Of Particular Significance

About This Site and How to Use It

Hi — and welcome to the scientific section of my website, whose goal is to provide interested non-experts with both the background information needed to understand more about science in general — what it is, how it is done, what it means to modern life — and more specifically about what is happening in my own research field — particle physics. I also provide up-to-date information about what is happening in particle physics and other nearby subjects.

A site of this sort is constantly growing, so when you visit it, in addition to looking at any daily posts to the blog, please check also for new pedagogical or analytic articles that will be linked within the site. Those articles will remain up until they go out of date, and so my intention is that they be carefully written and pedagogically oriented.

Please feel free to ask questions.   In my view there is no such thing as a dumb question; after all, even an expert once knew nothing at all.    The goal of the site is to be clear, and if one of my explanations is confusing or misleading, I want to know it.  Feedback from readers has been enormously beneficial to the quality, clarity and accuracy of this website!

Where might you start?  Well, one of my most pedagogical starting points would be this article:

Along the way you may want to learn some basic particle physics; so another pedagogical starting point would be here:

If you want to go further into the details of what particle physicists are doing right now, try

which might lead you to wonder “what are protons?” (which is what the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] usually smashes)

and also how one does measurements at such a machine:

You may also want to learn about that most important thing called “Higgs”  that was the motivation to build the Large Hadron Collider:

You can also learn about some of the speculative ideas that particle physicists were looking for at the Large Hadron Collider.  These include supersymmetry and extra dimensions, though these seem not to have turned up at the collisions energies accessible at the LHC.

57 Responses

  1. Comments seem to have been disabled (!) for the article about people who believe there is a conspiracy below a volcano (October 2021).

    Making a conspiracy theory about a volcanic eruption is of course silly in the present state of tech. However, attacks on the idea of making theories about conspiracies is an attack against history as a science, IMHO.

    Most of history is the history of conspiracies.

    Con-spirare means simply together-breathe. Oligarchies are organized by individuals so close that they breathe together. They also dine together, have parties together, play various games together, etc. If oligarchies want to stay in power, they have to deny that there are such collusions, because smart people would attribute the power of oligarchies to such collusions, instead of more meritorious circumstances. So oligarchies deny conspiracies exist. Instead they prefer to attribute their success to “God”, a great dog in the sky, or chance, or… merit… not the application of groupthink, group discrimination, and group plots…

    Yet, conspiracies exist, history is full of them. Conspiracy is a more general notion than the notion of “plot”, with which it is often confused. A plot necessitates a conspiracy. A conspiracy does not necessarily entail a plot. Conspiracies, like elites socializing together do not necessarily create explicit plots.

    Oligarchies bind through conspiracies and act through plots. Consider for example Julius Caesar: his entire life was spent fending off, or organizing conspiracies, sometimes for excellent reformist reasons (his distribution law in 59 BCE).

    One of the oldest documents in the world, engraved in stone by pharaoh Ramses III describes a “conspiracy of the Sea People in their islands” which destroyed most civilizations (Egypt barely survived)

    All historical figures were involved in conspiracies. Before 1942, Roosevelt and US media conspired to hide from the US public the holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis… to produce what came to be known as “US isolationism”.

    History is not restricted to conspiracies: natural events and vast economic, ecological and sociological forces also arise. But most human actions launched by oligarchies are enacted by conspiracies. Denying the necessity of making theories of conspiracies is denying the necessity of studying history… precisely to study plots and conspiracies and how to prevent them.

  2. I have always run away from maths! And in the end, to “understand” physics, one must be able to read maths.
    I look at field equations, Einstein’s equations (even Maxwell’s equations) and not to mention Dirac, I see hieroglyphics. No meaning at all.
    Is it too late and where/how would you suggest I start?

  3. I love your work. Well done! I too am a deep thinking scientist and I have tried to get to grips with Einstein’s relativity explanations many times. I still do not understand them and now aged 68 I have given up reading them.
    In your article on the information paradox, I feel it would have been helpful to know better what the information exactly is? I follow Penrose works and he seems to have developed a good descriptive approach that helps with understanding entropy.
    However I am quite unable to accept the parallel universes theories, even if it’s might explain why gravity is so small compared to the other fundamental forces. Ken Trethewey, Cornwall, UK

  4. One of the things most amazing to me. other than the BB itself, is why are there so few elementary particles, With all that energy, the potential seems unlimited. Why just twenty something and not 250. or 2.500 or 250,000? Long-term stability obviously plays a role, but is there more to it than that? Is this a question that anyone has tackled or even one that can be answered?

  5. The different radius values may be due to the fact that the proton is not spherical. It could have six knobs. Four around the equator and one on each pole. I calculate its average radius to be
    .841 235 636 fm. The circumference of a circle with that radius is exactly four wavelengths of a proton mass’s photon.

  6. Consider the “big bang”. I would have thought that any radiation from it would have travelled outward from it and kept doing so, there by being undetectable. What keeps it hanging around all these billions of years?

  7. Not sure if this has been covered here but I have a theory. You see, one thing kinda bugged me about the belief that time and space beginning with the big bang. That issue is that it would state that something happened (the big bang) without a cause. This to me sounds illogical so this makes me thing that time may not be a straight one dimensional line but a two dimensional circle. This circle started inflating at the time of the big bang and grows at a rate that is at or faster than time. Basically it would be like going around a race track at a set speed of 60 mph but the track it’self is growing in length at a speed of 60 mph or more making reaching the finish line impossible. Now if we reverse that process traveling back in time, this circle gets smaller to it’s infinitely small size. Thing is, because time would be a circle an not a line, it would not just stop but continue to move in one place like the very center of a spinning disk is moving yet going nowhere.
    I understand that because I don’t have any evidence that this theory could be dismissed, but to me, because it may help resolve the un-caused cause issue, that this could be seen as evidence. I am not sure if this theory can be tested or if it is even in your field. For all I know, this theory may have been tested and proven wrong but either way I would like some input if you can.

  8. I’ll have to admit, out of pure ignorance I will probably ask a myriad of dumb questions,but if you will bear with me a bit I may come up with one that has merit. For instance, if in using the Big Slammer Hammer, the LHC, we accidentally found a precursor, (antithesis) to energy, would we know what we had found?

  9. A week later:

    OK, I guess this is either posed in the wrong place, or outside your range of interest.

    Fortunately, I’ve found there are now more references to my query on the web than when I last looked it up (some years ago), and with the help of Wikipedia and arXiv.org, beginning to get a sense of what Wigner’s Classification is all about, especially when considering that even a free particle has a wave function over space-time (The Schrödinger Equation, F.A. Berezin, M. Shubin, p.27: “The free particle…”).

    And so it won’t involve the more abstract properties beyond mass and spin, so it’s NOT (as I thought when first reading about it, many years ago) predicting *all possible* fundamental particles (including isospin, color… etc), but rather it’s “simply” classifying the possibles in terms of the irreps of the Poincare’ Group.

    So I’m getting closer to an intuition of why one might associate various types of fundamental particles with the symmetries of what some call “the symmetries of the universe”.

  10. Fascinating site, Dr Strassler.

    Can I ask you a question about something that’s long puzzled me: how to view Wigners idea of fundamental particles as irreducible representations of the Poincare’ Group (or even, as someone once out it, of “the symmetry group of the universe”?).

    I can make sense of the idea of an irreducible representation in relation to sets of degenerate eigenfunctions of spatially distributed atomic and molecular orbitals, representing what might be described as the independent “sub-representations” of the effects of the symmetry operations of a group on sample component elements (basis vectors and basis functions) of such systems.

    But how does one interpret Wigner’s idea in physical terms? I know what the Poincare Group is, but what do its symmetry operations act on for free particles with no spatial distribution, such as a mu meson or a neutrino, say?

    Are the symmetry operations effecting transformations in abstract spaces of particles’ properties, and if so, can you offer some specific illustrative examples, please?

  11. I wanted to comment on the LIGO discussion. But I do not see a comment area at the bottom.

  12. Just wondering if a disc of solid protons could be used as a hoverboard levitator, so that the Back To The Future 2 hoverboard could be made for real. Remember, it works on road surfaces and on water, and hovers about a foot above the ground without fans or motors. So I thought condensed protons might repel ordinary matter, in a manner that could be controlled to allow for a truly real hoverboard. I figured since you know about protons, you might be able to speak to this. Thanks!!

  13. Professor Strassler,
    I just recently found this website and wanted to thank you. For a layperson, it is a great site and I’ve found a number of the articles very illuminating (What is a proton, Virtual Particles). Have you thought of seeking funding (like Khan Academy) to keep it going?
    I’ve got a lot of reading to do (just started), but had one question off the bat.
    In the picture above of the Higgs particle decay (or perhaps more accurately the two photon event whose excess of occurrence leads us to the discovery of the Higgs) it looks like the two photons are angling away from each other at 120 degrees or so. Not 180. Isn’t there some unaccounted for transverse momentum going “down” in the picture bisecting that angle (Two times the sine of 30 degrees times the momentum of one of the photons?)
    Thanks

  14. I want to start a group of educated persons and scientists on the possibility that our universe is in a computer monitor/3D space. Don’t associate me with the other sites! I want to start with the Big Bang, maybe the best evidence. COMPUTER UNIVERSE POSSIBILITY would be a nice title. I have viewed DVD lectures and read many good physics book. And, I do a lot of thinking. An idea person suits me fine. Love to have your expert help! Oh, no advanced math background, sorry.

  15. Matt,
    I’m a long time follower and admirer of both you, your desire to communicate the latest science to people, and especially your dedication to making it clear the different levels of conviction that we have about scientific results and theories.
    Along those lines, I just saw a news article about how Plank “preliminary, unverified, non-peer reviewed” data was indicating that stars formed 100M years later than had been thought until now. Can you point me at a good description of what is actually going on and where we are with feeling these results mean anything and what needs to and will happen next to get to the real scientific results?
    I’m hoping you can get a chance to respond, given your busy schedule.
    I’m also hoping I haven’t missed your comment on this already…
    Mike

  16. Hi Matt, A quick question: Does the Higgs Field have a polarity and if so could it potentially be reversed to relieve the property of mass in a local object to near zero? Such a thing would vastly reduce the energy needed to push objects closer to the speed of light with less energy required to move the object. It might also reduce Einstein’s relativistic time dilation effect. This idea intrigues me. I know these things are a vastly more complex problem and may not be practically feasible, but none-the-less food for thought.

    I have read that there may be as many as five different Higgs particles and five different fields associated with them, each imparting a particular mass characteristic on different particles.

    I have always had an interest in particle Physics and material science and graduated with an MSEE degree in ’77. So, I do not claim to be an expert by any means but I may be just slightly beyond a lay-person in my knowledge base. Your website is very interesting and the discussions stimulating.

    Lorin Black
    Principal Engineer

  17. Hi Matt… I happened upon your site in search of clarity on supersymmetry and am charmed by the clarity of your explanations. I’m not a physicist but I’m writing a story about an experimental particle physicist, it’s really necessary for the story.

    Immediately I realized I’d need to understand something about physics, so I began poking around classical physics then modern physics, then quantum physics, beat physics, square physics and physics (yanno, like Alan Watts “Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen”).

    Of all the research I’ve done, and it has taken a couple years, I’m lucky to have found your site because there’s a world out there that seems to want to keep this knowledge a big mystery — I mean, beyond the fact that it the physical universe is a huge mystery.

    Thank you for the value you place on clarity and not talking over your listeners. You have a rare gift.

  18. Hello. Do not have a lot of time right now but have bookmarked this site. Very intriguing! Specifically I was thinking about the Big Bang, and wondering if gravity might have created the Big Bang seed as gravity appears to me to favor density. Part of my thinking here regards the possibility of a cyclical universe that may end in a heat death for a time but then be pressed back together by gravity into another Big Bang seed. (Have also wondered if gravity might not be an equal and opposite reaction to the Big Bang.) Then I gave a thus far cursory glace at your article about the universe as expanding not exploding into being which I will be looking at further when I have more time.

    All of this relates to my having been invited to give a museum talk as a result of my short collection of poems and essays, Could a “heat Death” be Necessary for Life? I have seen many processes from apoptosis to what might be thought of as stellar apoptosis without which we could not exist, but that demonstrate time’s arrow and thus entropy, which has traditionally been thought of as disorder. (Recently being redefined in many text books not as disorder but as energy dispersal.) Anyway wanted to drop you a line and I shall return. Mike, Kane S. Latranz. https://www.createspace.com/4324969

  19. Hi Proff. Strassler,just now I have completed my school studies and entering college. I have many doubts to be clarified. First ,what is quantum field? Where all it exist? Studies says universe is expanding. What is beyond universe to which it expands? By expansion ,space (universe) is occupying which object?What are evidences for expansion of universe? Here, what expansion clearly means? Is universe is expanding only its ends or also in center (eg:between sun and earth)? What is cosmic background rays? Books says earth is moving at a very high speed with respect to cosmic background rays. Still I have many doubts but I think it is enough now. Please answer me…. My ambition is to become a scientist like you and discover and unreveal mysteries of universe.

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  21. Dear Matt Strassler,

    I am a biologist who is creating a website partly designed to increase understanding between Doctors (ie. MDs) and scientists. The MDs usually don’t have a clue about modern scientific inference – and I wished to give an example of a control which some people might think was not necessary because the answer is “already known”. I therefore thought that perhaps measurement of the speed of light in a vacuum would be a good idea – as everyone knows what this is – and I’ve heard that at the L.H.C. this was/is measured at many points along the circle (is this correct ??). I then got into trouble myself – as I find from math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/speed_of_light.html that the speed of light is DEFINED as 299,792,458 m/s. I find this hard to believe because I was under the impression that either the metre or the speed of light is defined – but not both.
    My questions are therefore, 1. is it true that the speed of light in a vacuum is measured many times at L.H.C. – and if so – why ?? 2. Which of the following are defined and which need to be/can be measured – the metre, the second, or the speed of light ??

    Hoping you can help.

    Yours sincerely,

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  25. Has Cosmic Inflation Been Proved?

    by Dr. Danny Faulkner, AiG–U.S. on

    March 17, 2014

    Layman

    astronomy
    author-danny-faulkner
    big-bang
    cosmic-microwave-background
    genesis
    light
    universe

    According to the big bang model, the universe suddenly appeared 13.8 billion years ago in a very dense, hot state that expanded into the universe that we see today. Based on this assumption, the big bang model predicted that the universe ought to be filled with radiation in the microwave part of the spectrum having a temperature of only a few Kelvin (K). This radiation, referred to as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), supposedly comes from a time a few hundred thousand years after the big bang. In 1965, two astronomers announced the discovery of a 2.73 K temperature radiation field coming from every direction. This was hailed as proof of the prediction of the big bang model, and so most scientists came to embrace the big bang as the origin of the universe.

    Proposing Cosmic Inflation

    However, cosmologists realized that there were problems with the CMB. One of these was the horizon problem: the CMB observed from opposite parts of the sky had precisely the same temperature. But how could that be? Those positions opposite one another had never had a chance to exchange heat, so how could they have come into thermal equilibrium (i.e., have the same temperature)?

    More than 30 years ago, a theoretical physicist named Alan Guth suggested cosmic inflation to solve the horizon problem. According to the theory of cosmic inflation, 10-34 seconds after the big bang the universe briefly and rapidly expanded, or inflated, to a much larger size with a velocity far faster than the speed of light. This would allow the entire universe initially to be in thermal contact so that it could come into the thermal equilibrium before being pulled out of thermal equilibrium by inflation. Cosmic inflation had the added benefit of solving another difficulty with the big bang, the flatness problem. After much discussion, cosmologists came to embrace cosmic inflation, although there has been no evidence for inflation.

    Evidence for Cosmic Inflation?

    Today, a team of scientists announced what they think may be the first evidence for cosmic inflation. This work is based upon a certain kind of polarization in the CMB. Like any other electromagnetic radiation, the CMB is a wave phenomenon. Most waves vibrate in all directions, but sometimes waves can vibrate more in one direction than in others. If so, we say that the wave is polarized. Electromagnetic waves can be polarized different ways. Different physical mechanisms can polarize electromagnetic waves differently, so by studying how and to what degree the radiation is polarized, we can gain clues as to what physical mechanisms may have been involved.

    According to the big bang model, cosmic inflation may have imprinted a certain kind of polarization in the CMB, and several experiments are now operating to look for the polarization predicted by these models. Today’s announcement is the preliminary result of one of these experiments. However, cosmic inflation is not a single theory, but rather it is a broad theory with an infinite number of variations. Thus, it may not be proper to claim that this discovery proves inflation. Rather, it may merely rule out some versions that cannot be true.

    Our Response

    This announcement undoubtedly will be welcomed as the long-sought proof of cosmic inflation so necessary to the big bang model. Biblical creationists know from Scripture that the universe did not begin in a big bang billions of years ago. For instance, from God’s Word we understand that the world is far younger than this. Furthermore, we know from Genesis 1 that God made the earth before He made the stars, but the big bang requires that many stars existed for billions of years before the earth did. So how do we respond to this announcement?

    First, this announcement may be improperly understood and reported. For instance, in 2003 proof for cosmic inflation was incorrectly reported and a similar erroneous claim was made last year. Second, the predictions that are being supposedly confirmed are very model-dependent: if the model changes, then the predictions change. Inflation is just one of many free parameters that cosmologists have at their disposal within the big bang model, so they can alter these parameters at will to get the intended result. Third, other mechanisms could mimic the signal being claimed today. So, even if the data are confirmed, there may be some other physical mechanism at play rather than cosmic inflation.

  26. The special theory of relativity shows that the total energy of a particle moving with speed v equals gamma times mc**2 which consists of two terms, the kinetic energy (gamma-1)* mc**2, and the term ‘E-lowerindex-0’, which equals mc**2. This last – famous – equation by Einstein suggests that all mass can be converted into energy. Yet, in nuclear reactions for instance, only a fraction of the mass is converted into the kinetic energy of the reaction products. Part of the mass of an atom is stored in the energy of the electrons, part in the virtual photons (?), part in all the particles inside the protons and the neutrons. My question is: How is the mass (or energy) distributions inside an atom: what part keeps the atom together electrically; how much is related to the decay of the neutrons to protons by means of beta-decay and how much is stored inside the protons by means of energy of the pions, gluons and quarks? My real question is: can indeed ALL the mass of an atom be converted into energy (that can de used to accellerate other particles) or can only be a certain percentage be release and are we always left with the ‘basic remains’ of some elementary elements that represent TRUE MASS, that cannot be converted any more into energy?

  27. Matt, if (as you’ve always been careful to remind us) what they’ve found at CERN may not be THE Higgs but instead one of several Higgs, could you tell us: if there do turn out to be several Higgs particles, is it best to think of each one as a different ripple in the same Higgs field? Or are they ripples in different Higgs fields? If the former, what’s different about the ripples–are they “simply” of different sizes? Thank you for your wonderful work in the business of careful clarifications to exceedingly difficult stuff.

  28. Hi, Professor. This is one of the best science blogs I know.

    I’m writing just to ask where is the article “Particle Physics: Why Do It? and Why Do It That Way?” There is no link to it and I would very much like to read it.

    Thanks in advance.

    Cheers from Brazil.

  29. Professor will you be joining all your articles together to create an online easy to learn advanced physics for everyone courses? it would be great then if we could then get college credit too!

    It would be very fun to learn everything you can each us with a syllabus on all the theories that are going about theories and online exams too.

  30. Not sure if this is the rightplace to start a thread but I have always found the concept of an acceleration of the expansion of the universe to be baffling. So, I make the outrageous suggestion of an alternative explanation of the red shift.
    If dark matter has the property of absorbing energy from light then the energy of a photon being hf , (Planks constant times the frequency,) then since the speed of light is constant, the frequency would have to reduce if energy was absorbed. So, a red shift would occur.

  31. Two serious issues.
    1 My unfortunate predictions, there will be no major financial investment in physics , per say, look standard model ?has been verified, so what do we need to know more ??.
    2. Well, perhaps only one, the above, serious, simply no investment in new research.

  32. Hi Matt,
    Can you tell me how a photon from the Andromeda Galaxy travels unattenuated over large distances of space and without deviation ?
    Thanks,
    Leighton

    1. It’s simply that nothing gets in its way, deflects it or absorbs it. Any object will move over long distances and without deviation unless some effect makes it do otherwise.

  33. I’ve been following this amazing blog for some months now and I have got a request that would improve my enjoyment of it even further if you have a ‘spare moment’ some time (which, I appreciate, may not be for quite some time, but I thought there would be no harm in mentioning it anyway). Please could you look into creating an additional feed that incorporates ALL updated content on your website, not just your headline articles. For example, today in your main feed

    http://profmattstrassler.com/feed/

    I can find the following article

    http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/07/09/trying-to-keep-up/

    in which you mention that you added a new article today:

    http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/the-higgs-particle/the-discovery-of-the-higgs/higgs-discovery-skill-and-a-little-luck/

    However, this latter article does not appear in any feed that I can follow – and I would like to follow it all and be sure that I don’t miss any new content on your website. Thank you!

  34. Exactly the kind of website I need. I’m very interested in physics but often get put off by my lack of math skills. I need simple explanations. This site does that. Only thing I hate about this site is the fact that I didn’t find it earlier!
    😉

  35. Hi Prof Strassler,
    Excellent Work and I’m a fan of your site. It’s a joy to be able to spend my lunch breaks diving into this strange and wonderful section of reality you and your colleagues are exploring!
    I’m a technology professional and have been analyzing, displaying and tracking trends in complex data sets for years. I’m wondering what role you see (if any) in fields of research like yours for folks like me that know a little bit about science and a lot about data.

    Thanks!

    1. Well — that’s a tough question for me to answer, mainly because there are some people in the field who know a lot about science *and* a lot about data, and I’m not one of them. It’s they who would know better what their challenges are and where data experts can perhaps add something. The good thing about my field is that people are very creative and self-reliant. The bad thing is that they are often slow to take advantage of advances in other areas of research, thinking they can do it themselves. So there may be room for an exchange of ideas.

      Maybe one of my readers has something smarter to say about this than I do…

  36. Phenomenal work Dr. Strassler. Wonder if you’ve heard of/read anything by Michael Nielsen? He wrote a book about “networked science” and is currently trying to address the difficulties of large-scale scientific collaborations like the LHC. To post a small excerpt:
    “The LHC analyses about 600 million particle collisions per second. The data analysis is done using a cluster of more than 200,000 processing cores, and tens of millions of lines of software code. That code is built on all sorts of extremely specialized knowledge and assumptions about detector and beam physics, statistical inference, quantum field theory, and so on… it’s possible that very few (no?) people will understand in much depth even just the principles behind the chain of evidence. How many people have truly mastered quantum field theory, statistical inference, detector physics, and distributed computing? What, then, should we make of any paper announcing that the Higgs boson has been found?”

    http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/some-garbage-in-gold-out/

    It’s a challenging thought, and one that I thought you might be able to address better than most. Thanks much!

    1. I have not read his work; thanks for pointing it out. It is certainly impressive that a collective effort of people who only see part of the whole can lead to real scientific achievements — but the very fact that the LHC operates successfully and that so much of its data matches theoretical expectations is already evidence that it works. However, I’m not sure whether it is such a new thing. I suspect that you could argue that this also works sometimes in large corporations, a few of which operate very effectively. Something to think about…

  37. I recently discovered this site and simply want to say thank you. I do not have a math or science background. Late in life I developed a totally unexpected interest. Thank you for taking the time to make otherwise brain numbing science so much more accessible to the average person. It is greatly appreciated.

  38. Matt, this is NOT for posting, but I needed to suggest, for the record, what a splendid thing you have set out to to do, and how splendidly you are doing it.

    Paris Conservitoire? Good grief! What is is about music and chemistry (Borodin) Engineering (Boulez) and Physics (e.g., YOU?)

    I had to get to MIT to realize that I had always been able to fake what a true mathematical mind would actually understand. Tensor calculus exposed me to this futility. I hit the wall. Same for group theory. I could TEACH MIT courses in elementary group theory (I did) and now have no clue about the symmetry groups of the SM. There are only 3 of them, for god’s sake, and I don’t understand any of them.

    Hence my violent encouragement for ANYTHING you do. I found myself telling my wife about the NECESSITY for a Higgs field. And how unhappy the LHC experience has been (so far) with respect to BSM. Your ability to make horrendously complicated things conceptually simple (or if not simple, at least reduced to the least complicated propositions) is simply magical.

    Abundant thanks!

    —pete
    peter@stokely.com

  39. This is an insanely brilliant and lucid site. Must read each morning. It is naturally focused on the experiments and theory, and is simply marvelous there. But every few hours, the LHC ops pages change, with reference to concepts of beam physics that can be puzzling. e.g., What is the relationship between emittance and beam size? What, other than electrons and UFOs, can cause vacuum problems? What happens to the electrons (if anything, given the current problems at P2?) What does a collimator jaw look like, and what geometries can it assume? What is really the difference between momentum cleaning and betatron cleaning? Why do beam lifetimes ultimately go UP, although they are pretty raggedy lately? Your insanely lucid explications would surely help dashboard watchers, between conferences. Best, Pete Stokely (Classical Music Writer).

    1. Very kind of you to say that… unfortunately I am *not* a dashboard watcher or an accelerator physics expert, so this would not be trivial for me to do. That said, I’ll keep it in mind, and if/when I do learn enough, will put something up about it. [A fellow classical music writer… spent a year at the Paris Conservatory before going to grad school.]

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A decay of a Higgs boson, as reconstructed by the CMS experiment at the LHC