Latest Boson Stories

A better understanding of the universe will be the outgrowth of the discovery of the Higgs boson, according to a team of University of Oklahoma researchers.   The team predicts the discovery will lead to supersymmetry or SUSY—an extension of the standard model of particle physics.  SUSY predicts new matter states or super partners for each matter particle already accounted for in the standard model.  SUSY theory provides an important new step to a better understanding of the universe we...

Technique suggests an avenue for creating new kinds of superconductivityPhysicists at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland-College Park, have for the first time caused a gas of atoms to exhibit an important quantum phenomenon known as spin-orbit coupling. Their technique opens new possibilities for studying and better understanding fundamental physics and has potential applications to...

Researchers have figured out how to nullify collision effects and make the clock still more preciseTo accurately measure tiny intervals of time, you need a clock that ticks very fast and very precisely. For the ultimate in accuracy, scientists reach for atoms, or more precisely, an exactly known frequency of light emitted by a chosen atom. The 'ticks' are the crests of a light wave, which rises and falls as many as a thousand trillion times per second. In an effort to improve the already...

University of Nevada, Reno team findings to be published in Physical Review Letters articleIn a forthcoming Physical Review Letters article, a group of physicists at the University of Nevada, Reno are reporting a refined analysis of experiments on violation of mirror symmetry in atoms that sets new constraints on a hypothesized particle, the extra Z-boson.Andrei Derevianko, an associate professor in the College of Science's Department of Physics, who has conducted groundbreaking research to...

A clock that is so precise that it loses only a second every 300 million years "“ this is the result of new research in ultra cold atoms. The international collaboration is comprised of researchers from the University of Colorado, USA and the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen and the results have just been published in the prestigious scientific journal, Science.An atomic clock consists of gas atoms captured in a magnetic field where they are held stationary with precise...