Want to take part in these discussions? Sign in if you have an account, or apply for one below
Vanilla 1.1.10 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
added pointer to today’s
Is that language of the three frontiers (cosmic, energy, intensity) useful do you think?
I am not in position to critique the common wisdom of the experiment HEP-community, but it sure sounds plausible
(just to note that “intensity” “precision”, I have now added a remark on that to the entry here).
Two points are maybe noteworthy:
There didn’t used to be much attention at all to the “precision experiments/intensity frontier”. This is gaining traction only now due to the direct detection null results of the LHC together with the increasing hints for precision effects in flavour/muon anomalies.
At the same time, the general idea of precision experiments – that strictly every particle, up to the Planck scale, is and always has been leaving its loop-effect traces, ever so small, in mundane low-energy experiments – is a charming one of appeal to theoretically minded people, who should recognize a superb chance to bring better HEP theory to directly bear on question of particle phenomenology.
While cosmology has famously been said, since the “ CDM concordance model” established a couple of decades ago, to have entered its “golden age” of “precision cosmology” that makes it a subject on par with particle physics (this didn’t used to be the case not so long ago), more recently the “-tension” in the “dark energy” model (not to mention the issues of “dark matter”) has been shaking up the foundations of the field to the extent that a small but growing number of experts feel compelled to call it all into question (cosmological contrarians). If these sceptics are only partly correct, then the conceptual foundations of cosmology will need some profound re-thinking before one can regard the field again as being on par with particle physics. This will be interesting to watch.
That “frontier”-language, as one may have guessed, seems to have been invented for grant applications of US particle physicists.
A popular account back from 2008 is here:
and a more recent and more professional discussion of the “intensity frontier” is on the first pages here:
Have added these to the entry now.
I wonder what kind of language European physicists use. Guilty about our expansionist past, I would imagine it emphasises integration.
engages in activities to reduce European fragmentation in physics research, funding and education (EPS)
While this is off-topic, just to remark that internal integration is not the antonym to external expansion, on the contrary. How much more expansionist Europe would be were it less fragmented. That’s why Verhofstadt dreams of a European empire, in these words. Or imagine Eurasian integration would happen, following up on Temujin’s little integration project 800 years ago. That’s why every empire-that-is has it’s eye on preventing such integration (check out George Friedman at the 2015 Chicago Council on Global Affairs 53:50 and 59:10).
Back on-topi: It could be that for the synonym pairs we discussed above:
“precision experiment”/”intensity frontier”
and
“direct detection experiment”/”energy frontier”
the usage is split as EU/US, roughly. But I haven’t really checked this (and I am not planning to :-)
added pointer to today’s
added pointer to today’s
whose abstract starts out with the line:
Belle II is an experiment operating at the intensity frontier.
added pointer to today’s
1 to 10 of 10