Category: Physics

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Blak Holz Eatn My Worlsd! Update

rpenner passes on some of the latest news on the black hole lawsuit against the LHC:

Update: The trial has been scheduled for June 2009….
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=4830&view=findpost&p=349304
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=4830&view=findpost&p=349685

and

Update: LHC Saftey Assessment Group releases two papers.
http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report.pdf

http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/CERN-PH-TH_2008-025.pdf

Update 6/23: Oh noes! The Optimizer wants to kill us all!

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Rhythm is a Quantum Concatenated Code

I do believe this is the first time I’ve performed the paper dance on the scienceblogs incarnation of this blog. Yep, it’s that time again: it’s the paper dance!
“A far away light in the futuristic place we might be; It’s a tiny world just big enough to support the kingdom of one knowledgeable; I feel a wave of loneliness and head back down I’m going too fast (I’m going too fast)”

arXiv:0806.2160
The Stability of Quantum Concatenated Code Hamiltonians
Authors: D. Bacon
Abstract: Protecting quantum information from the detrimental effects of decoherence and lack of precise quantum control is a central challenge that must be overcome if a large robust quantum computer is to be constructed. The traditional approach to achieving this is via active quantum error correction using fault-tolerant techniques. An alternative to this approach is to engineer strongly interacting many-body quantum systems that enact the quantum error correction via the natural dynamics of these systems. Here we present a method for achieving this based on the concept of concatenated quantum error correcting codes. We define a class of Hamiltonians whose ground states are concatenated quantum codes and whose energy landscape naturally causes quantum error correction. We analyze these Hamiltonians for robustness and suggest methods for implementing these highly unnatural Hamiltonians.

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Blackberry Hole Grows Larger

Blessed be Mike Lazaridis:

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, June 4, 2008 – In a new and generous act of personal philanthropy, Mike Lazaridis has provided an additional $50 million (Canadian) to Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI). This private donation increases his personal contributions to $150 million in the research institute.

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Physical Review Alphabet Quintfecta?

Does anyone know if any author has ever had a paper published in the entire alphabet of Physical Reviews? (A,B,C,D,E) And if not, doesn’t that sound like a fun task to try to achieve. OK, perhaps “fun” is the wrong word. Even better if you could carry out the task with alphabetical order corresponding to chronological order. Even better still would be if you could carry out the task with reverse alphabetical order corresponding to chronological order.

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Chronotron

I’m a sucker for any game which involves time travel. If only now I could go back in time and use my time more wisely than I did by playing that silly game.

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The Shrimp! They See Me Polarizations!

A new entry in the best title ever competition: arXiv:0804.2162, “The secret world of shrimps: polarisation vision at its best”, by Sonja Kleinlogel and Andrew G. White. Secret lives of shrimp? That sounds more like an expose on the secret drug habits of the Roloffs on the T.V. show Little People Big World, than the title for a scientific article. (Yes it is politically incorrect to call little people “shrimps.” Having spent the first many years of my life being stared at for have a little person as a sister, however, I think you can cut me some slack, and just laugh 🙂 ) Let’s see if makes it by the title police.
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The Computer, the Universe, and John Wheeler

It was an unassuming blue-grey volume tucked away in the popular science section of the Siskiyou County Library. “Spacetime Physics” it announced proudly in gold letters across the front of the book. Published in 1965, the book looked as if it hadn’t been touched in the decades since 1965. A quick opening of the book revealed diagrams of dogs floating beside rocket ships, infinite cubic lattices, and buses orbiting the Earth, all interspaced with a mathematical equations containing symbols the likes of which I’d never seen before. What was this strange book, and what, exactly, did those equations mean? How could there be equations and dogs and buses all in the same book? Answering these questions would be the beginning, for me, of a lifelong love of physics. It would also inspire in me a deep love of science books which make you smile, and, more importantly perhaps, led me to works of the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who would serve as the model of the researcher I have always wanted to be.
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