of antihydrogen by the ALPHA collaboration at CERN. The article itself is paywalled, because this is Nature, but one of the press offices at one of the institutions involved was kind enough to send me an advance version of the article. This seems like…
Relativity on a Human Scale: “Optical Clocks and Relativity”
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 12, 2010 As mentioned in yesterday’s post on
