Recent content by smoit

Here is the link to TASI http://www.colorado.edu/physics/Web/tasi10_annc.html where you can browse the previous years on the left side of the page and click on the Audiovisual Content link if you want to watch some lectures. I'd say TASI, PITP and PIRSA are all good sources but unfortunately...

Well, you can consider yourself lucky because you are starting your career at the time of the LHC. If I were you I would plan on working closely with data and try to get a good grasp on collider phenomenology. On the other hand, if you are interested in more formal BSM stuff, I would not start...

Bianchi has 21 professional articles, 17 of them published. I'm sure that as a postdoc, he likewise "hardly needs to try to peer-publish everything he writes to bolster his trackrecord". :biggrin:

I said nothing about virtual gluons and their contributions to the rest mass of baryons b/c I didn't want to get into discussing lattice QCD results for hardon masses but yes, virtual gluon loops do contribute a significant portion of a baryon's inertial mass and such effects are much more...

I'm not sure where you obtained this ballpark number. I suggest you read page 3 in [PLAIN]"arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0603/0603249v2.pdf"[/URL]. If you are questioning how one can measure quantum effects by classical means than you should read a book or take a class in quantum mechanics...

By MSUSY I just denoted a generic scale of level spacing. Its value should be related to the string scale, I think, since SUSY is broken at the string scale in this construction. That's why I did not really want to identify MSUSY with the scale obtained in some 4D EFT from the soft breaking but...

@Harv, no problem! Joe's article is good and pretty much sums up the current situation. I saw his talk on this topic at KITP back in 2006, you can find it here if you're curious: http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/strings_c06/polchinski/

@Fra, Here is a reference that is the most referred in the literature but you'd have to go to your library to actually read it: http://slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?irn=6818293 Please, read very carefully what I said in my previous comment b/c your response indicated that you had...

The shift in the electrostatic energy due to vacuum polarization (experimentally measured in the Lamb shift) contributes an amount large enough that, in case if it did not gravitate, would violate the equivalence principle to a precision of one part in a million. However, we can experimentally...

FYI, after almost 2 years, the authors have so far failed to publish it in a refereed journal.

We? Meaning all the retired mathematicians who post on the physics forum?

This "simple argument" is obviously flawed since an empty box containing all quantum fields in our vacuum already contains ALL contributions - tree-level and quantum, which all add up to the tiny value. There is no experiment that I'm aware of where one can separate the total tree-level...

What audience are they addressing in their paper? Undegraduates who just had a quantum mechaniscs class and learned about the zero-point energy? What is it that's new in their paper that particle theorists did not know already? What I and many people have already said here is that apart from...

No sane particle theorist makes such an identification, Markus! Read the Polchinski reference and you'll see that nowhere does he identify the cosmological constant only with the zero point energy. On the contrary, as people have repeatedly said here, the CC receives all kinds of tree-level...

I don't know! Indeed, the value one gets is a mere coincidence since it's a value for the vacuum energy in 10D. Indeed, assuming MSUSY~(TeV)~10-15MPlank and Mstring~MPlanck one gets Str(MSUSY8)Mstring2~10-120MPlanck10. As I said before in #56, if you want to compute the CC in a realistic...