Posters on Quantum Physics and Particle Physics:

Today we collected a few interesting posters on Quantum Physics and Particle Physics:

Atom:

Recently we come across the online post made by Himadri Bagchi. We want to share this post here:

How would I make sense Higgs Boson to a seven year old?

SYO = Seven-Year-Old.

SYO: “What is a Higgs Boson?”

Me: “Well, you see, everything in the Universe is made of atoms. Me, you, this chair, that window, the air, an iPhone, and even water. Right?”

SYO: “Atoms are small.”

Me: “Yes very small. Smaller than your IQ! Anyways those atoms are made of even smaller things! We call them Elementary Particles! They are the smallest things in the whole entire Universe! They are the things that makeup even Atoms themselves!”

SYO: “Really?! I always wondered what Atoms are made of!”

Me: “Well there are many elementary particles we have discovered. 38 to be exact. And one of these 38 elementary particles is called the Higgs Boson.”

SYO: “So, elementary particles are the smallest thing and they make up atoms. And one of them is the Higgs Boson?”

Me: “Yes!”

SYO: “So how do these elementary particles make up atoms? What does the Higgs Boson do?”

Me: “Well the Higgs Boson is what gives things mass. This is a little complicated for you, but the mass is like weight. Its what gives things weight.”

SYO: “What is the difference between mass and weight then?”

Me: “See this plastic water bottle and this glass bottle. They’re the same size yet this one is heavier than this one. That’s because there are more atoms in the glass than the plastic.”

SYO: “So what gives the atoms their mass?”

Me: “The atoms are made of a cloud of electrons, an elementary particle, and a nucleus consisting of protons and neutrons. The protons and neutrons are not elementary but they’re made of three elementary particles each. Called Quarks. The majority of the mass of the atom comes from the Protons and Neutrons so we don’t need to worry about the electrons right now. But the Protons and neutrons get their mass from their quarks.”

Me: “You see, the proton and neutrons are made of 3 quarks.”

SYO: “Okay.”

Me: “The quarks get their mass from how they move through the Higgs field.”

SYO: “What the frick is the Higgs field?”

Me: “You remember how I said there were 38 elementary particles? Well, each of them has a field associated with them.”

SYO: “What does that mean?”

Me: “Do you know what a violin is?”

SYO: “I placed 1st in the nation for violinists.”

Me: “Wow okay. Imagine that the strings on the violin are 4 different fields. When you do nothing the fields are at rest, there is nothing happening to the strings. When pluck one string, it begins vibrating, that vibration on its string is like a particle in its field. A particle can be viewed as a vibration in its particle field. So those quarks in the photo, they are vibrations in the quark field. This applies to all elementary particles. The electrons? They’re just vibrations in the electron field.”

SYO: “Okay so what does this have to do with mass?”

Me: “Oh right! Well the Higgs Boson is a vibration in the Higgs Boson Field. And this field is what gives Quarks mass. Making this glass bottle have more mass and weight than this plastic bottle?”

SYO: “But like how?”

Me: “Have you ever been swimming?”

SYO: “Yes.”

Me: “You know how it's hard to move fast because of the water drags you and if you try moving fast it's very difficult?”

SYO: “Yes.”

Me: “That’s kind of how the Higgs field is with giving things mass. Picture yourself moving as fast as you can underwater. The water around you is like the Higgs field and you are like an elementary particle. The water is thick and stops you from moving normally like you would above water. That is kind of how the Higgs field gives mass to particles. The water is dense and it requires more energy to move through. The Higgs field is like the water and the particle has to work hard to move through it.”

SYO: “I think I get it now.”

Me: “Good. So to recap. Everything is made from atoms and atoms are made of elementary particles. The mass of an atom comes from the Protons and Neutrons. Those two are made of three elementary particles each called quarks. Those quarks get their mass from the Higgs field because they are like swimmers trying to move through the thick water.”

SYO: “I’m gonna go play Fortnite.”

Sidenote: I understand that the majority of the mass in the atom actually comes from the strong force interactions (gluons) inside each proton and neutron in the nucleus. But this is a seven-year-old and I wanted to keep it simple. He’ll learn anyways when he’s older.

Post copied from internet Physics forum

Plasma Physics

Plasma

Plasma is a state of Matter. The three other common states of matter are solids, liquids, and gases. Plasma is sometimes called the fourth state of Matter. Plasma is created by adding energy to a gas so that some of its electrons leave its atoms. This is called ionization. It results in negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions. Unlike the other states of matter, the charged particles in the plasma will react strongly to electric and magnetic fields (i. e. electromagnetic fields) if a plasma loses heat, the ions will reform into a gas, emitting the energy which had caused them to ionize. 

Plasma current

Over 99 percent of the matter in the visible Universe is believed to be plasma. When the atoms in a gas are broken up, the pieces are called electrons and ions. Because they have an electric charge, they are pulled together or pushed aport by electric fields and magnetic fields. This makes a plasma act differently than a gas. For example, magnetic fields can be used to hold a plasma, but not to hold gas. Plasma is a better conductor of electricity than copper. Plasma is usually very hot because it takes a very high temperature to break the bonds between electrons and the nuclei of the atoms. Sometimes plasma can have very high pressure, like in stars. Stars (including the Sun ) are mostly made of plasma. 

Plasma - Temperature

Plasma can also have very low pressure, like in outer space. On Earth, lighting makes plasma. Artificial (man-made) uses for television or computer screens, as well as plasma lamps and globes which are popular children's toy and room decoration. Scientists are experimenting with plasma to make a new kind of nuclear power, called fusion, which would be much better and sofer than ordinary nuclear power, and would produce much less radioactive waste.

Post by

newWorld

Four fundamental forces:

Physicists have acknowledged four fundamental forces in the universe.
• Gravity
• Electromagnetic
• Strong nuclear force
• Weak nuclear force.

Let’s see briefly at each fundamental force.

1. Gravitational forces act over greater distances, distorting the fabric of space-time and so they control the motion of planets and stars. Gravity holds the universe together.

2. The electromagnetic force mediates and is responsible for chemical reactions between the elements and the interaction of electrons with the atoms’ nuclei. Magnetic and electrical fields combine to create energies such as light, radio/tv waves, x-rays, UV, ultraviolet and gamma waves. These travel from their point of origin at 3x10^8 m/s or three hundred thousand km per second.

3. The strong nuclear force binds the particles of the nucleus together and acts over a short distance. It works by combing quarks into hadron particles, protons, and neutrons.
This force is 10 to the 38th power, stronger than gravity!!

4. The weak force acts within the nucleus of the atom over extremely short distances, less than the diameter of a proton, and it mediates radioactive decay. For instance, uranium decays spontaneously into the lead.

Cosmologists believe that just prior to the Big Bang, these four forces were combined as one SUPER force. At the instant of creation, these forces split. Now experimental physicists are trying to recombine those forces. If successful, the recombination would replicate the extant conditions at creation. And that, in turn, would provide much insight and understanding into exactly how this universe came to be.

Experiments like these are conducted with atomic accelerators, such as the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, where protons are accelerated to near the speed of light and smashed into other atoms. The collision produces subatomic particles which give scientists clues to the nature of matter itself.

Einstein was working on a method for combing the four forces at the time of his death. He called the effort, the “Grand Unified Theory”. The equations, which he wrote to explain and to reach this goal, remain on his blackboard to this day. Will we ever achieve Einstein’s dream? Who knows. Uniting the four forces is what some call the “Holy Grail” of science.


Post by
newWorld

Large Hadron Collider - greatest experimental physics arena:

In the last post, we shared the interesting photos of ALICE projects which received a good response from the readers. This time, we collected high-quality photos of LHC in the physics forum and it will ignite the readers to pursue their career in physics.

Post by

newWorld

Higgs Field:

The Higgs field is a conformal scalar field which takes a constant non-zero value everywhere. It is mediated by the Higgs boson which provides intrinsic mass to matter via the spontaneous breaking of the electroweak gauge symmetry (especially the weak vector W and Z bosons) and carries no color or electric charge arising due to local gauge symmetries in the vector potential. It has positive parity (behavior of the wave function ψ under spatial reflections) and zero spins. The Higgs boson is variant under its elementary scalars yet another reason it acquires mass by itself via self-coupling, just like axions do and has a very short mean lifetime, decaying into two Z bosons and 4 leptons. The Higgs mass depends logarithmically on the stop mass corrections and thus provides a wide range of possible inbound state masses, from the experimental 500 Gev ( with nonminimal field content) to around 10 Tev. Energies ranging between 1.3-1.5 Tev are due to be tested at the LHC in a short while. In the spontaneous breaking of the electroweak gauge symmetry, another interesting fact prevails that a mass term is not included for the gauge bosons. The reason for this being that the equations of motion would change if a mass term for the gauge bosons would have been added and a gauge transformation would have been performed. Another well-known reason for gauge bosons to be massless is that gauge invariance requires the polarisation states of photons especially to be transverse. For exhibiting such a property, unbroken gauge invariance requires the photons to be massless. The breaking of the electroweak gauge symmetry would induce rest masses in the weak gauge bosons but a smaller symmetry persists, which leaves the photons massless. The superpartner of the Higgs boson is a supersymmetric fermion, known as the Higgsino though such composite particles haven't been detected as of yet. Another fact to note here that is that exact broken gauge symmetry within the realm of supersymmetry would mean exact masses between the superpartners. Hence, it essentially remains unbroken in nature provided nature exhibits a space-inversion symmetry by which parity remains conserved. A new concept has sprung up to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the early universe. It is said that the Higgs field possessed a much larger value in the early universe, by which matter received considerable mass while antimatter received it in small amounts (here I talk about the particles and their antiparticles). But as the universe aged, it gradually came down to stabilize to the value we see today. This phenomenon is known as the "Higgs field relaxation" and the yet undiscovered Majorana neutrino plays a crucial role in this aspect.

There are 2 types of masses: 

Gravitational Mass and Inertial Mass.

Inertial mass (m), it is the quantity which decides how much acceleration (a) particular amount of force(F) will produce if applied to a body. Giving rise to newtons very famous

Force=mass×acceleration

Gravitational mass(m) is simply the ‘charge’ in the gravitational field very similar to electric charge. It determines the strength of the gravitational force between 2 particles:

Fg=Gm1m2r2

Where Fg is the gravitational force, G is the gravitational constant, m1 and m2are the gravitational masses of the objects, while r is the distance between them.

Gravitational-mass and Inertial-mass are found to have the same value, to this date. The Standard Model and Higgs field: in the standard model of quantum field theory, each entity(electron, proton, neutron) is an excitation of its own field (electron field, proton field, etc.). Various properties such as “electric-charge”, arise due to interactions of particles with corresponding fields (eg. Electromagnetic field).

One such field is called Higgs field and its excitations are called Higgs-Bosons. This field gives mass to every other object in the Universe. More something interacts with this field more mass that object has. If it does not interact, the particle becomes mass-less(like a photon).

Let me explain it, with the help an example:

There is a party in the town and you happen to be invited to the party. If you are not a popular person, you can go there and wander without interacting with anyone in the crowd.

But a movie star came into the same party and he will get massive tiding and response from the crowd. You encounter no resistance going through the crowd. You have Zero-mass at this party. The movie star, on the other hand, has a very High-mass. In order to reach the other end of the party, he needs to interact with so many people.

In short, the crowd is the Higgs field, social interactions are what gives you mass.

Post by

newWorld

CERN: High-Energy Physics

CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research, which operates the largest particle physics experiment in the world. CERN is the provider of needed infrastructure for a high-energy physics experiment.

Year	Achievement
1973	The discovery of neutral currents in the Gargamelle bubble chamber
1983	The discovery of W and Z bosons in the UA1 and UA2 experiments
1989	The determination of the number of light neutrino families at the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) operating on the Z boson peak
1995	The first creation of antihydrogen atoms in the PS210 experiment
1999	The discovery of direct CP violation in the NA48 experiment
2010	The isolation of 38 atoms of antihydrogen
2011	Maintaining antihydrogen for over 15 minutes
2012	A boson with a mass around 125 GeV/c2 consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson

ALICE

ALICE is one of seven detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The other six are ATLAS, CMS, TOTEM, LHCb, LHCf, and MoEDAL. ALICE, one of the major experiments at CERN, creates a quark-gluon plasma, not seen in our universe since a millionth of a second after the great Big Bang. We got some of the coolest pictures shared by the researchers on the net. These pictures are surely blown the mind, because of the complex structure and grand appearance of the particle accelerators.

The below YouTube video was created by our team with these photos:

Post by
newWorld