statistical physics
drorzel | August 25, 2010The Joerg Heber post that provided one of the two papers for yesterday's Hanbury Brown Twiss-travaganza also included a write-up of a new paper in Nature on Mott insulators, which was also written up in Physics World.
Most of the experimental details are quite similar to a paper by Markus Greiner's group I wrote up in June: They make a Bose-Einstein Condensate, load it into an optical lattice, and use a fancy lens system to detect individual atoms at sites of the lattice. This lattice can be prepared in a "Mott insulator" state, where each site is occupied by a definite number of atoms. As…
drorzel | August 24, 2010Two papers in one post this time out. One of these was brought to my attention by Joerg Heber, the other I was reminded of when checking some information for last week's mathematical post on photons. They fit extremely well together though, and both relate to the photon correlation stuff I was talking about last week.
OK, what's the deal with these? These are two papers, one recent Optics Express paper from a week or so ago, the other a Nature article from a few years back. The Nature paper includes the graph you see at right, which is a really nice dataset demonstrating the Hanbury Brown and…
drorzel | August 17, 2010I got forwarded a physics question last night asking about the connection between wind and temperature, which I'll paraphrase as:
Temperature is related to the motion of the atoms and molecules making a substance up, with faster motion corresponding to higher temperature. So why does it feel warmer when the air is still and why does wind make you feel cold?
This is a moderately common point of confusion, so while I responded to the question in email, I'll also appropriate it for a post topic. So, why doesn't "windy" equal "hot," given that wind consists of moving air molecules?
The full…