CDMS model translates
data to light, sound

Karl Ramberg sometimes incorporates music into his artwork. But a trip with his brother, Fermilab physicist Erik Ramberg, added science to his palette. Karl, with the help of scientists, produced a full-scale, plastic model of a dark matter detector that translates its data into light and sound.

"The end result is that you get an experience, aurally and visually, of subatomic affects," Karl said. "You get a better understanding of what the data is saying."

The musical detector, a YouTube sensation, is modeled after the real Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, an underground experiment searching for dark matter particles. The actual CDMS experiment detects and records the energies of particles that strike its five towers. The model takes that one step further, expressing the data in color and tone according to particles and their properties. The idea for the model was inspired by a trip to the Soudan, Minn. mine that houses the CDMS experiment, where Erik, a CDMS collaborator, took shifts.

"I told him I'd go with him," Karl said. "The whole notion of being at the bottom of an abandoned iron mine - there is something kind of romantic or mysterious about it."

CDMS collaborator and University of Minnesota professor Prisca Cushman.

After spending the better part of a week in the mine, Karl had an idea to turn the detector into functional multimedia artwork. So, with the help of his brother and CDMS collaborator and University of Minnesota professor Prisca Cushman, Karl built a model detector to scale.

"I spent a lot of time programming it. I had to get CDMS files in the proper format and figure out what sounds good," Cushman said.

Cushman translated the data for an hour each night, between 9-10 p.m. in her attic. She filmed the YouTube video of the musical model and uploaded it online with the help of her neighbor's 10-year-old nephew.

Eventually Cushman said she and the Rambergs would like to place the model or a similar one in a science or university museum.

"This could be a great outreach tool," Cushman said. "It has a lot of potential to spark people's interest."

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

Click on the image to watch the five-minute video of the musical model of the CDMS detector on YouTube.

Physicists: After 30 years of study, rare particle confirms prediction

From University of Florida News,
March 10, 2008

High-energy physicists devoted to recreating the conditions at the beginning of the universe have for the first time observed a new way to produce those basic particles of atoms, protons and neutrons.

Confirming a decades-old prediction, the physicists with the CLEO collaboration say they observed a rare and extremely short-lived subatomic particle with the unusual name of "charmed-strange meson" decay into a proton and anti-neutron.

Detection of the event, which the collaboration made public Sunday at http://arxiv.org/, was attributed to John Yelton, a physicist at the University of Florida, one of many institutions that are part of the CLEO collaboration.

"It's the sort of thing that, for many years, people have known should happen," Yelton said. "What we have done is show that it does, and how often."

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Searching for a tiny new dimension, curled up like the universe before the Big Bang

From Science Daily,
March 12, 2008

The universe as we currently know it is made up of three dimensions of space and one of time, but researchers in the Department of Physics and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech are exploring the possibility of an extra dimension.

Sound like an episode from the "Twilight Zone?" Almost, but not quite; according to John Simonetti, associate professor of physics in the College of Science and Michael Kavic, graduate student and one of the investigators on the project.

"The idea we're exploring is that the universe has an imperceptibly small dimension (about one billionth of a nanometer) in addition to the four that we know currently," Kavic said. "This extra dimension would be curled up, in a state similar to that of the entire universe at the time of the Big Bang."

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