Physics, Storms and Black Holes

So ... many things happened during these months. Harvard had its winter break and returned to full speed a few weeks ago. There was a secret conference about Quantum Entanglement in St. John, U.S. Virgin Island while the Nemo storm hit Cambridge, and last week many got jealous in the physics community because a new Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences prize was announced. The award not only pairs to that in physics but it was created and is being partially funded by the Milner Foundation that started last year honoring discoveries in fundamental physics -- even the web pages look alike!

Personally, I had some very productive days and visited the String Theory Group at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill last week where I gave a talk and engaged in very interesting discussions about a new subject I am working on: Black Hole Scattering (click on the title or slides).

Please check my upcoming post about the Physics Harvard Puppet Show & fast spinning black holes.

 

Societies in the Boston area

One of the oldest and most prestigious societies, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is  housed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Today, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture there. Frank Wilczek (Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004) talked about "The Modern Concept of Matter" and explained the impact of the recent discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC after a brief introduction by Jerome Friedman (Nobel Prize in Physics 1990). If you get the chance to visit the building take some time to read the (old) letters around the entrance wall written by the some of its famous members. Here are my pictures of the evening.

Physics has new Nobel lautures

Today the Nobel prize of Physics was announced and ...  it goes to ...  quantum optics. This is the field in physics dealing with the application of quantum mechanics to phenomena involving light and its interactions with matter [Wiki-source] and had already been awarded a prize in 2005. So, in spite of the speculations after recent discoveries at the LHC, it seems that these teams will have to wait.
Interestingly, something that came up in a recent conversation with my  colleagues, is that there are other fields waiting to be more represented among the winners such as gravity. Einstein for instance got his for the photoelectric effect. Hopefully the lingering is not too long and does not come too late.
Oh! I was looking up some statistics on the Nobel prize and found some interesting ones. So if you are looking for a formula to get the Nobel prize click here.

Scientific Haute Cusine

The chefs Roca at the Science Center - Harvard

The new edition of some very interesting public lectures at the Science Center@Harvard started last week. A full auditorium today shows how the scientists can reach out and explain physical phenomena in simple things like cooking. World-class chefs cook and explain their cooking techniques and a scientist illustrates one of the ideas involved. If you are around you can see the upcoming events of Cooking&Science lectures. They prepared distilled chocolate ice-cream with liquid nitrogen for us today and we even got the chance to try it!

Mars relentless curiosity

In three hours the new robot Curiosity will land on Mars. This event will be broadcasted live on NASA's tv and other places like Times Square in New York City. 

Although humans have sent several robots already and we have a very good idea of its red hilly landscape there are many unknowns. The new US$ 2.5 billion robot will focus in trying to see whether Mars had the right conditions to support life.

Mars is smaller than the Earth, has its own atmosphere and is 6 months away for an astronaut to travel from the Earth. Therefore, if something interesting comes up maybe in 2030's we will put a step on it. For now, we can continue dreaming in buying a house and moving into Mars and if you are curious like me you can explore Mars in 3D directly with the really cool downloadable Google Earth program.

Theoretical Physics get's posh

While it is not true that "Physicists are rarely wealthy or famous[...]" as the NYTimes article
points out --  some of which include A. Einstein, A. Merkel and J.Simons -- it is true that rarely they receive a lump of millions just because.  This past week 9 prizes were awarded (each for a value of US$ 3 million dollars). The Leatures include: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Alan Guth, Alexei Kitaev, Maxim Kontsevich, Andrei Linde, Juan Maldacena, Nathan Seiberg, Ashoke Sen and Edward Witten.

Click to see the link.

If curious, check out the web-page of the Fundamental Physics Prize because this award will be awarded annually and it doubles the amount awarded with the Nobel prize.

I AMsterdam String Workshop 2012

During the last two weeks I participated in the 2012 edition of the Amsterdam String Workshop. Old and new faces were attending daily. A light format of two talks per day ( you can check the program here ) made it easy to interact and discuss with collaborators.

Traditions: the Cargese Summer School

Everyone working in high energy physics has attended at least once the Cargese Summer School held every two years since 1972 at the Institut d'Etudes Scientifiques in Corecega, France. I had the chance this year to attend and the lecturers included:

T. Banks (UCSC),  Z. Bern (UCLA),  E. Bergshoeff (Groningen),  H. Elvang (Michigan),  M. Gaberdiel (ETH), S. Grushevsky (Stony Brook),  A. Hanany (Imperial College),  R. Janik (Cracow),  Z. Komardogski (IAS and Weizmann Institute),  S. Minwalla (TIFR),  K. Schalm (Leiden),  A. Strominger (Harvard),  S. Vandoren (Utrecht).

During the traditional Gong show we  -- the participants -- had to explain in only two minutes what we are working on. I was first and this is my very compressed presentation on my latest paper arXiv:1204.1284   ---->



Can you guess who the person behind the camera is as well as who the moderator (on the right) and the chairman (on the left) are ???

Everyone has something to say on the Higgs. Also Juan Maldacena.

Early start for many and even queuing overnight to get a spot in the main auditorium @CERN as we could see throughout the internet. After a couple of hours the message was out: a new particle with a mass of 126 GeV had been discovered and everything hints that it is the spinless Higgs boson. We will have to wait for the complete analysis of CMS and ATLAS (both experiments @CERN) to know the details such as its spin to really declare that it is The Higgs. But the mass of this particle is a very good start! More details on the measurements will be presented -- 9am CMS and 9:15am ATLAS -- on Saturday in the conference in Australia that can be followed live: ICHEP2012 webcast. WARNING: the conference is in Australia EST-timezone so check your local time.

There was a lot of excitement after the talks and everyone had something to say. In our community the most famous person is Juan Maldacena and he had a newspaper article today in the argentinean newspaper La Nacion and as he says much remains to be elucidated. Check Juan Maldacena's newspaper article in spanish or this one translated into english.

Rumour Has It: Higgs spotted

There are not to many times in a physicist life in which a major discovery is made. Tomorrow at 9am (Europe) one of this onetime events is scheduled. As everything indicates a joint announcement between CMS and ATLAS of more than 5 sigma proclaiming that they have found the Higgs particle will take place. Everyone is invited to watch the LHC-webcast @CERN although as I have found out from the BBC there are also very special guests. These are the authors of the three 1964 theoretical papers where the existence of this particle was predicted. I had a look this week and this is how story was written:

1) on June 26 the first paper was submitted to PRL by Englert+Brout (published on Aug. 31)
2) on Aug. 31 the second paper was submitted to PRL by Higgs alone (published on Oct. 19)
3) on Oct. 18 the third paper of the saga was submitted to PRL by Guralnik+Hagen+Kibbles (published on Nov. 16)

The expectations are huge and the rumors do have it all: Higgs spotted @ the airport in his way to Geneva.

For me this is very special.  Many years ago, while bored reading about particles on a popular science book during summertime in Argentina I found out about the missing Higgs particle and decided that I was going to become a theoretical physicist.