Archive for July, 2014
Back from the SUSY conference
Schüleruni Physik
This week we have the “Schüleruni Physik “. 25 very motivated high school students aged 16-18 visit the institute to get an impression of life at the university and get some insight in whether they like to study physics at the RWTH. This year, we have planned great talks about particle physics at the collider and in space. In the afternoon, the students have the possibility to experiment and visit labs.
If you have missed to apply for this year, go here to find out about other RWTH events for high school students.
Dark matter mysteries
The bullet cluster are two galaxy clusters roughly 3.8 billion light years away in the Carina constellation in the southern sky. Galaxy clusters are gravitationally bound accumulations of galaxies. The bullet cluster is an object of particular interest: Since its discovery in 1995, it has been an object of study with different observation methods. In the optical light, there seem to be two separate galaxy clusters with a distance of roughly 0.7 Mpc. The X-ray observation reveals, that these two galaxy cluster collided in the past and are now separating again. The bullet cluster is a textbook example for such two objects interacting, leading to a bow shock which can be nicely studied in the X-ray image of the object. However, there is something else which is very interesting about this object: The collision separates two components of the galaxy clusters, namely the luminous mass of the cluster and the main mass components of the cluster, that can not be seen in the optical or X-ray region. This hints towards a large amount of dark matter taking part in the collision. And this makes it very interesting for particle physicists as well! Read the rest of this entry »
Are there leptoquarks?
Leptoquarks are interesting objects: These (so far) hypothetical particles are able to connect a single Lepton and a single quark in one interaction. For triggering such an interaction, leptoquarks have to carry both lepton number (such as leptons) and baryon quantum number (such as quarks). Hence the name: Lept-o-quark.
This year’s Bachelor projects
In our pheno group we had a whole bunch of Bachelor students which have now submitted their Bachelor theses. Some of the themes are roughly related to the actual projects we are working on at the moment, otherwise we tried to cover current topics in particle physics. And these are the topics:
A Higgs or not a Higgs?
It has been exactly two years now since the two big experiments Atlas and CMS at the LHC announced the discovery of a new boson. This boson is so far hotly tipped to be the Standard Model Higgs particle. What does “being the Standard model Higgs particle” mean, are particle physicists sure about that and how do they come to their conclusion?