PhysicsDavid - Slashdot User

Submission + - Higgs territory continues to shrink (symmetrymagazine.org)

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PhysicsDavid

on Friday March 13, 2009 @10:26AM

PhysicsDavid writes: "Announced this morning by Fermilab, the possible territory for the Higgs boson has shrunk even further. Combined results from the CDF and DZero experiments at the Tevatron have ruled out the existence of the Higgs with a mass between 160 GeV/c^2 and 170 GeV/c^2 with 95% confidence. At 90% confidence the Higgs is ruled out between about 157 GeV/c^2 and 185 GeV/c^2. Fermilab also has a press release. If the Higgs is to be found at the lighter end of the currently allowed 114 GeV/c^2 to 185 GeV/c^2 range, its detection is harder than at the heavier end due to the kinds of signals that the Large Hadron Collider and the Tevatron will see. Some physicists think that a lighter Higgs will be easier to spot at the Tevatron as the background processes which obscure the faint signal are not as prevalent in those experiments."

Submission + - Making magnetic monopoles and physics exotica (symmetrymagazine.org)

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PhysicsDavid

on Thursday January 29, 2009 @03:38PM

PhysicsDavid writes: "Physicists have been searching for magnetic monopoles pretty much since they knew about magnetism and definitely since Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism. Now some researchers have shown that using some weird mirror materials will allow them to create something indistinguishable from a monopole in a lab experiment. A paper about it was published today in the journal Science as an advance online publication. The technique looks like it could be used to create these analog systems of other kinds of exotic particles that haven't yet been observed, such as axions. The theorists who proposed this are working with experimenters to try to create these systems and study them in depth this year."

Submission + - First definitive Higgs result in 7 years (symmetrymagazine.org)

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PhysicsDavid

on Monday August 04, 2008 @07:25PM

PhysicsDavid writes: "In a suite of new results about the Higgs boson, Fermilab presents the first new definitive evidence on the (lack of) existence of the Higgs boson since the Large Electron Positron collider shut down in 2000. Fermilab hasn't found the Higgs but can rule out a certain range of masses for the particle that is expected to create mass for all the other particles of nature. Other Higgs news suggests a new likeliest mass range for the Higgs. These results were among those presented at the ICHEP 2008 conference currently underway."

Submission + - New particle: the bottom-most bottomonium (symmetrymagazine.org)

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PhysicsDavid

on Wednesday July 09, 2008 @06:12PM

PhysicsDavid writes: "Collaborators on the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center have detected and measured, for the first time after a 30-year search, the lowest energy particle of the "bottomonium" family, called the eta-sub-b. The discovery fills in a missing piece of quark physics that will help reveal the nature and behavior of the quarks and the strong force."

Submission + - Pioneer anomaly a step closer to resolution (symmetrymagazine.org)

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PhysicsDavid

on Sunday April 13, 2008 @11:14AM

PhysicsDavid writes: "A news report discusses the results of a new model of the Pioneer spacecraft, in an attempt to explain why it is accelerating slightly toward the sun. The reasons for the anomalous acceleration have been debated for years but this result says that about a third of the acceleration can be explained by heat emissions from the spacecraft."

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