Otterbein Physics Blog

Robertson and I completed our first refit of the intro labs. They look pretty good! Students are socially distanced in their new positions, and are all conveniently facing away from the instructor. The tables resisted moving, having been locked in place by a decade of floor-waxing, but the physicists ultimately prevailed.
Onward to a new semester!

This beautiful plot shows the relation between the fundamental particle masses and the coupling to the Higgs field for heavy fermions (t, b, tau) and gauge bosons (W, Z). The prediction of the Standard Model Higgs boson is the blue dashed line. Marvel at the precision – apart from the muon, which is not well covered by this dataset, the error bars are tiny! The upcoming Run 3 of the Large Hadron Collider should significantly expand these data for the second family: the charm quark and muon, radically shrinking the uncertainty on the latter. Run 3 is currently scheduled to begin in early 2021, so stay tuned!

I’m just the slightest bit late posting this, but Otterbein physics students Olivia Smith ’22 and Heather Tanner ’20 attended the Conference on Undergraduate Women in Undergraduate Physics (CUWiP) back on January 17-19, 2020. (It seems like forever ago!) This conference was hosted jointly by Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne University, and Washington and Jefferson College.

For readers of a certain vintage, an Otterbein connection: Mike Pettersen, who was a physics faculty member at Otterbein starting in 1993, moved to “Wash and Jeff” in 2002.