Fermilab scientists find evidence for significant matter-antimatter asymmetry
Scientists of the DZero collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced Friday, May 14, that they have found evidence for significant violation of matter-antimatter symmetry in the behaviour of particles containing bottom quarks beyond what is expected in the current theory, the Standard Model of particle physics. The new result, submitted for publication in Physical Review D by the DZero collaboration, an international team of 500 physicists, indicates a one percent difference between the production of pairs of muons and pairs of antimuons in the decay of B mesons produced in high-energy collisions at Fermilab's Tevatron particle collider. Read more
Scientists say they have come across a clue that could help explain why the universe is comprised of matter and not antimatter. According to the researchers, arriving at that answer could reveal why we even exist. The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory researchers say collisions of protons and anti-protons produce pairs of particles called muons more frequently than they produce anti-muons. Read more
John C. Mather, a Senior Astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and a Nobel Laureate, explained the creation of the universe to a packed house at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Thursday afternoon. Mather received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his experimental work that solidified the big bang theory, which states that the Universe expanded from the eruption of a dense primordial material thirteen to fourteen billion years ago. Read more
Title: Self-Consistent Solution of Cosmological Radiation-Hydrodynamics and Chemical Ionisation Authors: Daniel R. Reynolds, John C. Hayes, Pascal Paschos, Michael L. Norman (12 Jun 2009, version v3)
We consider a PDE system comprising compressible hydrodynamics, flux-limited diffusion radiation transport and chemical ionisation kinetics in a cosmologically-expanding universe. Under an operator-split framework, the cosmological hydrodynamics equations are solved through the Piecewise Parabolic Method, as implemented in the Enzo community hydrodynamics code. The remainder of the model, including radiation transport, chemical ionisation kinetics, and gas energy feedback, form a stiff coupled PDE system, which we solve using a fully-implicit inexact Newton approach, and which forms the crux of this paper. The inner linear Newton systems are solved using a Schur complement formulation, and employ a multigrid-preconditioned conjugate gradient solver for the inner Schur systems. We describe this approach and provide results on a suite of test problems, demonstrating its accuracy, robustness, and scalability to very large problems.
Lancaster Scientists take part in Big Bang experiments
Lancaster University Physicists are celebrating their work on two landmark experiments which are attempting to understand the building blocks of the universe. Lancaster scientists were in Switzerland over the weekend observing the successful switch on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the world's biggest science experiment. Shortly after 2pm on Monday, 23 November, engineers operating the LHC successfully smashed together proton beams in the machine for the very first time. These were observed in the ATLAS detector which was developed by a team including Lancaster Physicists. Meanwhile on Tuesday, 24 November, Lancaster Particle Physicists working on the T2K (Tokai-to-Kamioka) neutrino experiment in Japan celebrated as the 'near' detector observed its first neutrinos - fundamental particles about which much is still to be learned. The University's particle physics group built a 6 ton particle detector being used in Japan. The detector is a key component of the T2K research which hopes to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of the universe. Read more
How did the Universe begin? Many scientists would regard this as one of the most profound questions of all. But to Stephen Hawking, who has perhaps come closer than anyone to answering it, the question doesn't in fact even exist. Hawking, based at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleague Thomas Hertog of the European Laboratory for Particle Physics at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, are about to publish a paper claiming that the Universe had no unique beginning. Instead, they argue, it began in just about every way imaginable (and maybe some that aren't).
Lawrence Krauss gives a talk on our current picture of the universe, how it will end, and how it could have come from nothing. Krauss is the author of many bestselling books on Physics and Cosmology, including "The Physics of Star Trek."
We've all heard it before. The classic argument from a theist's perspective on why a god must have created our universe. I can't tell you how many times religious people have said to me: "well, can you think of one example where something comes from nothing in the universe?" Read more Ed ~ the answer is yes. It could be thought that all the parts that make up our universe today add up to zero. The discovery of CPT violation gave some insights into the mechanism.