physicsdude

9 ms·

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by physicsdude 5d ago
One of the amazing things about Cherenkov radiation is that it is not omnidirectional. There are processes (fluorescence, or scintillation, for example) which result in isotropic emission of light from materials. But Cherenkov light is emit
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by physicsdude 12d ago
That is a great point. I'm not sure if I fully understand your question, but I'll comment on both "testing," meaning doing the analysis, and "reviewing," meaning peer review. The point of "blinding,"
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by physicsdude 12d ago
Thanks for clarifying, and my apologies if I came off as argumentative --- what you _are_ suggesting makes sense and is a reasonable thing to wonder about. But I don't see anything particularly strange or coordinated is happening. From
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by physicsdude 13d ago
Particle physics is not a particularly large community. There is a hand-countable number of experiments like this, and the folks working on each of them know the folks working on each of the others. The collaborations executing each experim
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by physicsdude 14d ago
This raises what is (I think) an interesting question. CERN is a collider, so they are _trying_ to produce lots of stuff, and they do (lots and lots of stuff). They can't write it all to disk, and most of it isn't interesting enou
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by physicsdude 14d ago
At some level, it could be (and that would be an great discovery as well!). It's a question of probabilities: it's unlikely to be any of the things that we already know about, but that doesn't mean that it's something ne
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by physicsdude 14d ago
The detector from which data is taken to do this analysis contains 7 tons of liquid xenon. It is inside of a larger detector, which contains hundreds of tons of water and more than 10 tons of a scintillator. One of the functions of that out
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by physicsdude 2mo ago
The data-driven approach is referring to a more general technique --- it's a less fancy concept than renormalization, which only comes up when doing full-blown relativistic quantum field theory. Specifically, it refers to the use of a
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by physicsdude 2y ago
Axions can seem a bit goofy. One thing to know is that when talking about particle physics, we like to talk about particles, but "particles" are really a concept from classical physics. When doing quantum physics, one is fundament
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by physicsdude 2y ago
Reprioritization of direct experimental searches for dark matter is already happening. WIMPs are by no means being abandoned, but because we are closing in on the neutrino fog background (which is mentioned in another comment), it's be
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by physicsdude 2y ago
This is absolutely correct, as there are no solar neutrinos with energy above ~20 MeV (but below that, the solars dominate). Thanks for the clarification.
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by physicsdude 2y ago
Primordial black holes do not require new fundamental physics, but for them to constitute the primary component of dark matter would require a revision, at some level, of our narrative of the history of the universe. This gets a bit outside
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by physicsdude 2y ago
The "floor" is due to solar neutrinos - the sun is a continuous source of neutrinos and is located much closer to us than virtually every past supernova was. It is also a soft floor, as there are analysis tricks that can be played
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by physicsdude 2y ago
Particle physicist here. I've worked on direct detection DM experiments in the past, and personally know some folks who work on the LZ experiment. That direct detection experiments, such as LZ, have not detected a signal does not contr