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From Quarks to Quasars
 

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Please do not report on the results mentioned in this press release until the day the respective paper is delivered at the meeting.

For more information contact Phillip Schewe, 301-209-3092, pschewe@aip.org, or Ben Stein, 301-209-3091, bstein@aip.org, at the American Institute of Physics, or Randy Atkins at the American Physical Society, 301-209-3238, atkins@aps.org.

College Park, MD, March 28, 2001 ----- The theme for the American Physical Society (APS) Spring Meeting is "quarks to quasars," in reference to the wide scope of subjects to be covered, extending from the very smallest size imaginable, the so called Planck scale at which space itself is thought to break down, right up to the scale of the universe as a whole. In between come a lot of other issues as well, such as missile defense and climate change, which will be represented on the program. The Spring Meeting, taking place April 28 to May 1 at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, DC, located at 9th Street and New York Avenue, is the second of the two national meetings held each year by APS. The first was the recently concluded March Meeting in Seattle.

The first two days of the meeting do fall on a weekend, but science journalists will have to reconcile themselves to this since we expect to have some important press conferences on these days.

WEBSITE AND PRESSROOM
The official Spring Meeting website is http://www.aps.org/meet/APR01/baps/index.html. Click on "epitome" to see the meeting program, including abstracts. Complimentary press registration will allow science writers to attend all scientific sessions. If you wish to come, please fill out and return the form at the end of this release. For out-of-town science writers, you should know that the hotel reservation deadline is nigh: see http://www.aps.org/meet/APR01/apr01hou.pdf.

Here is information relating to the press operations at the meeting:

• The meeting pressroom will be located in the Renaissance Hotel, room 18
• Press conferences will take place in room 19
• Pressroom hours: Saturday April 28-Monday, April 30: 8-5. Tuesday, May 1: 8-12.
• Pressroom phone numbers: 202-962-4214
• Pressroom fax number: 202-962-4212
• Breakfast and lunch food will be available in the pressroom Saturday-Monday; breakfast only on Tuesday
• a press conference schedule will be issued in several weeks.

SOME EXPECTED HIGHLIGHTS OF THE MEETING

ELEMENTARY PARTICLES
One can view the meeting as a grand trek up the size scale, with sessions covering some of the hottest topics in physics. Starting at the small end of the scale, there are sessions devoted to the search for extra dimensions (session S5); the anomalous magnetism of muons at odds with the standard model (C10); B mesons and CP violation (C4, S11); strange quarks (B6); the search for supersymmetric particles (H10, S5); the search for exotic particles such as leptoquarks (B10); the search for Higgs bosons (B10); the simulation of quark behavior on imaginary lattices (C12); the latest on neutrinos and their internal transformations (J2); new accelerator techniques (J3); future accelerators (H3, J1); and the S and Z bosons, which carry the weak nuclear force (S10).

NUCLEAR PHYSICS
Forefront physics at the level of protons, neutrons, and nuclei is also represented in a wealth of sessions. Examples include: astrophysical neutrinos (session B8); nuclei with handedness (C15, Q2); ultracold neutrons (Q13); physics at RHIC and extreme states of nuclear matter (H7, V10, Q12); rare isotope beams (V12); and the collisions of heavy nuclei (J12).

ASTROPHYSICS
Going the rest of the way up in size scale, we have sessions on galaxy formation (J6); cosmic rays (B1, C14, H14); black holes (B14, S12); processes that produce x rays and gamma rays (J14, S6, V4); quantum gravity (V11); the search for short-range gravity effects (J9); gravity waves (H1, Q3); and nucleosynthesis and the microwave background (H4).

PLENARY SESSIONS
David Kestenbaum, a self-described "escaped physicist who is hiding out at National Public Radio," will talk about news media coverage of science. Paul Kwiat of the University of Illinois will describe how specially prepared "entangled" photons can be used for such applications as quantum cryptography-which is the most secure encryption system ever imagined by humankind. Other scheduled topics include imaging the cosmic microwave background (by Andrew Lange of the Boomerang collaboration), searching for extra dimensions, CP violation in B mesons, a progress report on the Chandra x-ray satellite, neutrino oscillations, and the amplification of atoms and light in Bose-Einstein condensates. (Sessions A1, G1 and P1.)

And now for some more detailed summaries

"EARTHQUAKES" IN PLASMA CRYSTALS
Laser cooling can be used to reduce the temperature of trapped ions to the point at which they form a crystalline state. Such "plasma crystals" can provide insights into dense astrophysical matter such as in the outer crust of a neutron star or in the interior of white dwarfs. John J. Bollinger of NIST (303-497-5861, jjb@boulder.nist.gov) will discuss several experiments which probe the structure of this condensed-matter state. These experiments use a Penning trap, which employs electric and magnetic fields to trap, cool, and prepare the plasma crystals. Applying torques on the crystal with lasers and electric fields, the researchers have recently studied the response of the trapped ion crystal to an applied stress. Such crystals have a shear modulus (a measure of its response to sliding forces) approximately 19 orders of magnitude smaller than ordinary condensed matter. They observe sudden jumps or slips in the orientation of the interior crystal separated by long periods in time when the interior crystal orientation does not change. The statistics of the slip frequency versus their size is similar to earthquakes which exhibit a phenomenon known as "self-organized criticality." Their current interest is to understand better how the slips occur in order to minimize their occurrence. This is important for some of the potential applications of this system such as atomic clocks and quantum computing. However, the researchers also believe that trapped ion crystals may provide an interesting system with which to study self-organized criticality. (S3.004)

BLUEPRINT FOR A NEUTRINO FACTORY
Neutrinos are one of the universe's most abundant particles--about a billion exist in every cubic meter of space--but they are also very elusive, rarely interacting with matter. Jocelyn Monroe of Columbia will describe a preliminary design for a "Neutrino Factory," a facility that could produce large numbers of neutrinos that pass through a detector. Such a facility would enable high-statistics investigations of every parameter associated with neutrino oscillations, which indicate the presence of neutrino mass. Even a tiny neutrino mass has tremendous implications for cosmology and the standard model of particle physics. Monroe will discuss a neutrino factory idea based on muon beams. Muons can provide lots of neutrinos, as they rapidly decay into an electron and a neutrino pair. But standard muon beams tend to have large, watermelon-sized diameters, making them unsuitable for storage and high-statistics applications. Monroe and her colleagues have found that a proposed technique known as ionization cooling can reduce the diameter of the beam by a factor of 10, so as to make muons feasible for a Neutrino Factory. In the scheme, muons pass through a block of material, reducing momentum in all their directions. But an electric field applied in the direction of the beam maintains the high energy of the beam, while keeping the beam narrow. The neutrino factory idea is in an early stage (in the category of R&D at Fermilab, LBL, and Brookhaven), but those working on the project hope to conduct tests that will lead to a proposal for building one. (W9.008)

GOING BALLISTIC ON MISSILE DEFENSE
One of the key technical questions in the ongoing debate about the feasibility of national missile defense systems (NMDs) is whether they can be expected to work under real- world conditions. For example, critics have observed that an attacker could send hundreds of harmless decoys along with a single lethal missile. Responding to this pressing national issue, the APS Council has approved a new APS study to analyze what some physicists consider the most realistic missile defense: a boost-phase intercept system, which would disarm enemy missiles at the very earliest stages after their launch. This issue will be addressed by several speakers, among them prominent physicist and arms expert Richard Garwin, a senior fellow for science and technology for the Council on Foreign Relations. Lisbeth Gronlund of MIT's Security Studies Program will make recommendations as to what an adequate NMD test program might look like. George Lewis of MIT will review the US's only actual experience with a ballistic missile defense system: the Patriot Missile System during the Gulf War. According to Lewis, "independent analysis of Patriot's performance using news media videos and other publicly available data shows conclusively that Patriot's performance was very poor -- that it destroyed very few, and most likely no, Scud warheads." David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists and MIT will discuss North Korea's missile program and speculate on possible future developments. (Sessions S1 and H2)

COSMONUMEROLOGY
Modern-day observers might be surprised to learn that some of the 20th century's top scientific thinkers proposed physical theories that we would now consider to be numerology. In his Large Number Hypothesis, Paul Dirac suggested that the gravitational constant, G, varies in time because he noticed that the ratio of electrostatic to gravitational attraction in a hydrogen atom is roughly equal to the age of the universe (which is always changing) expressed in certain units. Attempting to derive the fine structure constant (which dictates the strength of the electromagnetic force), the scientist Sir Arthur Eddington convinced himself that the value was 1/137, because he was sure that the denominator had to be a whole number (the actual value is closer to 1/137.036). Ian Durham of the University of St. Andrews (ian@dcs.st-and.ac.uk) in Scotland hypothesizes that the introduction of these and other unorthodox cosmological models may have stemmed in part from the scientists' upbringing in early twentieth-century England, in which even some of the most celebrated scientists entertained ideas that we would associate with the occult and supernatural. Durham is also investigating the influence of Pythagorean and Aristotelian thought which also contained large amounts of numerology. (C13.001)

WARMING UP TO CLIMATE CHANGE
Experts ranging from archeologists and climatologists to economists and international diplomats will discuss important issues in climate change. The task of coping with changes in global climate is made more daunting "because climate and weather impact society largely through extremes," says William H. Hooke of the American Meteorological Society. In order to forecast societal impact, he points out that we need a predictive understanding of how projected climate change will reflect or affect extreme events, a capability that does not yet exist. However, "By studying how societies worldwide build resilience to today's weather extremes, and by adopting best practices locally, we can go a long way toward building global resilience with respect to future climate change," he says. Modeling climate change in the past can help us to understand how society can adapt to future climate change. George Gumerman of the University of Arizona (and director of the Arizona State Museum) will describe simulations of the early farming culture of the Anasazi, a 2000-year-old civilization in the American Southwest. He and his colleagues perform "bottom-up simulations," which start with a few key variables and look for complex behavior to emerge. Such simulations, he says, help to provide clues on the important factors underlying how the society adapted to environmental changes. Hugh Pitcher of Pacific Northwest National Lab will discuss the economics of future energy sources. Richard Benedick, chief U.S. negotiator of the Montreal Protocol, is slated to discuss the role of scientists in setting climate change policy. (Session Q11)

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SSC.
Michael Riordan of UC-Santa Cruz will describe the history of the Superconducting Super Collider, the largest scientific project ever attempted. It fell to the Congressional budget axe in 1993 after 10 years of work and two billion dollars. Other accelerator facilities constructed since then have had better fates. Thomas Kirk of Brookhaven will describe how formal project management methods and tools are needed for successful execution of the work. Herwig Schopper of CERN and the University of Hamburg will discuss the evolution of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Congressional staffer David Goldston will discuss how scientists can apply the history of the SSC and the LHC towards successful future ambitious science projects. (Session J1)

THE SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF ETERNAL LIFE IN AN ETERNALLY EXPANDING UNIVERSE
Tackling the ambiguous complexity of "life, the universe, and nothing," bestselling science author Lawrence Krauss (The Physics of Star Trek), a professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University, will give this year's Lilienfeld Prize lecture on Saturday afternoon. His theme is life and death in an ever-expanding universe, starting with recent observations in cosmology "that have changed the way we think about the universe on large scales," extending the discussion to the implications for life, and closing with the question of whether life can be eternal in an eternally expanding universe. "Surprisingly, the answer to this question appears to hinge on questions of basic physics, in particular issues of quantum mechanics and computation, which may determine whether life is ultimately analog or digital," he says. The session will also feature the annual retiring presidential address, delivered this year by APS Past President James Langer. (Session E1)

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SCIENCE WRITER REGISTRATION FORM
APS 2001 Spring Meeting

Send or fax to: Ben Stein
AIP, Media and Government Relations
One Physics Ellipse
College Park, MD 20740-3843
Fax: 301-209-0846
E-mail: bstein@aip.org

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