BLOGS

 Video Source: Quanta Magazine

Topics: Astrophysics, High Energy Physics, Particle Physics

Each week, Quanta Magazine explains one of the most important ideas driving modern research. This week, physics staff writer Charlie Wood explains why many researchers are looking to outer space for signs of “new physics.”

Fundamental physics has a problem. Some researchers say the field faces a “nightmare scenario.” Some say it’s “in crisis.” To others, it’s merely “stuck.” Whatever word they use, most particle physicists acknowledge that progress has slowed. After a rip-roaring 20th century that saw the discovery of general relativity, quantum theory, and a dozen or so fundamental particles, the first quarter of the 21st century has mainly brought further confirmation of those theories.

Physicists know their hard-won understanding of nature’s laws is incomplete. They don’t know why certain particles have mass, what sort of invisible stuff seems to be holding galaxies together, or what sort of energy is driving the universe’s expansion. But their biggest blind spot is one of scale. Physicists have equations that predict how molecules zig and zag, how atoms split, and how the heart of the atom holds together. They can continue zooming into the sub-sub-subatomic world for quite a while, but eventually — for any event playing out on a stage roughly 10⁻³⁵ meters across — they run out of equations. The universe seems to have rules that tell it what to do in those situations (it follows them during black hole formation, for instance), but physicists are ignorant of these instructions.

Particle physicists have pushed their frontier of ignorance back to this minuscule realm by repeatedly crashing particles closer and closer together, watching what happens, and developing the mathematics to capture the strange and surprising behaviors they witness. This strategy has culminated in Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer ring that can summon the energies needed to collide protons and study nature at 10⁻¹⁹ meters. The international physics community aims to build a next-generation collider — perhaps with a 100-kilometer circumference — this century. But the money, time and technology required to go much further boggles the mind. Numerous clever non-collider experiments are searching for subtle deviations from predictions and could lead to a major discovery any day, but researchers are ultimately facing similar problems as their experiments grow more and more intricate. Particle physicists are approaching a technological and financial wall as they attempt to probe ever deeper layers of reality.

One of the most promising avenues for new discoveries is the detection of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves. Researchers have now racked up dozens of chirps originating from cataclysmic crashes between black holes, and they are rapidly developing ways of picking up cosmic clangs indicative of even more dramatic events. Particle physicists are anxiously awaiting the 2030s, when they hope to see a trio of satellites known as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) go into operation. If it flies, LISA will be capable of picking up gravitational waves generated during the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, an intense era in cosmic history at the frontier of the known laws of physics. In those early moments, some physicists expect, the universe existed in multiple phases at once — like a pot of boiling water. If so, the bubbling would have set off space-time ripples that LISA will be listening for.

Why the Next Physics Revolution Might Come From Above, Charlie Wood, Quanta Magazine

Colleagues remember Peter Higgs as an inspirational scientist who remained humble despite his fame. Credit: Graham Clark/Alamy

Topics: CERN, Higgs Boson, High Energy Physics, Nobel Prize, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Theoretical Physics

Few scientists have enjoyed as much fame in recent years as British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, the namesake of the boson that was discovered in 2012, who died on 8 April, aged 94.

It was 60 years ago when Higgs first suggested how an elementary particle of unusual properties could pervade the universe in the form of an invisible field, giving other elementary particles their masses. Several other physicists independently thought of this mechanism around the same time, including François Englert, now at the Free University of Brussels. The particle was a crucial element of the theoretical edifice that physicists were building in those years, which later became known as the standard model of particles and fields.

Two separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland — ATLAS and the CMS — confirmed Higgs’ predictions when they announced the discovery of the Higgs boson half a century later. It was the last missing component of the standard model, and Higgs and Englert shared a Nobel Prize in 2013 for predicting its existence. Physicists at the LHC continue to learn about the properties of the Higgs boson, but some researchers say that only a dedicated collider that can produce the particle in copious amounts — dubbed a ‘Higgs factory’ — will enable them to gain a profound understanding of its role.

“Besides his outstanding contributions to particle physics, Peter was a very special person, an immensely inspiring figure for physicists around the world, a man of rare modesty, a great teacher and someone who explained physics in a very simple yet profound way,” said Fabiola Gianotti, director-general of CERN in an obituary posted on the organization’s website; Gianotti who announced the Higgs boson’s discovery to the world at CERN. “I am very saddened, and I will miss him sorely.”

Many physicists took to X, formerly Twitter, to pay tribute to Higgs and share their favorite memories of him. “RIP to Peter Higgs. The search for the Higgs boson was my primary focus for the first part of my career. He was a very humble man that contributed something immensely deep to our understanding of the universe,” posted Kyle Cranmer, physicist at the University of Wisconsin Madison and previously a senior member of the Higgs search team at the CMS.

Nanos gigantum humeris insidentes is a Latin phrase that translates to "dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants." It's a Western metaphor that expresses the idea of "discovering truth by building on previous discoveries." The phrase is derived from Greek mythology, where the blind giant Orion carried his servant Cedalion on his shoulders.

English scientist Sir Isaac Newton also coined the phrase "to stand on (someone's) shoulders" in his letter, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." This means that we are who we are because of the hard work of the people who came before us. Newton was talking about collective learning, or our species' ability to share, preserve, and build upon knowledge over time. Source: AI overview

Peter Higgs: science mourns giant of particle physics, Davide Castelvecchi, Nature

Image source: Link below

Topics: Applied Physics, Astrophysics, Computer Modeling, Einstein, High Energy Physics, Particle Physics, Theoretical Physics

In the search for new physics, a new kind of scientist is bridging the gap between theory and experiment.

Traditionally, many physicists have divided themselves into two tussling camps: the theorists and the experimentalists. Albert Einstein theorized general relativity, and Arthur Eddington observed it in action as “bending” starlight; Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig thought up the idea of quarks, and Henry Kendall, Richard Taylor, Jerome Freidman and their teams detected them.

In particle physics especially, the divide is stark. Consider the Higgs boson, proposed in 1964 and discovered in 2012. Since then, physicists have sought to scrutinize its properties, but theorists and experimentalists don’t share Higgs data directly, and they’ve spent years arguing over what to share and how to format it. (There’s now some consensus, although the going was rough.)

But there’s a missing player in this dichotomy. Who, exactly, is facilitating the flow of data between theory and experiment?

Traditionally, the experimentalists filled this role, running the machines and looking at the data — but in high-energy physics and many other subfields, there’s too much data for this to be feasible. Researchers can’t just eyeball a few events in the accelerator and come to conclusions; at the Large Hadron Collider, for instance, about a billion particle collisions happen per second, which sensors detect, process, and store in vast computing systems. And it’s not just quantity. All this data is outrageously complex, made more so by simulation.

In other words, these experiments produce more data than anyone could possibly analyze with traditional tools. And those tools are imperfect anyway, requiring researchers to boil down many complex events into just a handful of attributes — say, the number of photons at a given energy. A lot of science gets left out.

In response to this conundrum, a growing movement in high-energy physics and other subfields, like nuclear physics and astrophysics, seeks to analyze data in its full complexity — to let the data speak for itself. Experts in this area are using cutting-edge data science tools to decide which data to keep and which to discard and to sniff out subtle patterns.

Opinion: The Rise of the Data Physicist, Benjamin Nachman, APS News

Lurking for decades: researchers have discovered Pines' demon, a collection of electrons in a metal that behaves like a massless wave. It is illustrated here as an artist’s impression. (Courtesy: The Grainger College of Engineering/University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Topics: Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Research, Solid-State Physics, Theoretical Physics

For nearly seven decades, a plasmon known as Pines’ demon has remained a purely hypothetical feature of solid-state systems. Massless, neutral, and unable to interact with light, this unusual quasiparticle is reckoned to play a key role in certain superconductors and semimetals. Now, scientists in the US and Japan say they have finally detected it while using specialized electron spectroscopy to study the material strontium ruthenate.

Plasmons were proposed by the physicists David Pines and David Bohm in 1952 as quanta of collective electron density fluctuations in a plasma. They are analogous to phonons, which are quanta of sound, but unlike phonons, their frequency does not tend to zero when they have no momentum. That’s because finite energy is needed to overcome the Coulomb attraction between electrons and ions in a plasma in order to get oscillations going, which entails a finite oscillation frequency (at zero momentum).

Today, plasmons are routinely studied in metals and semiconductors, which have conduction electrons that behave like a plasma. Plasmons, phonons, and other quantized fluctuations are called quasiparticles because they share properties with fundamental particles such as photons.

In 1956, Pines hypothesized the existence of a plasmon which, like sound, would require no initial burst of energy. He dubbed the new quasiparticle a demon in honor of James Clerk Maxwell’s famous thermodynamic demon. Pines’ demon forms when electrons in different bands of metal move out of phase with one another such that they keep the overall charge static. In effect, a demon is the collective motion of neutral quasiparticles whose charge is screened by electrons from another band.

Demon quasiparticle is detected 67 years after it was first proposed. Edwin Cartlidg, Physics World.

Excited helium nuclei inflate like balloons, offering physicists a chance to study the strong nuclear force which binds the nucleus’s protons and neutrons. Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine

Topics: Modern Physics, Nobel Prize, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Steven Weinberg, Theoretical Physics

A new measurement of the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together, confirms previous hints of an uncomfortable truth: We still don’t have a solid theoretical grasp of even the simplest nuclear systems.

To test the strong nuclear force, physicists turned to the helium-4 nucleus, which has two protons and two neutrons. When helium nuclei are excited, they grow like an inflating balloon until one of the protons pops off. Surprisingly, in a recent experiment, helium nuclei didn’t swell according to plan: They ballooned more than expected before they burst. A measurement describing that expansion, called the form factor, is twice as large as theoretical predictions.

“The theory should work,” said Sonia Bacca, a theoretical physicist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and an author of the paper describing the discrepancy, which was published in Physical Review Letters. “We’re puzzled.”

For many years, physicists didn’t understand how to use the strong force to understand the stickiness of protons and neutrons. One problem was the bizarre nature of the strong force — it grows stronger with increasing distance rather than slowly dying off. This feature prevented them from using their usual calculation tricks. When particle physicists want to understand a particular system, they typically parcel out a force into more manageable approximate contributions, order those contributions from most important to least important, then simply ignore the less important contributions. With the strong force, they couldn’t do that.

Then in 1990, Steven Weinberg found a way to connect the world of quarks and gluons to sticky nuclei. The trick was to use an effective field theory — a theory that is only as detailed as it needs to be to describe nature at a particular size (or energy) scale. To describe the behavior of a nucleus, you don’t need to know about quarks and gluons. Instead, at these scales, a new effective force emerges — the strong nuclear force transmitted between nucleons by the exchange of pions.

A New Experiment Casts Doubt on the Leading Theory of the Nucleus, Katie McCormick, Quanta Magazine

Magnet row of the ALPS experiment in the HERA tunnel: In this part of the magnets, intense laser light is reflected back and forth, from which axions are supposed to form. Credit: DESY, Marta Maye

Topics: Dark Matter, Materials Science, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics

The ALPS (Any Light Particle Search) experiment, which stretches a total length of 250 meters, is looking for a particularly light type of new elementary particle. The international research team wants to search for these so-called axions or axion-like particles using twenty-four recycled superconducting magnets from the HERA accelerator, an intense laser beam, precision interferometry, and highly sensitive detectors.

Such particles are believed to react only extremely weakly with known kinds of matter, which means they cannot be detected in experiments using accelerators. ALPS is therefore resorting to an entirely different principle to detect them: in a strong magnetic field, photons—i.e., particles of light—could be transformed into these mysterious elementary particles and back into [light] again.

"The idea for an experiment like ALPS has been around for over 30 years. By using components and the infrastructure of the former HERA accelerator, together with state-of-the-art technologies, we are now able to realize ALPS II in an international collaboration for the first time," says Beate Heinemann, Director of Particle Physics at DESY.

Helmut Dosch, Chairman of DESY's Board of Directors, adds, "DESY has set itself the task of decoding matter in all its different forms. So ALPS II fits our research strategy perfectly, and perhaps it will push open the door to dark matter."

The ALPS team sends a high-intensity laser beam along a device called an optical resonator in a vacuum tube, approximately 120 meters in length, in which the beam is reflected backward and forwards and is enclosed by twelve HERA magnets arranged in a straight line. If a photon were to turn into an axion in the strong magnetic field, that axion could pass through the opaque wall at the end of the line of magnets.

Once through the wall, it would enter another magnetic track almost identical to the first. Here, the [axion] could then change back into a photon, which would be captured by the detector at the end. A second optical resonator is set up here to increase the probability of an [axion[ turning back into a photon by a factor of 10,000.

This means if [light] does arrive behind the wall, it must have been an axion in between. "However, despite all our technical tricks, the probability of a photon turning into an axion and back again is very small," says DESY's Axel Lindner, project leader and spokesperson of the ALPS collaboration, "like throwing 33 dice and them all coming up the same."

In order for the experiment to actually work, the researchers had to tweak all the different components of the apparatus to maximum performance. The light detector is so sensitive that it can detect a single photon per day. The precision of the system of mirrors for the light is also record-breaking: the distance between the mirrors must remain constant to within a fraction of an atomic diameter relative to the wavelength of the laser.

World's most sensitive model-independent experiment starts searching for dark matter, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, Phys.org.

Conceptual artwork of a pair of entangled quantum particles. Credit: Science Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo

Topics: Modern Physics, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Theoretical Physics

Quantum entanglement is a complex phenomenon in physics that is usually poorly described as an invisible link between distant quantum objects that allows one to affect the other instantly. Albert Einstein famously dismissed this idea of entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.” Entanglement is better understood as information, but that’s admittedly bland. So nowadays, every news article, explainer, opinion piece, and artistic interpretation of quantum entanglement equates the phenomenon with Einstein’s spookiness. The situation has only worsened with the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics going to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for quantum entanglement experiments. But it’s time to cut this adjective loose. Calling entanglement spooky completely misrepresents how it actually works and hinders our ability to make sense of it.

In 1935, physicist Erwin Schrödinger coined the term entanglement, emphasizing that it was “not one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought.” He was writing in response to a famous paper (known simply to physicists as the EPR argument) by Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen that claimed quantum physics was incomplete. The New York Times headline read, “Einstein attacks quantum theory,” which solidified the widespread perception that Einstein hated quantum physics.

The EPR argument concerns the everyday notion of reality as a collection of things in the world with physical properties waiting to be revealed through measurement. This is how most of us intuitively understand reality. Einstein’s theory of relativity fits into this understanding and says reality must be local, meaning nothing can influence anything else faster than the speed of light. But EPR showed that quantum physics isn’t compatible with these ideas—that it can’t account for a theory of local reality. In other words, quantum physics was missing something. To complete quantum physics, Einstein suggested scientists should look for a “deeper” theory of local reality. Many physicists responded in defense of quantum theory, but the matter remained unresolved until 1964 when physicist John S. Bell proposed an experiment that could rule out the existence of local reality. Clauser was the first to perform the test, which was later improved and perfected by Aspect and Zeilinger.

Quantum Entanglement Isn’t All That Spooky After All, Chris Ferrie, Scientific American

Credit: Petrovich9/Getty Images

Topics: Entanglement, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Research, Theoretical Physics

Reference: Albert Einstein colorfully dismissed quantum entanglement—the ability of separated objects to share a condition or state—as “spooky action at a distance.” Science.org

For the first time, scientists have observed quantum interference—a wavelike interaction between particles related to the weird quantum phenomenon of entanglement—occurring between two different kinds of particles. The discovery could help physicists understand what goes on inside an atomic nucleus.

Particles act as both particles and waves. And interference is the ability of one particle’s wavelike action to diminish or amplify the action of other quantum particles like two boat wakes crossing in a lake. Sometimes the overlapping waves add up to a bigger wave, and sometimes they cancel out, erasing it. This interference occurs because of entanglement, one of the weirder aspects of quantum physics, which was predicted in the 1930s and has been experimentally observed since the 1970s. When entangled, the quantum states of multiple particles are linked so that measurements of one will correlate with measurements of the others, even if one is on Jupiter and another is on your front lawn.

Dissimilar particles can sometimes become entangled, but until now, these [mismatched] entangled particles weren’t known to interfere with one another. That’s because part of measuring interference relies on two wavelike particles being indistinguishable from each other. Imagine two photons, or particles of light, from two separate sources. If you were to detect these photons, there would be no way to determine which source each came from because there is no way to tell which photon is which. Thanks to the quantum laws governing these very small particles, this ambiguity is actually measurable: all the possible histories of the two identical photons interfere with one another, creating new patterns in particles’ final wavelike actions.

Scientists See Quantum Interference between Different Kinds of Particles for the First Time, Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American

Credit: Matt Harrison Clough (original image at link)

Topics: Entanglement, High Energy Physics, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics

Breaking the rules is exciting, especially if they have been held for a long time. This is true not just in life but also in particle physics. Here the rule I’m thinking of is called “lepton flavor universality,” and it is one of the predictions of our Standard Model of particle physics, which describes all the known fundamental particles and their interactions (except for gravity). For several decades after the invention of the Standard Model, particles seemed to obey this rule.

Things started to change in 2004 when the E821 experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island announced its measurement of a property of the muon—a heavy version of the electron—known as its g-factor. The measurement wasn’t what the Standard Model predicted. Muons and electrons are both parts of a class of particles called leptons (along with a third particle, the tau, as well as the three generations of neutrinos). The rule of lepton flavor universality says that because electrons and muons are charged leptons, they should all interact with other particles in the same way (barring small differences related to the Higgs particle). If they don’t, then they violate lepton flavor universality—and the unexpected g-factor measurement suggested that’s just what was happening.

If particles really were breaking this rule, that would be exciting in its own right and also because physicists believe that the Standard Model can’t be the ultimate theory of nature. The theory doesn’t explain why neutrinos have mass, what makes up the invisible dark matter that seems to dominate the cosmos, or why matter won out over antimatter in the early universe. Therefore, the Standard Model must be merely an approximate description that we will need to supplement by adding new particles and interactions. Physicists have proposed a huge number of such extensions, but at most one of these theories can be correct, and so far none of them has received any direct confirmation. A measured violation of the Standard Model would be a flashlight pointing the way toward this higher theory we seek.

Rule-Breaking Particles Pop Up in Experiments around the World, Andreas Crivellin, Scientific American

The ore pass at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. (Courtesy of Sanford Underground Research Facility, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.)

Topics: Applied Physics, Modern Physics, Particle Physics, Theoretical Physics

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) will be the world’s largest cryogenic particle detector. Its aim is to study the most elusive of particles: neutrinos. Teams from around the world are developing and constructing detector components that they will ship to the Sanford Underground Research Facility, commonly called Sanford Lab, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. There the detector components will be lowered more than a kilometer underground through a narrow shaft to the caverns, where they will be assembled and operated while being sheltered from the cosmic rays that constantly rain down on Earth’s surface.

For at least two decades, the detector will be exposed to the highest-intensity neutrino beam on the planet. The beam will be generated 1300 km away by a megawatt-class proton accelerator and beamline under development at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. A smaller detector just downstream of the beamline will measure the neutrinos at the start of their journey, thereby enabling the experiment’s precision and scientific reach.

Building a ship in a bottle for neutrino science, Anne Heavey, FERMILAB, Physics Today

Living on: data taken by the now-defunct CDF experiment has revealed a surprising mass for the W boson. (Courtesy: Fermilab)

Topics: Fermilab, High Energy Physics, Modern Physics, Particle Physics, Steven Weinberg

The most precise measurement to date of the mass of the W boson has yielded a result seven standard deviations away from that predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. The stunning result was obtained by a painstaking analysis of data taken at the Fermilab Tevatron collider in the US before it closed in 2011. The particle physics community must now study the results carefully to work out whether it is an incredible statistical fluke, an unknown experimental error, a flaw in the Standard Model, or a genuine indication of physics beyond the Standard Model.

The W boson is one of the most intriguing particles described by the Standard Model. Together with the neutral Z boson, the charged W boson mediates the weak interaction, which causes beta decay and several other important processes in particle physics. The weak interaction has long intrigued scientists searching for physics beyond the Standard Model, partly because it is the only force known to violate charge-parity symmetry. If particles in a process are exchanged for their antiparticles and the spatial coordinates are inverted, the weak interaction in this mirror image process is not always identical. This puzzle is not explained in the Standard Model.

W boson mass measurement surprises physicists, Tim Wogan, Physics World

Image Source: Fermilab, and link below

Topics: Fermilab, High Energy Physics, Modern Physics, Neutrinos, Particle Physics

Solving big mysteries

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment is an international flagship experiment to unlock the mysteries of neutrinos. DUNE will be installed in the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, under construction in the United States. DUNE scientists will paint a clearer picture of the universe and how it works. Their research may even give us the key to understanding why we live in a matter-dominated universe — in other words, why we are here at all.

DUNE will pursue three major science goals: find out whether neutrinos could be the reason the universe is made of matter; look for subatomic phenomena that could help realize Einstein’s dream of the unification of forces; and watch for neutrinos emerging from an exploding star, perhaps witnessing the birth of a neutron star or a black hole.

DUNE at LBNF, Fermilab

This calculated diffraction image shows how forked diffraction gratings shape the atoms' wave function into a vortex. (Courtesy: Science/AAAS)

Topics: Bose-Einstein Condensate, Nanotechnology, Particle Physics, Quantum Optics

A wave-like property previously only seen in beams of light and electrons has been observed for the first time in atoms and molecules. By passing beams of helium and neon through a grid of specially shaped nanoslits, researchers led by Edvardas Narevicius of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science succeeded in giving the beams a non-zero orbital angular momentum (OAM). The resulting structures are known vortex beams, and they could be used for fundamental physics studies such as probing the internal structure of protons.

Many natural systems contain vortices – think of tornadoes and ocean eddies on Earth, the red spot on Jupiter, and gravitational vortices around black holes. On all scales, such vortices are characterized by the circulation of a flux around an axis. In the quantum world, these swirling structures are found in ensembles of particles that can be described by a wavefunction, including superfluids and Bose-Einstein condensates.

Atoms and molecules make vortex beams, Isabelle Dumé, Physics World

Figure 1. The size contrast between conventional accelerator facilities and chip-based accelerators is dramatic. (a) The Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator facility at SLAC was used for early laser-acceleration experiments in 2012–15. (Image courtesy of the Archives and History Office/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.) (b) The first dielectric laser accelerator chips demonstrated at SLAC were made of fused silica and were each the size of a grain of rice. (Image courtesy of Christopher Smith/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.)

Topics: Applied Physics, Modern Physics, Particle Physics

Physics Today 74, 8, 42 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4815

Particle accelerators are among the most important scientific tools of the modern age. Major accelerator facilities, such as the 27-km-circumference Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, where the Higgs boson was recently discovered, allow scientists to uncover fundamental properties of matter and energy. But the particle energies needed to explore new regimes of physics have increased to the TeV scale and beyond, and accelerator facilities based on conventional technologies are becoming prohibitively large and costly. Even lower-energy, smaller-scale accelerators used in medicine and industry are often cumbersome devices; they can weigh several tons and cost millions of dollars.

Efforts are consequently underway to develop more compact, less expensive accelerator technologies. One approach, a dielectric laser accelerator (DLA), uses an ultrafast IR laser to deliver energy to electrons inside a microchip-scale device. Efficient, ultrafast solid-state lasers and semiconductor fabrication methods developed over the past two decades have enabled a new breed of photonic devices that can sustain accelerating fields one to two orders of magnitude larger than conventional microwave-cavity accelerators.

The approach has the potential to dramatically shrink particle accelerators, thereby enabling ultrafast tabletop electron diffraction and microscopy experiments and tunable x-ray sources. An international effort is now underway to develop a laser-driven accelerator integrated on a silicon photonics platform: an “accelerator on a chip.”

Microchip accelerators, Joel England, Peter Hommelhoff, Robert L. Byer, Physics Today

Image Source: Link below

Topics: Particle Physics, Quantum Computer, Quantum Mechanics, Theoretical Physics

Flatland: “The book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture, but the novella’s more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.” Source: Wikipedia

After decades of exploration in nature’s smallest domains, physicists have finally found evidence that anyons exist. First predicted by theorists in the early 1980s, these particle-like objects only arise in realms confined to two dimensions, and then only under certain circumstances — like at temperatures near absolute zero and in the presence of a strong magnetic field.

Physicists are excited about anyons not only because their discovery confirms decades of theoretical work, but also for practical reasons. For example, Anyons are at the heart of an effort by Microsoft to build a working quantum computer.

This year brought two solid confirmations of the quasiparticles. The first arrived in April, in a paper featured on the cover of Science, from a group of researchers at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Using an approach proposed four years ago, physicists sent an electron gas through a teeny-tiny particle collider to tease out weird behaviors — especially fractional electric charges — that only arise if anyons are around. The second confirmation came in July when a group at Purdue University in Indiana used an experimental setup on an etched chip that screened out interactions that might obscure anyon behavior.

MIT physicist Frank Wilczek, who predicted and named anyons in the early 1980s, credits the first paper as the discovery but says the second lets the quasiparticles shine. “It’s gorgeous work that makes the field blossom,” he says. Anyons aren’t like ordinary elementary particles; scientists will never be able to isolate one from the system where it forms. They’re quasiparticles, which means they have measurable properties like a particle — such as a location, maybe even a mass — but they’re only observable as a result of the collective behavior of other, conventional particles. (Think of the intricate geometric shapes made by group behavior in nature, such as flocks of birds flying in formation or schools of fish swimming as one.)

The known universe contains only two varieties of elementary particles. One is the family of fermions, which includes electrons, as well as protons, neutrons, and the quarks that form them. Fermions keep to themselves: No two can exist in the same quantum state at the same time. If these particles didn’t have this property, all matter could simply collapse to a single point. It’s because of fermions that solid matter exists.

The rest of the particles in the universe are bosons, a group that includes particles like photons (the messengers of light and radiation) and gluons (which “glue” quarks together). Unlike fermions, two or more bosons can exist in the same state at the same time. They tend to clump together. It’s because of this clumping that we have lasers, which are streams of photons all occupying the same quantum state.

Physicists prove the existence of two-dimensional particles called 'anyons', Stephen Omes, Astronomy (December 2020)

New territory Two candidate collider-neutrino events from the FASERν pilot detector in the plane longitudinal to (top) and transverse to (bottom) the beam direction. The different lines in each event show charged-particle tracks originating from the neutrino interaction point. Credit: FASER Collaboration.

Topics: CERN, High Energy Physics, Particle Physics, Research

Think “neutrino detector” and images of giant installations come to mind, necessary to compensate for the vanishingly small interaction probability of neutrinos with matter. The extreme luminosity of proton-proton collisions at the LHC, however, produces a large neutrino flux in the forward direction, with energies leading to cross-sections high enough for neutrinos to be detected using a much more compact apparatus.

In March, the CERN research board approved the Scattering and Neutrino Detector (SND@LHC) for installation in an unused tunnel that links the LHC to the SPS, 480 m downstream from the ATLAS experiment. Designed to detect neutrinos produced in a hitherto unexplored pseudo-rapidity range (7.2 < 𝜂 < 8.6), the experiment will complement and extend the physics reach of the other LHC experiments — in particular FASERν, which was approved last year. Construction of FASERν, which is located in an unused service tunnel on the opposite side of ATLAS along the LHC beamline (covering |𝜂|>9.1), was completed in March, while installation of SND@LHC is about to begin.

Both experiments will be able to detect neutrinos of all types, with SND@LHC positioned off the beamline to detect neutrinos produced at slightly larger angles. Expected to commence data-taking during LHC Run 3 in spring 2022, these latest additions to the LHC experiment family are poised to make the first observations of collider neutrinos while opening new searches for feebly interacting particles and other new physics.

Collider neutrinos on the horizon, Matthew Chalmers, CERN Courier

Illustration of the FASER experiment. Image Credit: FASER/CERN.

Topics: CERN, Dark Matter, High Energy Physics, Neutrinos, Particle Physics

Neutrinos are ubiquitous and notorious. Billions are passing through you at this moment. Occasionally described as a “ghost of a particle,” neutrinos are nearly massless, thereby making them extremely difficult to detect experimentally (“Neutrino,” meaning “little neutral one” in Italian, was first used by Enrico Fermi in the early 1930s). Neutrinos were first confirmed in 1956 (thanks to a nearby nuclear reactor), and they’ve since been detected from different sources, including the Sun and cosmic rays, but not yet in a particle collider. Their elusiveness has been the source of much intrigue (and, of course, research funding) within the particle physics community since.

What else makes them so curious? Neutrinos come in three flavors — electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino — and may switch between them through the process of oscillation. Neutrino oscillations have been experimentally confirmed only in the past decade at the Super-K Detector in Japan (physicists Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for it). This discovery signified an important direction in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model because the longstanding theory does not explain neutrino oscillations and describes them as completely massless particles. Something isn’t quite adding up.

Enter: FASER. Initially proposed in 2018, the ForwArd Search ExpeRiment (FASER) is CERN’s newest experiment poised to detect neutrinos, potentially up to 1300 electron neutrinos, 20,000 muon neutrinos, and 20 tau neutrinos. Constructed in an unused service tunnel located about 500 meters from an Atlas experiment interaction point, FASER and its corresponding sub-detector, FASERν, have been designed to probe interactions of high-energy neutrinos (predicted to be between 600 GeV and 1 TeV).

FASER Poised to Further Our Understanding of Neutrinos, Dark Matter, Hannah Pell, Physics Central Buzz Blog

Feynman QED Diagram: Fermilab

Topics: Modern Physics, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics

Solving a mystery

More than 200 scientists from around the world are collaborating with Fermilab on the Muon g-2 physics experiment which probes fundamental properties of matter and space. Muon g-2 (pronounced gee minus two) allows researchers to peer into the subatomic world to search for undiscovered particles that may be hiding in the vacuum.

Residing at Fermilab's Muon Campus, the experiment uses the Fermilab accelerator complex to produce an intense beam of muons traveling at nearly the speed of light. Scientists will use the beam to precisely determine the value of a property known as the g-2 of the muon.

The muon, like its lighter sibling the electron, acts like a spinning magnet. The parameter known as "g" indicates how strong the magnet is and the rate of its gyration. The value of the muon's g is slightly larger than 2. This difference from 2 is caused by the presence of virtual particles that appear from the quantum vacuum and then quickly disappear into it again.

In measuring g-2 with high precision and comparing its value to the theoretical prediction, physicists aim to discover whether the experiment agrees with the theory. Any deviation would point to as yet undiscovered subatomic particles that exist in nature.

An experiment that concluded in 2001 at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a tantalizing 3.7 sigma (standard deviation) discrepancy between the theoretical calculation and the measurement of the muon g-2. With a four-fold increase in the measurement's precision, Muon g-2 will be more sensitive to virtual or hidden particles and forces than any previous experiment of its kind and can bring this discrepancy to the 5 sigma discovery level.

The centerpiece of the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab is a large, 50-foot-diameter superconducting muon storage ring. This one-of-a-kind ring, made of steel, aluminum, and superconducting wire, was built for the previous g-2 experiment at Brookhaven. The ring was moved from Brookhaven to Fermilab in 2013. Making use of Fermilab's intense particle beams, scientists will be able to significantly increase the science output of this unique instrument. The experiment started taking data in 2018.

U.S. Department of Energy - Fermilab: Muon g - 2

Topics: Modern Physics, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Quarks

Note: A primer on quarks at Hyperphysics</a>

On 17 January 1957, a few months after Chien-Shiung Wu’s discovery of parity violation, Wolfgang Pauli wrote to Victor Weisskopf: “Ich glaube aber nicht, daß der Herrgott ein schwacher Linkshänder ist” (I cannot believe that God is a weak left-hander). But maximal parity violation is now well established within the Standard Model (SM). The weak interaction only couples to left-handed particles, as dramatically seen in the continuing absence of experimental evidence for right-handed neutrinos. In the same way, the polarisation of photons originating from transitions that involve weak interaction is expected to be completely left-handed.

The LHCb collaboration recently tested the handedness of photons emitted in rare flavor-changing transitions from a b-quark to an s-quark. These are mediated by the bosons of the weak interaction according to the SM – but what if new virtual particles contribute too? Their presence could be clearly signaled by a right-handed contribution to the photon polarization.

In pursuit of right-handed photons, A report from the LHCb experiment, CERN Courier