SUSY
esiegel | August 2, 2013“Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection; no more” -Lord Alfred Tennyson
Ahh, the Standard Model of elementary particles and their interactions. It's right up there with General Relativity -- our theory of gravitation in the Universe -- as the most successful physical theory of all-time.
Image credit: DoE, NSF, LBNL, and CPEP, via http://www.cpepphysics.org/.
While General Relativity describes the relationship between matter-and-energy and spacetime, the Standard Model describes all the known particles in the Universe and how they interact with one another. This…
esiegel | May 15, 2013“Supposedly she’d died, but here she was again–somewhat changed, but you couldn’t kill her. Not when the truest part of her hadn’t even been born.” -Denis Johnson
Over the past 100 years, our picture of the Universe has changed dramatically, on both the largest scales and the smallest.
Image credit: Richard Payne.
On the large-scales, we've gone from a Newtonian Universe of unknown age populated only by the stars in our own Milky Way to a Universe governed by General Relativity, containing hundreds of billions of galaxies.
Image credit: Rhys Taylor, Cardiff University.
The age of this…
esiegel | November 14, 2012"...this consensus has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preference or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data." -Steven Weinberg
One of the most fundamental questions we could ever ask about all of existence is "What makes up the Universe?"
Image credit: Misti Mountain Observatory.
I don't mean "stars and galaxies," like you see above. That might make up the Universe on the largest scales, but that's taking a look at the question of what the fundamental constituents of the Universe compose themselves into.
The other side of the…
esiegel | September 19, 2012"Science enhances the moral value of life, because it furthers a love of truth and reverence—love of truth displaying itself in the constant endeavor to arrive at a more exact knowledge of the world of mind and matter around us, and reverence, because every advance in knowledge brings us face to face with the mystery of our own being." -Max Planck
Our standard model of elementary particles and forces -- with the recent discovery of the Higgs boson now behind us -- has now had every expected particle within it discovered, and we can explain where the elementary particles get their masses from…
catdynamics | July 26, 2012The LHC Shows the Way workshop rolls on, looking at the implications of the Higgs at 125-126 GeV for supersymmetry.
I live blog, slowly.
Where are the sparticles.
Coloured supersymmetric partners, the quark and gluon supersymmetric partners, must be massive - greater than ~ 1,000 GeV
in some natural implementation of supersymmetry, natch, clever theorists can of course think of increasingly contrived ways to get around most any limit, at the expense of fewer and fewer people believing them.
Minimal supersymmetric extensions to the standard model, with the Higgs mass assumed to be 126 GeV and…
esiegel | July 6, 2012"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" -Stephen Hawking
After a long search spanning more than my entire lifetime (so far), the Higgs boson has finally been discovered at both detectors -- CMS and ATLAS -- at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Image credit: CERN / Particle Physics for Scottish Schools.
For a little more on this, check out the earlier posts here celebrating Higgs week:
The Biggest Firework of them all: The Higgs
How the Higgs…
esiegel | July 3, 2012"Give me a coin. <Takes Coin.> All right. Uh... heads, I win, tails, you lose. Right? <Flips coin.> Tails, you lose." -Ralph Kramden
All things being equal, you're well aware that if you flipped a completely fair coin, you'd have a 50% chance of it landing on heads, and a 50% chance of landing on tails (ignoring the side, of course).
Image credit: C. Nolan, A. Eckhart and Warner Bros. Pictures, retrieved from http://explow.com/Two-Face.
So let's imagine that you flip the coin ten times, and you get seven heads and three tails. Are you worried? You shouldn't be; in order to tell…