Here is a link to the online version of our paper. I’m not sure if just anybody can access that link. If you’re in the William & Mary network, it should work. I apologize to anyone for whom access is forbidden.
Oct
06
Paper Accepted
Not much has happened research-wise since the beginning of the semester. It’s so much more difficult to get anything done while classes are in session. The one bit of news I have to share is that our paper was accepted for publication in Physics Letters B. It should appear in an online version any day now and in print in a few weeks. I’ll post a link to the online version when it becomes available. I think you will be able to access it from the William and Mary network, because the college should have a subscription to the journal. It will be more or less identical in content to the arXiv version that I posted last time, but the editors will reformat it.
Aug
27
Paper Submitted
In my last post I divulged as little information about my project as possible, because my collaborators and I were in the process of compiling a paper. That paper has since been submitted to a journal and posted to the arXiv and is, therefore, public. That means I can write freely about the results presented therein. For those who don’t know what the arXiv is, it’s a website (arxiv.org) which contains pre-print versions of scientific papers. When a scientist finishes a paper, he can upload it to the arXiv where it can be viewed by other scientists almost immediately. The arXiv was invented in response to the relatively large amount of time between the submission of a paper to a journal and its appearance in that journal. Incidentally, the inventor of the arXiv, Paul Ginsparg, gave a talk at William and Mary last year. The arXiv was invented by physicists for physicists, but it is now also used for mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics. Click here for the arXiv version of our paper. We also submitted to a journal. I’ll let you know how that turns out. Our paper is a letter. A letter is a short article (usually 8-12 pages). Some journals — like the one we submitted to — only accept letters. We have enough results to write a much longer article, but we decided to summarize our results in a letter first. We might write a longer article later. In any case, the rest of our results will appear in my thesis.
Jul
22
Checking in
I promised in my last post to talk more about my results and less about the background, but I’m going to have to break that promise. The reason is that my advisor, his graduate student and I are writing a paper on said results, and I really shouldn’t be announcing anything to the World Wide Web until the paper’s been submitted. That may seem paranoid, but a quick Google search for “decaying dark matter” returns this blog on the first page. Actually, we’ve already been scooped once this summer. That means some other physicists submitted a paper very similar to the paper we had been writing. As it turns out, our analysis is much more robust than theirs, so we considered submitting our results anyway. Eventually, though, we decided that the novelty was gone and that it would be better to change our focus and submit a different set of results. I will write about those results and even post a link to our paper once it’s been submitted.
Jun
12
Decaying Dark Matter
My first post to the Honors Fellowship blog. I will simply introduce the topic.
Cosmic rays are high-energy particles that originate in outer space. There are several space-based observatories that measure the cosmic rays that come near Earth. In 2009, two different teams using state-of-the-art equipment published measurements of the cosmic ray spectrum that were completely unexpected by the astrophysics community. Basically, there were more cosmic ray particles than had been predicted. This implies that there is a source of cosmic ray particles which was not taken into account. Many wild and crazy hypotheses have been suggested, and one of those wild and crazy hypotheses is that dark matter particles can decay into ordinary matter. This would provide a sprinkling of extra particles which just might be able to make up for the discrepancy between what was expected and what was observed.