Archive for November, 2014
Bouncing robots and deformed planets
On a long hiking trip we were bored on our way back. So what do you do if you are a physicist and if you are outside and have no data and nothing to look up? You bring up some Fermi-Problem to solve as a pastime. Our up-to-date problem chosen was concerning the marvelous landing of Philae on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. After the first “landing” the little robot bounced back and it took it around 2 hours to touch the comet again (resulting in at least one more bounce). The question at hand is: How far up did the robot bounce? We tried to answer this question, but this lead us to some more questions with quite unintuitive results.
Supersymmetry or just a bunch of logarithms?
In its first phase from 2010 to 2013, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has delivered an impressive amount of new results. The LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS have measured a myriad of particle scattering cross sections with unprecedented accuracy. These cross sections reflect the probability of producing certain particles in the collisions of protons, smashed at each other by the LHC. The so-called “Stairway to Heaven” plot below shows the remarkable agreement between experimental cross section measurements (points) and the theoretical predictions (lines) within the Standard Model of particle physics. Read the rest of this entry »