A team of physicists at the Californian Institute of Technology has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

Dr Adrienne Erickcek, and colleagues from the California Institute for Technology (Caltech), now believes these fluctuations contain hints that our Universe “bubbled off” from a previous one.

Their data comes from Nasa’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has been studying the Cosmic Microwage Background since its launch in 2001.

Their model suggests that new universes could be created spontaneously from apparently empty space. From inside the parent universe, the event would be surprisingly unspectacular.

Click here to read the full BBC news article

The preprint version of the article submitted to Physical Review Letters, A Hemispherical Power Asymmetry from Inflation is available at arxiv.org.

There is a UBC connection to this research. Dr. Mark Halpern from UBC’s Department of Physics and Astronomy is directly involved in
WMAP Research and is a member of the WMAP Science Team.

New types of journal metrics grow more influential in the scientific community

AT ONE POINT in his career, Nobel Laureate Sir Harold W. Kroto was the second most highly cited chemist in Britain—topped only by the University of Southampton’s Martin Fleischmann, one of the proponents of cold fusion.

Kroto, who codiscovered C60 and is currently a chemistry professor at Florida State University, declines to draw any conclusions from that experience. But given the ultimate fate of cold fusion, the anecdote suggests that citation statistics aren’t always a good indicator of scientific excellence.

Read the full article at Chemical & Engineering News

As part of the UBC Library’s mandate to archive undergraduate research, two honors theses have just been added to the Physics and Astronomy Community in cIRcle – UBC’s Information Repository.

Measurement of Upsilon (1S) Production at BaBar
by Rocky So.

A Deformation Induced Quantum Dot by Daniel
Woodsworth.

If you are interested in contributing your undergraduate thesis to cIRcle, please contact me directly kevin.lindstrom@ubc.ca.

Microsoft’s much anticipated WorldWide Telescope was released on Tuesday – May 12th, 2008.

There is a very nice article about it in the New York Times – Two New Ways to Explore the Virtual Universe, in Vivid 3-D

Moreover, around two months ago, Google also introduced a Web-based version of Google Sky, layering space images on its searchable map service.

Take a look on the books UBC Library has on this topic of Astronomy

** Photo by Fort Photo

Dr. Erich Vogt
In addition to an outstanding career as a top researcher and scientist in the field of nuclear physics, Dr. Erich Vogt was one of the founders of the TRIUMF project at the University of British Columbia, the largest university-based scientific laboratory in Canada for particle and nuclear physics.

Dr. Vogt is a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of British Columbia, where he has taught thousands of students who have excelled under his enthusiastic mentorship and influence. Dr. Vogt has also served on many high-level advisory committees in the field of nuclear and accelerator science in various world-class institutes. He is an internationally renowned scholar, and has published many research papers on theoretical physics

For more information, go to Day of Celebration in Honour of Dr. Erich W. Vogt.

Tentative Program

Sunday, May 4, 2008

12:30 – VOGT SYMPOSIUM – Hebb Theatre
12:30 Hon. Stan Hagen (MLA, Comox Valley) – Introduction
13:00 Nigel Lockyer “The Future of TRIUMF: Building on the Past Successes”
13:40 Art McDonald “TRIUMF and UBC in the SNO experiment”
14:20 BREAK
14:40 Carlo Rubbia “Beta beams and ion cooling: the future of accelerator driven neutrino oscillations?”
15:20 Walter Kohn “Density and Density Functional Theory of Nuclei and Other Self-bound Fermi Systems”
16:00 Erich Vogt Summary
16:30 – RECEPTION – SUB Party Room
16:30 Semi-Open Microphone (sign up in advance)

UBC’s Dr. Mark Halpern gave a presentation on Thursday April 17 about WMAP and some of the results from their five years with of data.

The audio and pdf presentation is available at
http://hdl.handle.net/2429/730

Abstract:

We have released maps and data for five years of observation of the cosmic microwave background with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and I will review the main results in this talk. A simple 6 parameter cosmological model continues to be an excellent fit to the CMB data and to our data in conjunction with other astrophysical measurements. In particular a running spectral index is not supported by the data, and constraints that the Universe is spatially flat have increased in precision. Increased sensitivity and improvements in our understanding of the instrumental beam shape have allowed us to measure for the first time a cosmic neutrino background. Neutrinos de-coupled from other matter earlier than photons did. While they are expected to have a 2 Kelvin thermal distribution today, they comprised 10% of the energy density of the Universe at the epoch of photon de-coupling. The data also allow tighter constraints on the shape of the inflationary potential via the amplitude of a gravitational wave background new constraints on features of cosmic axions. Recorded at TRIUMF on Thursday April 17, 2008.

Here is a recent presentation by Dr. Harvey Richer. Here is an abstract:

White dwarf stars are the burnt out remnants that remain after a star like the Sun has completed its nuclear evolution. In such a star there are no remaining nuclear energy sources, so the star evolves by simply radiating its stored thermal energy out into space. This may seem rather uninteresting, but in fact there is a wealth of physical phenomena that occur during this part of a star’s life – from getting kicked at birth, to neutrino emission in early life, to some interesting high density physics, through to functioning as precise clocks that can provide an age for some of the oldest know stars in the Universe. Some of these phases will be illustrated with detailed observations taken recently with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Click here to play mp3 file and here to view to presentation slides.

Moreover, you can play the file using the small gadget below: