Most recent stroke of genius by my favourite company!

As some of you might know I am a real Apple fan from the beginning of the first iPhone! So I was very amused when I found the video below on Caschys Blog today. On his youtue channel Vaclav Krejci showed how to design the iOS 7 with only the basic picture editing tools (or rather progressed?) delivered by Microsoft Word. Yes, this programme was developed by this small company that wants to compete with Apple's awesome operating systems ... Ouw ouw, what did Apple do here? :D

A design that simple might not mean anything besides the exorbitant prices, closed up hardware you cannot repair on your own so easily (most recent highlight: Somewhere I read that Apple soldered the processors of the new iMacs onto the socket <.< ) or all the other features I love about my favourite company. :) Nevertheless I found this video funny somehow. ;)

Higgs, Higgs, hurrah!

First of all: I borrowed the title of this post from here because I liked it so much. :) Just for the credit ... And sorry for the missing sources, I just wrote down what I remebered. There should be quite some material easily accessable using the search engine of your choice at the moment. ;)

So Peter Higgs and Francois Englert really got the Nobel prize - for predicting a particle that seems to be discovered now. I am not an expert in particle physics although some of my bachelor exam was on this topic. Sometimes it might even be advantageous to not know all the details when explaining something so one does not go too far into details. In the following I will try to give a comprehensible insight into this Higgs stuff ...

CMS detector. ((c) CERN HP)

The Nobel prize this year was awarded for the predicition of the Higgs boson. So first of all: What is a boson? Well, short and simplified version: It is a particle. Then second and third question: What is a prediction and why would someone come up with it?

When theoretical physicists perform their crazy black magic in their super secret "labs" (aka pen + paper on desk) they might come up with so called theories. These theories try to explain phenomena observed by experimental physicists (those are the cool guys with lasers and sh*t ;) ) before and at the same time might predict some stuff that should be possible to observe as well. The last part then is what the experimantalists try to do by throwing around with money and building incredibly complicated toys called particle colliders. In the given case of the Higgs boson the theory of the standard model predicted this special boson and in 2012 it might have been found. So far so good.

But how did this special boson sneak into the standard model? This happened in the beginning of the 1960s when the recent model at the time predicted stuff that was not true like particles having no mass except it was already observed that they have mass or like forces that should exist but do not exist.

Weird stuff.

Potential of the Higgs field. (Source: wikipedia)

So some researchers (amongst them Peter Higgs and Francois Englert) came up with the new fancy idea that there could be a field that is everywhere and interacts with particles to give them mass. The new model including this idea predicted stuff that made more sense than before so the physicists went along with it after some time. The only thing that was missing to prove this theory right was the Higgs boson.

This boson is an excitation of the Higgs field mentioned above and it can be measured as a particle with a mass. Now this is really weird again: Excitation of a field? Suddenly a particle? Excitation has mass? What? Let me skip this and just say: If someone found the Higgs boson than there is probably a Higgs field. This seems to have happened in 2012 at the CERN in about the following way: Following Einstein's E = m*c^2 one can clash particles which results in energy. Out of this energy (yes, only the energy and nothing else but E = m*c^2) new particles can form. In this way the physicists at the CERN clashed particles and measured the particles that formed out of the energy afterwards. Easy enough. The reason why it took so long to find the Higgs boson is that it is very heavy so you need much energy to form it. (Transfer task - look at the quation to understand this. ;) ) So the problem was to accelerate the clashing particles fast enough to get this energy.

Yes, physicists like to play in the basement ... LHC collider.
((c) CERN HP)

The last part is then the detection and the question why I always used the subjunctive when writing about the detection of te Higgs boson. If physicists measures something they measure it often. Very often. By that they receive statistical data about their measurements and only if this data meets certain criteria physicists say that it is ok. Some physicists outside CERN still doubt the discovery of the Higgs boson or its existance in general. Partly because they want more measurements. ;) To their credit: It is hard to believe that it has been found as it is some really fundamental small particle.

What physicists do in the lab part II: Nobel Prize!

Tomorrow the nobel prize in physics will be announced! But what for? To show that physicists do not (always) only live in their ivory tower of bubbly dreams I shortly summarised what I remember about the three most promising candidates for the nobel prize in physics 2013 do/did. (Most promising according to thomsonreuters.)

 

Hideo Hosono - Iron-based superconductors

Superconductor floating over a
permanent magnet.
(wikipedia)

Short story for this one: Supraconductive means that a material loses all its electrical resitivity. This is pretty cool because often you do not like resistivity. It costs energy. So everybody is happy when the resistivity is low. (At least in some applications.) For a long time low temperature was required to reach superconductivity. Then someone found somethin about copper-based superconductors at "high" temperatures where high means several Kelvin. (Around  50 - 70 I think - was a nobel prize in 198something as far as I remeber.) Now someone (Hideo Hosono) found something iron-based. Next nobel prize? ;)

Galaxy M51. ((c) MPIA Heidelberg)

Geoffrey W. Marc, Michel Mayor, Didier Queloz - Exoplanets

What do astrophysicists do? Yeees, look for aliens! ;) A very fascinating question not only to physicists is the one if we are alone in the universe ... Philosophers may wonder, religious people may beleive, physicists go looking for it. First step: Find planets outside our solar system. The three guys named above did exactly that. I am not an astrophysicist but I think they managed to do so by examining the planets' bending of light of stars. Pretty cool, huh? ;)

François Englert and Peter W. Higgs - The Higgs Boson

ATLAS detector. ((c) KIP Uni Heidelberg)

Maybe some of you have already heard of this mysterious particle - the "God particle". It is so important to physicists that they have been looking for it since the 1960s when its existance was predicted for the first time. But how can one predict the existance of a particle? Well, most of our modern physics is based on the so called standard model which explains the four fundamental forces (gravitaional, electromagnetical, strong and weak force) with the interaction of different particles. The latter three are quite well explained in this model, only for gravitation there was no corresponding particle. But there should have been one according to the standard model. Thus, physicists tried to find it in order to confirm the correctness of their beloved model. (If they never found/find it they might have to assume that the standard model is wrong - horrible vision!) In March 2013 now some physicists may have found it at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in Genf. This discovery might be worth a nobel prize because the standard model and hence the current understanding of physics would have been proven right. (To a certain degree ...)

The procedure of winning a nobel prize can be found here by the way. :)

What physicists do in the lab part I: The plasma microwave and the 30 million euro baking oven

Today we were in the lab again and entered the real clean room. Air filtering, whole-body overall, no cell phones, anti-vibrant floors, no breathing allowed, ... that kind of clean room. And we worked with a plasma microwave. This is not a joke!^^ They used a microwave to build a plasma ashing tool. This etches "stuff" with the use of plasma. (Plasma is a partially ionised gas which glows in the dark - like a lightsabre somehow.) Inside the microwave a plasma is created with the microwave microwaves. The plasma ions then react with the surface you want to etch and remove it. And I just have to repeat: You can build something like this from an ordinary microwave!

Electron Beam Lithography Tool - Lund Nano Lab (image from lecture script)

This wardrobe like or industry baking oven like looking thing is not the plasma microwave. This is an Electron Beam Lithography (EBL) Tool. (I think our teacher mentioned something about 30 million euros ...) What it does is "simply" writing structures on a photo resist with an electron beam.

Why should anybody do such things like writing with the help of electron beams or etching stuff with plasma in a microwave? Well, this time this is not just because we can! Maybe ask your mobil phone or your PC why anybody should do this. ;) These processes are necessary to produce the processors and stuff in all your electronic toys. Would not work without plasma microwaves. ;)

3D Tri-Gate Transistor

The title does not refer to one of the Tri-Pod fighting robots from Star Wars Episode III. Rather it refers to the future of transistors. Yes, I admit, it is a little of covered advertising but they invented it, so it should be ok. Only thing I wonder: Why did it take so long to invent something like this? Althoug it has quite some fancy properties it does not look like black magic ...

In the video Mark Bohr, Senior Fellow at Intel, presents the new 3D Tri-Gate Transistor with some nice animations - enjoy! :) (And do not miss the end, there is even a small joke - I hope not only coltish physicists can love about it. ;) )