Links to Interesting Physics Sites

Here are a few links to some interesting recent research in fundamental physics.

Supermassive Blackholes imaged.

Supermassive Blackhole Eats Light

Dark Matter punches massive holes through trails of stars.

A dark matter galaxy?

Gravitational Waves :Read about the detection of gravitational waves by LIGO.

Visit the CERN website for inofmration on the Discovery of the Higgs Boson.

Science Daily reports on the LUX experiment which will search for Dark Matter.

Science Daily reports on using gravitational lensing to detect the most Distant Galaxy.

The CERN Courier    The history of QCD is a nice article in the October 2012 edition of this magazine from CERN.

Particle Physics and Cosmology    Want to learn about the Higgs Boson? Check out The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close. Information can be found on the book's website.

There is also a higher-level article written by a member of the CERN teams that discovered the Higgs that can be found on the physics preprint server.

Particle Physics and Cosmology    Check out The New Cosmic Onion: Quarks and the Nature of the Universe by Frank Close. It is in the CMU library and can be purchased from Amazon.com.

The Search for QCD Exotics    Read the following article in American Scientist. You can learn more about the Gluonic Excitations experiment at www.gluex.org. This experiment will be performed at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Laboratory JLab in Newport News, Virgina.

LIGO    How do you measure gravitational waves? Take a look at the LIGO experiment. Additional information on this experiment can be found at their web site at www.ligo.org. There is also a very informative site on what they are doing and what they hope to measure at UIUC. This latter site is VERY INTERESTING READING.

The Law of Gravitation    The inverse square law for gravity is an empirical result. Well, just how good is it? The Nuclear Physics group at the University of Washington (Seattle) is exploring just this question. Visit their website at www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash to learn more about this.

Dark Matter    We believe that most of the matter in the universe is dark, i.e. cannot be detected from the light which it emits (or fails to emit). This is "stuff" which cannot be seen directly -- so what makes us think that it exists at all? Its presence is inferred indirectly from the motions of astronomical objects, specifically stellar, galactic, and galaxy cluster/supercluster observations. It is also required in order to enable gravity to amplify the small fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background enough to form the large-scale structures that we see in the universe today. See http://cdms.berkely.edu and http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov for more information.

The Universie, Big and Small    How small is small? How big is big? Check out this interactive web application that goes from the smallest distance scales to the largest.