Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Joint Fall 2012 Meeting of the Texas Sections of the APS, AAPT, and Zone 13 of the SPS
Volume 57, Number 10
Thursday–Saturday, October 25–27, 2012; Lubbock, Texas
Session A1: Plenary Session I |
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Chair: Charles W. Myles, Texas Tech University Room: Holiday Inn Towers Petroleum |
Friday, October 26, 2012 8:00AM - 8:15AM |
A1.00001: Welcome |
Friday, October 26, 2012 8:15AM - 8:50AM |
A1.00002: Higgs Searches at the CMS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider Invited Speaker: Nural Akchurin The Higgs boson was suggested in mid-1960s within the standard model and has been the subject of numerous searches at accelerators around the world. Its discovery would verify the existence of a complex scalar field thought to give mass to three of the carriers of the electroweak force - the W and Z bosons - as well as to the fundamental quarks and leptons. The CMS Collaboration has identified, with a statistical significance of 5 standard deviations, a new particle in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The evidence is strongest in the two-photon and four-lepton (electrons and/or muons) final states which have the best mass resolution in the CMS detector. The probability of the background fluctuating as high as the observed signal is about 1 in $3\times10^6$. The new particle is a boson (i.e. a particle with integer spin) with spin different from one, and has a mass of approximately 125 GeV. Its measured properties are, with the present data, consistent with those expected of the Higgs boson. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 26, 2012 8:50AM - 9:25AM |
A1.00003: Answering Dirac's Challenge: Practical Quantum Mechanics for Materials Invited Speaker: James Chelikowsky Over eight decades ago, after the invention of quantum mechanics, P. A. M. Dirac made the following observation: ``The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems...'' The creation of ``approximate practical methods'' in response to Dirac's challenge has included the one electron picture, density functional theory and the pseudopotential concept. The combination of such methods in conjunction with contemporary computational platforms and new algorithms offer the possibility of predicting properties of materials solely on the basis of the atomic species present. I will give an overview of progress in this field with an emphasis on materials at the nanoscale. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 26, 2012 9:25AM - 10:00AM |
A1.00004: Transient Plasma Physics: Nanosecond Pulsed Power Applied to Energy, Engines, and Other Things Invited Speaker: Scott Pendleton Plasma in a formative state prior to equilibration of the electron energy distribution, (referred to here as ``transient plasma''), is studied for improvement of engine efficiency in various types of fuel-burning engines. Ignition by transient plasma has demonstrated substantially reduced ignition delay, and shows promise for improving engine efficiency through improved combustion efficiency. This transient plasma persists for only a short time, and requires for operation short ($<$ 100ns) pulsed high voltage, and typically small pulse energy (10mJ to $<$ 1J). It thus requires nanosecond-time scale pulsed power. The plasmas, combined with the subsequent combustion, provide a rich physics. Results for studies of several varied engine types including internal combustion engines and pulse detonation engines will be reviewed. Experiments and modeling to determine the physics and some ideas for future directions will be presented. In addition, some other diverse applications for nanosecond pulsed power will be briefly described. [Preview Abstract] |
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