Content about physics and astronomy

The Belle experiment at the KEKB electron-positron collider, based at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan, made significant contributions to the field of particle physics before it shut down 30 June 2010. Among them was the observation of charge-parity violation in B mesons. Today, physicists are preparing for the next step: SuperKEKB and Belle II. And part of those preparations include creating the computing infrastructure the experiment will need to handle massive amounts of data.

If the sun is anything, it is reassuring. It rises, sets, and rises again, allowing us to grow crops, get tan, and power homes, just to name a few of humanity’s most important life-sustaining functions. No wonder it was considered a deity by countless ancient civilizations.

Like many other things, however, our sun is prettier at a distance. Turns out the sun is a violent place where magnetic fields and fusion energy spew plumes of radiation into outer space and at Earth. Physicists call this phenomenon space weather, and seek to understand it by running increasingly complex simulations on increasingly powerful computing systems.

The Royal Society has made 60,000 of its historical scientific papers free and permanently available online. 

Few laypeople think of computing innovation in connection with the Tevatron particle accelerator, which shut down earlier this year. Mention of the Tevatron inspires images of majestic machinery, or thoughts of immense energies and groundbreaking physics research, not circuit boards, hardware, networks, and software.

Yet over the course of more than three decades of planning and operation, a tremendous amount of computing innovation was necessary to keep the data flowing and physics results coming. Those innovations will continue to influence scientific computing and data analysis for years to come.

Brian Schmidt, awarded the 2011 Physics Nobel Prize, dicusses the role of e-science in astronomy and talks about his new project SkyMapper, which grew from the ashes of the Australian Mt. Stromlo telescope, used by Schmidt to discover that the Universe was accelerating.

The quest to produce power from fusion is back on track after the test-bed reactor JET restarted successfully. But some serious challenges, which require heavy computing, still lie on the scientists' path between here and realising their dream.

Scientists are installing extremely sensitive infra-red cameras to find tiny hot-spots in the walls of the container, which might show why and where energy is lost. And they must also tackle one of the most important unsolved problems of classical physics: turbulance.

Real-time analysis allows astronomers to capture a supernova in the act of exploding, an unprecedented opportunity to study the phenomenom.