The Search for New Physics: The Era of Precision Measurements

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Created: Sunday, November 27 2011 16:48

Last Updated: Wednesday, November 30 2011 11:56

Written by Carole Kiger

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A new era in particle physics has begun with the main focus of the field now turned to the discovery of physics beyond the Standard Model. While, the Standard Model has, thus far, passed all tests to very high accuracy, there are many indications that it is an incomplete theory. Direct searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model, in the form of new types of elementary particles and interactions, are underway at experiments at the CERN LHC collider. The reach of these searches is in the multi-TeV energy scale that is currently reachable at the LHC. Another powerful approach, historically responsible for some of the major discoveries in the field, is the indirect detection of the imprints of New Physics through virtual quantum effects. Precision measurements of such processes can provide complementary information on possible New Physics signatures that may emerge at the LHC, but also provide a window into physics at energy scales far exceeding those available to the direct searches. On the experimental front, the measurements of these rare processes often require particle collisions at extremely high intensity. In this talk, I will describe the prospects for indirect searches for new physics and new sources of CP violation by using the bottom quark as a probe. I will also describe some of the key experimental breakthroughs that have made it possible to design and develop a very high luminosity electron-positron collider that allows for precision measurements of New Physics effects in the decays of particles containing the bottom quark.

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Lighting the Way to Fusion Energy with Intense Lasers

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Created: Wednesday, October 26 2011 10:56

Last Updated: Wednesday, October 26 2011 10:58

Written by Carole Kiger

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Caught between increasing evidence of rapid warming and ever more difficult carbon-based resource extraction, those who aren't in a state of pseudo-science denial are desperately looking for a sustainable path forward. While the public's current attention is on so-called renewables (wind, bio, solar), not only is our record of sustained investment in these technologies remarkably inconsistent, there is a strong case to be made that renewables can't be scaled up in any practical manner to become the "green" energy source for the world by 2100. This leaves nuclear fission as the technologist's choice, but since the US, Russian and now Japanese accidents, there is no political will to invest here either. By a process of elimination, we are left with fusion. Fusion Energy, the solution to the world's energy needs, is the promised source "20 years in future", and has been so described since the 1950s. As physicists, we have been guilty of far too little humility concerning the degree of difficulty surrounding the physics fundamentals of fusion. Magnetic confinement technologies have proven far more expensive and intractable than anyone imagined 20 years ago: now the nation has invested in the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a $5B inertial confinement, laser-driven fusion energy device. It's purpose is to show "the way" in a demonstration of break-even fusion ignition, scheduled for this year. As this talk will make clear, it shouldn't surprise anyone that Mother Nature evidently didn't receive the memo on what she was supposed to do. Yes, NIF may be in trouble, and with this trouble the nations last sustained research program in alternative energies may fall victim to the impending budge-cutting mayhem being proffered in D.C. On the other hand, the nation's investment in the science of High Energy Density Physics, the study of materials at the extremes of density and temperatures, has yielded a set of remarkable results, and a new physics field full of large promises.

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Solving the Energy Crisis Without Coal and Nuclear Reactors

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Created: Wednesday, October 26 2011 14:01

Last Updated: Monday, November 07 2011 11:32

Written by Carole Kiger

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A fully renewable, reliable, and efficient energy system in the United States is technically and economically feasible. The transition can be completed in about in about 30 years. Nuclear power is neither needed nor desirable to go to a zero-CO2 emissions economy. The issues relating to intermittency of solar and wind can be overcome with available technology and the rapidly developing set of technologies and concepts that go under the smart grid rubric.

Two resources:

http://www.ieer.org/carbonfree/CarbonFreeNuclearFree.pdf published in 2007 and an update in the form of a legal declaration www.ieer.org published in 2011.

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Why are Neutrinos so Light? Early Results from the EXO Double Beta Decay Experiment

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Created: Friday, September 30 2011 11:48

Last Updated: Tuesday, October 04 2011 16:49

Written by Carole Kiger

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Neutrinos are perhaps the most mysterious and intriguing fundamental particles known to exist in nature. It took 40 years to determine that they have tiny, non-zero masses, and even today neutrino mass properties can only be inferred indirectly through quantum mechanical interference effects. So why should nature give us a particle which is so extraordinarily light, and yet not exactly massless? Our best hope to unravel this puzzle is to address a closely related question: does the neutrino act as its own anti-particle? Unfortunately, there has been little direct experimental progress on these issues in the last ten years, but now several ambitious new experiments are promising to significantly advance the frontier in relatively short order. The first such experiment to come online is the EXO-200 experiment, which was designed, constructed, and operated by a collaboration which includes the University of Maryland. An order of magnitude larger than all previous efforts, EXO-200 has already made the first observation of the ultra-rare two-neutrino double beta decay of the Xenon-136 nucleus. The half-life of this decay, at 2.11x10^21 years, ranks it as the longest half-life ever directly observed in nature, and yet it was seen and accurately measured by EXO-200 with only six weeks of data. Due to this demonstrated and unprecedented sensitivity, we expect to shed some welcome light on the critical questions of neutrino mass in the near future.

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