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Another best advice- take a lot of courses on advanced statistics. Recently I was interviewed at Oxford University on particle physics. Can you imagine that most of my questions were about pure statistics? So the conclusion is the following: to become a competitive physicist you have to learn data science (statistics, machine learning, python), to have a physics degree, and to know how to code. #Advice


I know here are many young readers who want to become a physicists. My best advice is GET Computer Science degree on top of your physics degree! Also, data science degree would be good. In my group (I work for Yale university project), most people have 2-3 degrees mentioned above. Although I am a theorist, I have to use data science tools every day to perform analysis and build models. We have a lot of data from different experiments and you have to know python, jupyter notebooks, pandas, and machine learning! Please learn all of them asap if you want to become a physicist. Today, I started my data science master degree btw (on top of upcoming physics PhD).






In our lab, there are a lot of wild turkeys and deers! I took a bit more pictures.






Here are some pictures of LZ people from Brown and Imperial university working on TPC construction :


This is the detector I am working with. It’s used for direct dark matter detection. Today, my colleagues came up with a new setup which would help to detect dark matter even more. They are going to use an extra skin on top of the detector, which would hold 230 tons of ultrapure water! Just stop for a second and think about these numbers. The detector itself is located very deep (around 1500 m) in South Dakota. All the parts of the equipment has to be extremely clean before it’s put near by(or in) the detector. Just imagine how much effort it takes to learn anything about dark matter!




Oh wow so many new people. Thank you 🙏 спасибо


Here is my and Saul’s regular coffee spot. We work on the same floor. If you zoom in, you will see Golden Gate bridge, Alcatraz and San Francisco skyline.


This is Saul Perlmutter’s office. He got a nobel prize for proving that the Universe’s expansion is accelerating
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Perlmutter


Probably I should say a bit more on what is quantum entanglement. Imagine having two boxes. In each of the boxes is a cat. Box #1 has a white cat is sitting inside, and box #2 has a gray cat inside. You know there are only two boxes and only these two cats. No more extra stuff. Now, your friend closes the boxes and moves them around so you don’t know where is which anymore. Your friend asks you to open any of the boxes. You open and see the grey cat. This means that in the second box the white cat is sitting. This phenomenon is called entanglement. We say that two boxes were entangled. Same in quantum physics. You have two entangled qubits. If you know anything about qubit 1, you automatically know everything about qubit 2. This is used in black hole scrambling effect described in the previous post. You can simulate “sending” entangled qubit inside a black hole, and knowing something from Hawking photon to reveal something else inside the black hole.


We have a whole department who works on quantum computers and their relationships to black holes. Yes, it sounds a bit awkward, but here is what I understood from them so far. They literally try to reconstruct a 7-quibit quantum computer to simulate the lost and retrieving information inside a black hole. It was believed that if something goes inside the black hole, it would never return. It was believed that there was no way to figure out what was going on inside a black hole. However, quantum entanglement IS the way! You can use that on Hawking photons( the photons coming from a black hole evaporation which is called Hawking radiation).


Today’s view from my work. It’s San Francisco #workviews


What is C?P?
CP stands for charge + parity in particle physics. Once you work with quantum mechanics, you use high level math involving operators. What is an operator? In simple terms, think about them as about an abstract thing which does something. C and P are just the operators, and we often discuss about them when it comes to symmetry. C is a charge conjugation operator: it switches the sign, for example if you had an electron, after C is applied it becomes a positron. In another words, C changes particles into their antiparticles (opposite charged particles). We say that electromagnetism, gravity, and the nuclear (strong) force all obey the charge symmetry. Now, what is P? P stands for Parity, or “mirror operator”. Literally, every time you stand by the mirror- you see yourself under parity! Parity changes the sign of spacial component. For example, if you were at -6 m, after P you would be on +6 m. C and P sounds like useless,but they are super important when we work with particles. In addition, they combination (CP) is even more important. For now, just remember what C and P do #particlephysics


What is direct detection of WIMPs?

There are two methods of detecting dark matter: direct detection is when you have a detector, and indirect - when you look for decay products/signs of the particle somewhere in the atmosphere. Direct method is quite exciting, because it gives some hope to “catch” a WIMP. Your detector has to be extremely large and filled with dense medium, like liquid xenon, germanium, silicon, argon, and so on. Why dense? Because you wanna make sure that the particle will hit the medium’s nuclei. WIMPs which make up halo of out galaxy are expected to travel with velocity around 200 km/sec. #darkmatter


What is WIMP? SUSY?

WIMP stands for weakly interacting massive particle, a possible candidate for a dark matter particle. It’s heavy, about 100Gev scale, and quite stable. WIMPs are predicted by a variety of SUSY(supersymmetry) theories. A lot of WIMPs clustering together resulting having dark matter in the Universe.
I wanna tell a bit about SUSY. It’s a fancy mathematical theory which basically states that every particle has a partner with different spin. Particles responsible for fundamental forces, like gravity, electromagnetism and so on (we call them bosons) accompanied by particles which are taking care of regular matter (call them fermions). SUSY makes beautiful derivation of the dark matter existence and possible particle candidate (in SUSY it’s called the neutralino). So now, you are already familiar with supersymmetry and how it is related to dark matter and possible dark matter particles.


As you already know, dark matter(DM) is made of not regular matter (it is not baryonic matter).
➡️DM must be dark: no light goes in or out through (no interactions with photons, i.e. no electromagnetic interaction at all)
➡️DM does not interact with itself. By that, I mean that mathematically you can prove that time needed for self scattering even is bigger than the Universe’s lifetime.
➡️DM weakly interacts with regular matter. Otherwise, we would already see dark matter particles. Moreover, CMB spectrum would be different from what we have right now
➡️DM can not be made of standard model particles, because most of them are charged, while DM is not. Possible candidate could be neutrino- extremely light neutral particle, coming from the atmosphere all over the place. However, other experiments showed that the lower boundary for DM matter is much heavier than neutrino’s mass.
#darkmatter

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