Atoms and Molecules
drorzel | June 28, 2011That's the title of my slightly insane talk at the DAMOP (Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society) conference a couple of weeks ago, summarizing current topics of interest in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics. I'll re-embed the slides at the end of this post, for anyone who missed my earlier discussion.
I put a ton of work into that talk, and had a huge amount of material that I didn't have time to include. I'd hate for that to go to waste, so I'm going to repurpose it for blog content over the next week or so. It'll probably be about a half-…
drorzel | June 17, 2011Alternate, More-Interesting Post Title: Attack of the Vampire Physicists.
I realized today that the only time I have been outside during daylight hours on this trip to Atlanta was during the brief walk down the platform to the airport entrance. This is only a little unusual for a DAMOP-- the Marriott Marquis is connected to a small mall by an enclosed walkway, so it was possible to leave the hotel and grab lunch in the food court without having to set foot outside. Other than that, I only left the hotel to go to dinner Tuesday and Wednesday, and that was on the late side, and hardly counts.…
drorzel | June 16, 2011One of the odd things about going to conferences is the unpredictable difference between talks and papers. Sometimes, when you go to a talk, you just get an exact repetition of what's in the paper; other times, you get a new angle on it, or some different visual representations that make something that previously seemed dry and abstract really click. And, of course, sometimes you get new hot-off-the-apparatus results that haven't made it into print yet.
Maddeningly, there doesn't seem to be any way to know in advance which of these things you're going to get from the title and abstract. It…
drorzel | June 15, 2011Tuesday at DAMOP was dominated by my talk. Well, in my mind, at least. I suppose people who aren't me saw other interesting things.
OK, fine, I did go to some other sessions. I would link to the abstracts, but the APS web site is having Issues this morning.
In the Prize Session that always opens the meeting, Gerry Gabrielse from Harvard gave a really nice talk about his work on measuring the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. This is the "g-factor" that I've cited before in calling quantum physics the most precisely tested theory in the history of science. Gabrielse is the guy behind…
drorzel | June 14, 2011That's the title of my talk this morning at DAMOP, where I attempt the slightly insane feat of summarizing a meeting with over 1000 presentations in a single 30-minute talk. This will necessarily involve talking a little bit like the person reading the legal notices at the end of a car commercial, and a few of the guide-to-the-meeting slides will have to flash by pretty quickly. Thus, for the benefit of those who have smartphones and care about my categorization of talks, I have put the slides on SlideShare in advance, and will embed them here:
What's So Interesting About AMO Phyiscs?…
drorzel | June 13, 2011You may or may not have noticed that I've been making a concerted effort to do more ResearchBlogging posts explaining notable recent results. I've been trying to get at least one per week posted, and coming fairly close to that. I've been pretty happy with the fake Q&A format that I've settled into, and while they're time-consuming to write, they're also kind of fun.
This past week, alas, was kind of brutal, as I was doing a ton of reading in preparation for my DAMOP talk tomorrow, which, in retrospect, is kind of insane, and SteelyKid's day care being closed for two days didn't help (…
drorzel | June 9, 2011One of the many things I've been occupied with the last few weeks has been arranging a reception at next week's Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (DAMOP) meeting. I was late in asking about the possibilities for this, so it won't make it to the printed program, which means I need to advertise by word of mouth. So:
What: An informal reception for people attending the DAMOP meeting who are associated with undergraduate institutions (i.e., small colleges, or non-Ph.D. granting universities), or thinking about pursuing a position at an undergraduate institution.
Why: Over the…
drorzel | June 7, 2011I have to admit, I'm writing this one up partly because it lets me use the title reference. It's a cool little paper, though, demonstrating the lengths that physicists will go to in pursuit of precision measurements.
I'm just going to pretend I didn't see that dorky post title, and ask what this is about. Well, it's about the trapping and laser cooling of thorium ions. They managed to load thorium ions into an ion trap, and use lasers to lower their temperature into the millikelvin range. At such low temperatures, the ions in the trap "crystallize."
So, they've demonstrated that if you get…
drorzel | June 4, 2011As I noted a while ago, I'm giving a talk at DAMOP a week from Tuesday with the title "What's So Interesting About AMO Physics?". This is intended as an introduction to the meeting as a whole, for new students or people coming in from other fields. The reason? I found a copy of the 2001 DAMOP program, which featured 270 talks and 293 posters. This year's meeting is almost twice as big: 477 talks and 548 posters. That's awfully daunting, so I'm going to try to provide an introduction/ guide to the meeting as a whole.
This, of course, requires me to know a little bit about a wide range of…
drorzel | June 1, 2011In just under two weeks, I'll be giving an invited talk at DAMOP (that is, the annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society) that is intended to serve as an introduction to the meeting for new students or physicists from other fields. My plan is to pick 3-4 areas and give a quick summary of those subfields, highlgihting a few invited talks in that area from the full program.
My background is in cold-atom physics, so obviously I have a good idea of what's what in those areas, and I follow things like quantum information and precision…
drorzel | May 6, 2011In comments to yesterday's post about precision measurements, Bjoern objected to the use of "quantum mechanics" as a term encompassing QED:
IMO, one should say "quantum theory" here instead of "quantum mechanics". After all, what is usually known as quantum mechanics (the stuff one learns in basic courses) is essentially the quantization of classical mechanics, whereas QED is the quantization of classical electrodynamics, and quantum field theories in general are quantizations of classical field theories. I think saying "quantum mechanics" when one talks about something which essentially has…
drorzel | May 5, 2011NASA held a big press conference yesterday to announce that the Gravity Probe B experiment had confirmed a prediction of General Relativity that spacetime near Earth should be "twisted" by the Earth's rotation. A lot of the coverage has focused on the troubled history of the mission (as did the press conference, apparently), but scientifically it's very impressive.
The shift measured is very, very small-- 0.04 arcseconds over the course of a year, or 0.000011 degrees-- but agrees nicely with the predictions of relativity. I'm not sure whether to try to work this into the book-in-progress as I…
drorzel | May 4, 2011It's been a hectic day here, so I haven't had time to do any substantive blogging. I did want to quickly note a couple of stories presenting marked improvements in experiments I've written up here in the past:
1) In the "self-evident title" category, there's Confinement of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds, which extends last year's antihydrogen trapping to times a factor of 6000 longer than the previous record. That's very good, and a good sign for plans to do precision spectroscopy and other such experiments. As always, Physics World offers a nice write-up.
2) As noted in the comments of Monday…
drorzel | May 2, 2011Over in Scientopia, Janet notes an interesting mis-statement from NPR, where Dina Temple-Raston said of the now-dead terrorist:
[O]ne intelligence officials told us that nothing with an electron actually passed close to him, which in a way is one of the ways they actually caught him.
As Janet notes, this would be quite a feat, given that electrons are a key component of ordinary matter. But for the sake of silly physics blogging, let's take this seriously for a moment. Suppose that Osama bin Laden really could make himself utterly devoid of electrons: would that be a good way to hide?
To…
drorzel | May 2, 2011Last 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 unfair to Einstein. It does draw media attention, though...
The experiment in question involves Brownian motion, and since I had to read up on that anyway for something else, I thought I might as well look up this paper, and write it up for the blog.
OK, so what did they do that…
drorzel | April 26, 2011This 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 out exactly what they did and why it mattered. I've got a little space now between handing the manuscript in last week and starting to revise it (probably next week), so while it's a bit late, here's an attempt at an explanation of what all the excitement was about.
So, what's this about, anyway?…
drorzel | 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 news-- it's been all over, getting almost as much press as rumors that some people whose funding will run out soon saw something intriguing in their data. So, in the usual Q&A format:
OK, what's this about? Well, the paper title, "Quantum interference of large organic molecules" pretty well…
drorzel | March 23, 2011I am less enthralled by the "molecular gastronomy" thing than someone with my geek credentials ought to be. As a result, I was a little disappointed when I clicked the link (from Jennifer Ouellette on Twitter) to this Wired story about a new tv show called Marcel's Quantum Kitchen. Because, you know, there are much more fun things that the combination of "Quantum" and "Kitchen" could evoke:
A kitchen whose dishes all come in discrete and indivisible portions. You can't eat half and take the other half home-- it's all or nothing...
You can either know what you're making, or how long it will…
drorzel | March 11, 2011I've got three months to decide. I'll be giving an invited talk at the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (DAMOP) with this title, with a goal of introducing the field to students and physicists from other fields:
In recent years, DAMOP has expanded to the point where the meeting can be quite daunting for a first-time attendee. This talk will provide an introduction to some of the most exciting current areas of research in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics, intended to help undergraduates, beginning graduate students, or physicists from other fields attending their first…
drorzel | January 27, 2011I probably ought to get a start on the big pile of grading I have waiting for me, but I just finished a draft of the problematic Chapter 7, on E=mc2, so I'm going to celebrate a little by blogging about that.
One thing that caught my eye in the not-entirely-successful chapter on momentum and energy in An Illustrated Guide to Relativity was a slightly rant-y paragraph on how it's misleading to talk about the energy released in nuclear reactions as being the conversion of mass into energy, because what's really involved is just the release of energy due to the strong force. It struck me as…