Can you predict Nobel Prize winners by counting citations?

August 27, 2008 | 8:11 am

The Nobel Prize Medal for Physics and Chemistry

The Nobel Prize Medal for Physics and Chemistry

In this recently posted paper, Yves Gingras and Matthew L. Wallace analyze the bibliometrics surrounding the physics and chemistry Nobel Prize winners and nominees of the past 106 years. They were curious: Could we predict the winners of the upcoming Nobel Prizes on the basis of how often their work is cited by other scientists?

The answer turns out to be no.

In the first half of the 1900s, citations did have some predictive power. A scientist would make a crucial discovery and write a paper (or papers) about it in a scientific journal. Other researchers would then cite these results in their own publications. Just about the time the scientist’s papers became the most heavily cited in the field, he or she would be awarded a Nobel.

In the last 30 years, however, it appears that physics–and chemistry as well–have become larger and more diverse, so that citations are spread among many seminal papers and researchers. Nobel laureates are no longer necessarily near the top of the citation rankings at the time of their awards.

In some sense this is like the “parity” many sports fans talk about. Making good predictions in an NCAA tournament bracket or fantasy football league can be pretty difficult, because there has been an increase in the number of high-quality players and teams. Further, the teams now must be compared across conferences or leagues. While Gonzaga might have won its conference tournament, it may not be strong compared to teams from the ACC, and the fifth-place team in the English Premier league might still win the European Cup. [Editor's note to taunt his English friends: How did the English do in the European Cup this year?]

Similarly, the Nobel committee must compare seminal research across sub-disciplines of physics that have different cultures and traditions when it comes to citing papers.  So citation counts don’t have as much predictive power for the modern Nobel as they did when the disciplines were smaller and less diverse. Looks like we’ll just have to wait and see.

Travis Brooks

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GLAST Observatory renamed for Fermi, reveals entire gamma-ray sky

August 26, 2008 | 1:01 pm

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope "first light" all-sky gamma-ray map

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope "first light" all-sky gamma-ray map

The US Department of Energy (DOE) and NASA announced today that the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) has revealed its first all-sky map in gamma rays. The onboard Large Area Telescope’s (LAT) all-sky image—which shows the glowing gas of the Milky Way, blinking pulsars, and a flaring galaxy billions of light-years away—was created using only 95 hours of “first light” observations, compared with past missions which took years to produce a similar image. Scientists expect the telescope will discover many new pulsars in our own galaxy, reveal powerful processes near super-massive black holes at the cores of thousands of active galaxies, and enable a search for signs of new physical laws.

The NASA mission was made possible by collaboration with many US and international partners. As part of its support for particle physics research, DOE contributed funding to the LAT—the primary instrument on GLAST—and DOE’s Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) managed the LAT construction. SLAC also played a key role in assembling the instrument and now plays the central role in LAT science operations, data processing and making scientific data available to collaborators for analysis.

“The DOE-NASA collaboration on this new observatory has been very successful and shows what can be accomplished when we work together,” says Dennis Kovar, DOE Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics.  “We look forward to the scientific discoveries it will enable in both particle physics and astrophysics.”

NASA also announced today that GLAST has been renamed the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The new name honors Professor Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), a pioneer in high-energy physics. “Enrico Fermi was the first person to suggest how cosmic particles could be accelerated to high speeds,” says Paul Hertz, chief scientist for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. “His theory provides the foundation for understanding the powerful phenomena his namesake telescope will discover.”

For two months following the mission’s June 11, 2008 launch, scientists tested and calibrated its two instruments, the LAT and the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM). “What impressed me the most is that everything went by the book,” says Peter Michelson, LAT principal investigator at Stanford University. “We’re elated.” The LAT has already verified sources found by other gamma-ray detectors—and discovered more.

The all-sky image shows gas and dust in the plane of the Milky Way glowing in gamma rays due to collisions with accelerated nuclei called cosmic rays. The famous Crab Nebula and Vela pulsars also shine brightly at these wavelengths. These fast-spinning neutron stars, which form when massive stars die, were originally discovered by their radio emissions. The image’s third pulsar, named Geminga and located in Gemini, is not a radio source. It was discovered by an earlier gamma-ray satellite. The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is expected to discover many more radio-quiet pulsars, providing key information about how these exotic objects work.

A fourth bright spot in the LAT image lies some 7.1 billion light-years away, far beyond our galaxy. This is 3C 454.3 in Pegasus, a type of active galaxy called a blazar. It’s now undergoing a flaring episode that makes it especially bright.

The LAT scans the entire sky every three hours when operating in survey mode, which will occupy most of the telescope’s observing time during the first year of operations. These fast snapshots will let scientists monitor rapidly changing sources.

The LAT instrument detects photons with energies ranging from 20 million electronvolts to over 300 billion electronvolts. The high end of this range, which corresponds to energies more than 5 million times greater than dental X-rays, is little explored.

The spacecraft’s secondary instrument, the GBM, spotted 31 gamma-ray bursts in its first month of operation. These high-energy blasts occur when massive stars die and when orbiting neutron stars spiral together and merge.

The GBM is sensitive to lower energy range gamma rays (8000 to 30 million electronvolts) than LAT. Bursts seen by both instruments will provide an unprecedented look across a broad gamma-ray spectrum, enabling scientists to peer into the processes powering these events.

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the US Department of Energy, along with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States.

Visit the NASA site to see a bunch of animations of FGST and different views of the gamma-ray sky.

David Harris

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Free online: Full documentation for the Large Hadron Collider

August 25, 2008 | 5:00 am

Figure 2.1: Schematic layout of the LHC

Figure 2.1: Schematic layout of the LHC

Want to read every single technical detail of the design and construction of the Large Hadron Collider and its six detectors?  The whole shebang–seven reports totalling 1600 pages, with contributions from 8000 scientists and engineers–is available here, published electronically by the Journal of Instrumentation.

According to Friday’s CERN Bulletin:

For many years to come, these papers will serve as key references for the stream of scientific results that will begin to emerge from the LHC after the first collisions that are expected later this year.  Although published in a refereed scientific journal, the articles will be completely free to download and to read on the Internet under an “Open Access” scheme, without requiring a journal subscription.

“This is a landmark publication in many respects,” says ATLAS physicist Rudiger Voss, who has coordinated the project since it started in late 2005.  “It is probably the first time in the history of particle physics that a major new accelerator project has been documented in such a comprehensive, coherent and up-to-date manner before it goes into operation.”

Another long, boring technical document to gather virtual dust on virtual shelves?

Not at all, judging from the continued popularity of The Stanford Two-Mile Accelerator, affectionately known as The Blue Book, which was published in 1968 to preserve the knowledge and experience gained in building the SLAC linac. The recent struggle to make it available to a wide audience shows what a milestone the open-access publication of the LHC documentation is.

Most copies of The Blue Book had vanished from the SLAC Library, and the librarians wanted to make it available electronically.  But they ran into a snag: No one could figure out who owned the copyright, so there was no one to give permission to put it on the Web.

“It’s an orphan work,” SLAC archivist Jean Deken told me Friday. The original publisher was bought by another, which was bought by another, and so on. Finally, with the help of an expert from Stanford Law School, librarian Abraham Wheeler tracked down the current owner of the copyright–which said that since it could not find any documentation on the book, it could not grant permission to reproduce it.

After much legal head-scratching it was decided that SLAC could post the book online, which it did last summer. You can read about the copyright saga here, and browse the book here.

So when Deken learned that the LHC documentation had been posted online, she said, “I think it’s great.”

She said the folks who still want access to SLAC’s Blue Book after all these years are “people who are doing research on accelerator technology–a lot of International Linear Collider people who want to see what were the issues people faced for this accelerator and how to go about solving them. I assume it’s the same type of thing with the LHC. It’s the biggest high-energy physics experiment in the world now, so it’s a way for people, even if they’re not there physically at CERN, to still keep up with it and study it.”

I wrote about open access in particle physics for the October/November 2007 issue of symmetry.  According to the CERN Bulletin, the LHC documentation is ”the most significant manifestation” yet of CERN’s open-access policy.

Glennda Chui

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The Paul Revere of pulses

August 22, 2008 | 6:55 am

From a person’s point of view, the beam of electrons driving down the linear accelerator at close to the speed of light would appear as a single thread. “But from the point of view of precision electronics,” explains Jachin Spencer, “you might see something, you might see nothing.”

To a non-specialist, the word “beam” may be associated with columns of material or light. But on a microsecond time scale, the beam in an accelerator is actually a series of electron-bunches, more like machine gun fire than a shaft of sunshine.

Spencer, a summer student in the SULI program at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is studying the performance of what is called the “fiducial pulse,” a pulse of electromagnetic waves used to coordinate the timing of the accelerator. It’s the job of the fiducial pulse, Spencer says, to let electronics know “when they can look at the beam, when there’s something to see.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Zoë Macintosh

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Physicists shine light on the human brain

August 21, 2008 | 5:00 am

Illustration by Laura Randall, Science Illustration Program, UC Santa Cruz Extension.

Illustration by Laura Randall, Science Illustration Program, UC Santa Cruz Extension.

The UC-Santa Cruz Science Communication Program puts out an annual magazine, Science Notes, showcasing the work of its students.  (Full disclosure: I teach in the program, and boy are they a talented bunch!  Check out what some of the graduates are doing here.)   In the current issue, Amber Dance describes how scientists at Stanford Linear Accelerator are using a beam of bright light to look for metal deposits in the human brain:

[Uwe] Bergmann’s light is a hair-thin beam of sizzling X-rays, shed by a 75-meter-across circular tube called a synchrotron. In recent years, he’s become SLAC’s resident guru for anyone who wants to put something unusual in the beam line—from ancient manuscripts to body parts to fossils. For his next trick, Bergmann is focusing his rays on preserved brain tissue, sliced like a loaf of bread.

The brain research is a collaboration with Helen Nichol, a cell biologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. Together, they have put together detailed maps of the metals in a healthy and diseased brain. Bergmann’s beam shed light on Nichol’s field of study: how metals contribute to diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

For Nichol, the research has a personal element. Before graduate school, she cared for her father, who had Parkinson’s-like symptoms, and two aunts with Alzheimer’s disease. Her inheritance from those relatives allowed her to pursue her doctorate in her 40s. Now a professor, she studies how metals, like iron and copper, can build up in a patient’s snarled brain tissue like a clog in a drain. It’s important to Nichol that she makes a contribution to medical research. But, she says, science also is “a license to play.”

With Bergmann, she gets to play with some fancy toys. Their secret is speed—Bergmann’s X-rays can scan a brain slice one thousand times faster than other scanning technology. Armed with maps of different diseases, scientists will now know where to look for the problems that metals can cause. “I don’t know how the heck you would find that by any other means,” Nichol says.

It’s not the first time Bergmann and his colleagues have been in the news.  Two years ago they made headlines around the world with an analysis of an ancient parchment.   Beneath the writings of a medieval monk, they found copies of seven treatises and other works by Archimedes, the renowned thinker who lived from 287-212 BC.  Two of those works were the only surviving copies.  Dance describes this research and an upcoming analysis of the famous bird/reptile fossil Archaeopteryx; you can read more about the Archimedes Palimpsest here.

More full disclosure:  Dance was an intern in the SLAC communications office last year, and wrote this feature about outsider science for the March/April 2008 issue of symmetry.

Glennda Chui

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The safety of switching on the Large Hadron Collider

August 20, 2008 | 8:35 am

Most people interested in the Large Hadron Collider have heard about recent grumblings from a small, dedicated cadre who believe that the risks of starting up the LHC are unacceptable, primarily because they think it could create microscopic black holes that would destroy the Earth.

Although this argument had been refuted many times, and repeated safety studies commissioned by CERN have agreed that the risk is negligible, a new essay is well worth reading. Michael Peskin, from Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, has penned a viewpoint for the American Physical Society’s new online publication, titled Physics.

In it, he discusses the recent technical paper by Giddings and Mangano (G&M) on the risks of black hole production at the LHC. The paper itself is long and probably only readable by scientists, but Peskin’s viewpoint summarises the main arguments admirably clearly. As readers following this topic know, there is a negligible risk, but Peskin relates the quite fascinating contortions that G&M go through to try to find a significant risk before disposing of all those arguments.

If you haven’t read a discussion of this issue but would like to find out a bit more than the newspapers have discussed, Peskin’s viewpoint is well worth reading.

There is a lot of good stuff in Physics and so you might want to add its RSS feed to your feed reader. And you do have symmetry breaking coming in by RSS to your feed reader already, don’t you?

David Harris

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ArgoNeuTs see first events

August 19, 2008 | 9:05 am

A group of scientists known as the ArgoNeuTs—a word play on the Argonauts, the heroes of Greek mythology—have overcome the first hurdle in their scientific quest to observe neutrinos. In an e-mail to his colleagues, ArgoNeuT collaborator Flavio Cavanna wrote on Saturday, August 9:

“Dear ArgoNeuTs: After sailing across deep sea for about a week, with just few fire-breathing oxens and sleepless dragons found here and there, the first harbor of the long trip of the ArgoNeuTs to retrieve the Golden Neutrino Event now has been reached–a first cosmic ray event in liquid argon has been just recorded!!”

Flavio Cavanna points at an image of the first tracks, taped to the ArgoNeuT detector.

Flavio Cavanna points at an image of the first tracks, taped to the ArgoNeuT detector.

Less than a week before he wrote his e-mail, Cavanna and his collaborators filled their particle detector with liquid argon to catch cosmic rays. The text of his email refers to an article in the August issue of symmetry, which says:

“According to Greek mythology, the Argonauts were adventurers who sailed across the Mediterranean Sea in their ship, the Argo, to retrieve the Golden Fleece. Led by Jason, the crew braved fire-breathing oxen and sleepless dragons.”

ArgoNeuT stands for the Argon Neutrino Test project at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. The ArgoNeuT collaboration comprises about 20 scientists from six institutions. Their particle detector relies on liquid argon–cooled to a temperature of minus 187 degrees Celsius–to catch neutrinos. (To learn how the detector works, check out the graphic at the end of the symmetry article.)

To test its detector, the ArgoNeuT collaboration began filling it with liquid argon for the first time on Monday, August 4. Less than a week later, the ArgoNeuTs observed their first cosmic ray particles—a first step toward detecting neutrinos.

“It’s a big step for the technology of liquid argon detectors in the US,” says Mitch Soderberg, Yale University, who worked on setting up the ArgoNeuT detector at Fermilab. “We’re gaining the experience and knowledge necessary to build bigger detectors that can help answer some of the open questions about neutrinos.”

Cavanna was one of the three people working on the ArgoNeuT detector when it revealed the first cosmic-ray interactions.

“People were thinking this technology is black magic. But it’s more like learning to drive a new car. You need to adjust the seat, point the mirrors in the right direction,” says Cavanna, who works for the University of L’Aquila in Italy and came to Fermilab at the end of July to share his experience in starting up liquid-argon detectors. “The liquid-argon technology is more than reliable.”

The first cosmic ray event seen in the ArgoNeuT detector.

The first cosmic ray event seen in the ArgoNeuT detector.

The next goal of the ArgoNeuT collaboration is the observation of its first neutrino, which Cavanna in his e-mail jokingly called “the Golden Neutrino Event.” Unlike cosmic rays, neutrinos rarely interact with matter. Despite the fact that every three seconds a trillion neutrinos go through an area the size of a hand, the chance that one of these neutrinos would leave a signal in the ArgoNeuT detector is basically zero. Instead, the ArgoNeuTs will place their detector later this year into an artificial, intense beam of neutrinos produced by accelerators at Fermilab.

The mysteries of neutrinos

Neutrinos may hold the answer to one of the most puzzling questions about the evolution of the universe: What happened to the antimatter? For every fundamental particle scientists have found an antiparticle, and the big bang almost certainly produced particles and antiparticles in equal numbers. Yet astronomical observations indicate that we live in a universe made of matter, with no sign of antimatter galaxies. How did the antimatter disappear?

The imbalance between matter and antimatter must have developed after the big bang. While experiments have revealed subtle differences in the quantum behavior of quarks and antiquarks, which are the building blocks of protons and antiprotons, their asymmetric behavior does not account for the excess of matter seen in our universe.

Physicists are looking toward another possibility. Did neutrinos cause the imbalance? Do neutrinos and antineutrinos display signs of asymmetric behavior?

Neutrinos behave differently than any other type of particle that physicists know. Experiments in the last 15 years have revealed that neutrinos have mass, a fact that the highly successful Standard Model of particles and their interactions cannot explain.

Intriguingly, the three types of neutrinos observed so far—electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino—weigh much less than quarks and protons. Theorists think that a see-saw mechanism connects these light neutrinos with a set of short-lived, ultra-heavy neutrinos that were abundant during the early universe. Those prehistoric neutrinos could have caused the matter-antimatter imbalance.

To find the answer, physicists must examine the quantum behavior of neutrinos, displayed when neutrinos travel long distances through matter and when they collide with atoms. In particular, the three types of neutrinos can transform into each other, a process known as neutrino oscillations.

Unveiling the details of these oscillations will be a major step in understanding the role that neutrinos played in the early universe. The challenge is to record the right type of neutrino collisions at the right energy, in sufficient numbers, and with the correct identification of particles emerging from those collisions.

Liquid-argon neutrino detectors might be the way to go. The ArgoNeuts aim to find out.

Kurt Riesselmann

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Can science be funny?

August 18, 2008 | 11:26 am

The owners of the Punch Line Comedy Club in San Francisco weren’t too sure when they hosted Brian Malow, self-styled “science comedian” on August 11, 2008. Pre-bookings were slow and the club had only two servers working a room that can seat over 200. But as the start time drew closer the room filled to capacity.

Malow started performing general stand-up comedy but found that his audiences would respond well to bits he did based on topical science. Over time he began to specialize and now does full stand-up shows with a science theme, and is often booked by scientific organizations as entertainment.

I’ll admit that I was quite skeptical about whether the show would be genuinely funny, or just appeal to my inner geek. I’ve seen quite a few people try to make comedy from science, but rarely have they reached a level of actual comedy that might be of general interest. Instead they have merely been a set of statements designed to appeal to a shared sense of geekiness between performer and audience.

The warm-up act was a science teacher who writes jokes for Jay Leno on the side. Although he drew a few chuckles, the audience would have preferred he stick to writing jokes rather than performing them.

When Malow appeared on stage, the whole vibe in the room changed. This was a performer who was at home on stage, and was prepared to entertain. From the start, Malow had the audience laughing loudly and only a few times was he met with a withering silence. However, he handled those little deaths quite well and got on with the show, bringing the audience back around.

Malow’s material ranged from particle physics to evolution, with a good dash of psychology thrown in. At times he strayed to areas outside science, but that felt out of place. An exception was a bit on feline existential philosophy, which went down very well with the audience. It might not have been science, but the references to Sartre appealed to an audience ready to think their way to laughs.

I won’t try to retell any of Malow’s jokes as stand-up almost never survives a retelling, especially not in print, but you can see a set of excerpts on the Web. One series of jokes was along the lines you might be guessing: “(Something scientific) walks into a bar and the bartender says…” Malow told these jokes in the middle of his set in a knowing way that allowed the audience to groan along happily, and his material was fresh. He read the audience perfectly in that series and pulled off a daring stunt very well.

The audience definitely knew it was there for science comedy and was clearly knowledgeable about science–I spotted a handful of editors from publications like New Scientist and Nature, staff from the Exploratorium, and a smattering of scientists I knew. For many jokes, the audience laughed at the surface-level joke but than responded to the deeper geekier joke that followed up as the bit progressed. Perhaps because it was such a science friendly audience, there was no substantial heckling. If there had been, Malow probably could have handled it.

One of the members of the group I went with has performed stand-up comedy, including at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and although not a scientist, she laughed a lot and really enjoyed the show overall.

Malow finished off with a Q&A session in which audience members would ask about whatever science topics they had on their minds and Malow would try to entertain with improvised quips and stories. This part of the show was less successful, and it probably would have been better to finish the show strongly with the prepared stand-up. But that was a minor quibble after a strong main performance.

It would be interesting to see Malow in an audience with fewer scientists to see how we fared. I suspect he’d face a few more challenges, but no more than many stand-ups working the circuit. I started skeptical but now have some good evidence that science can actually be funny, and not just to scientists.

David Harris

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Twirl yourself dizzy in a virtual LHC

August 15, 2008 | 5:00 am

Image by Peter McCready

Image by Peter McCready

As excitement builds toward the Large Hadron Collider start-up, things are doubtlessly getting a bit feverish at CERN. But you can stumble around the LHC machinery in the calm of your own home thanks to photographer Peter McCready, who has created stunning 360-degree images of the ALICE, ATLAS, and CMS detectors and posted them to his Web site. (We couldn’t get to the images through the Web site late yesterday–too much traffic?–but found the ALICE image here.)

According to International Science Grid This Week, McCready took 102 individual photos and stitched them together into one seamless spherical image. The controls take a bit of getting used to, but by clicking on an image and dragging your cursor, you can “turn” the camera to look in any direction you like.  Just be careful not to make yourself sick with all the twisting!

Kelen Tuttle

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On course for a convincing supernova

August 14, 2008 | 7:40 am

A still from a conventional supernova simulation depicts the rebounding shockwave (visible as the front between inwards-falling outer gases and outwards-blowing stellar materials). Lighter colors indicate regions of greater density. (Image courtesy of Tony Li)

A still from a conventional supernova simulation depicts the rebounding shockwave (visible as the front between inwards-falling outer gases and outwards-blowing stellar materials). Lighter colors indicate regions of greater density. (Image courtesy of Tony Li)

A cataclysmic explosion that lights up an entire galaxy is hard enough to fit in your mind’s eye, much less a computer.

As a summer research student in the SULI program at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Tony Li has learned that, despite 40 years of development, simulations of stars which are nearing the requisite conditions for a supernova have failed to undergo the critical transformation. A supernova is the intensely brilliant explosion of a dying star’s matter bursting through its own shock front. Working with astrophysicist Shizuka Akiyama, Li hopes to make progress in this direction with a model that, unlike previous ones, operates three-dimensionally and grapples with the effects of a very strong magnetic field on core collapse.

Extremely massive stars at the end of their lifetime undergo gravitational implosion when they’ve run out of fuel to burn. Deprived of the outward pressure formerly supplied by the fusion process, the star’s iron core begins to disassociate into subatomic particles in an effort to compress as much as possible. At some point, the star succumbs to a gravitational free-fall that involves the entire star, converting virtually all of its potential energy to outrushing neutrinos. Collapsing outer materials and plasma collide with the star’s core, transferring much energy to reactions inside the core, and the rest to a rebounding shockwave that, though dampened, begins to push against the star’s gaseous envelope.

Recent consensus has emerged that this is the true precipice of a supernova. Thermal pressure produced by the neutrinos is supposed to cook the stellar bubble until it explodes. But in current simulations of large stars, no explosion occurs, and the shockwave merely sits inside the shell.

Because scientists can’t create their own experiments with stars in a laboratory, astrophysicists rely heavily on computer models to study the respective contributions of parameters in a given physical system.
Equations representing the collected body of physical and astronomical knowledge form a code that, when fed with initial conditions, runs the system and produces profiles for components like temperature, density, and velocity of outwards-blowing stellar matter.

The computer program has limits, however. As Li says, “The catch with our code is that we don’t have every single detail of physics in it.” Supernova science is highly complex, pooling cosmic-scale physics of gravity with the particle level and calling for equations of state that no one understands for the extreme density and temperature conditions involved.

Only recently has computing power advanced to include 3-dimensional grids, a capacity crucial for simulating the inherently multidimensional effects of magnetic fields. Previously, scientists used 2-D models and were obliged to make assumptions about the symmetry of the core’s rotation.

Now that computing power has reached this stage, attention in the field is expanding beyond the conventional theory of neutrino heating and looking to other sources that could provide the missing energy.

Akiyama believes that a magnetic field effect within the neutron star could be factor that revives the retarding shockwave. Magnetic tension caused by differential rotation causes magnetic fluid inside the iron core to fluctuate chaotically, creating flashes of spectacular field strength where field lines are briefly closer. The leap in magnetic force in these areas would produce an added kick to the rebounding stellar plasma, because plasma has a magnetic component. Because the instability serves to dramatically amplify existing magnetic field strength, its addition to the theory means that a huge amount of energy could be created from initially weak fields.

Currently writing and modifying code for a 3-D simulation, Li aims to fulfill one step in the larger picture of Akiyama’s research. A battery of tests will narrow the models down to those most susceptible to the magnetic field effect. The future will see extensions of this program, and a better understanding of how a very powerful magnetic field contributes to not just supernovae, but even more energetic products of core collapse, such as gamma ray bursts and magnetars.

Zoë Macintosh

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