Related papers: Thirty Minutes Before the Dawn -- Trinity
Atomic nuclei are quantum many-body systems of protons and neutrons held together by strong nuclear forces. Under the proper conditions, nuclei can break into two (sometimes three) fragments which will subsequently decay by emitting…
We recall the early theoretical speculations on the possible explosive uses of antimatter, from 1946 to the first production of antiprotons, at Berkeley in 1955, and until the first capture of cold antiprotons, at CERN on July 17-18, 1986,…
Penning trap mass measurements of short-lived nuclides have been performed for the first time with highly-charged ions (HCI), using the TITAN facility at TRIUMF. Compared to singly-charged ions, this provides an improvement in experimental…
Einsteins general theory of relativity is one of the most important accomplishments in the history of science. Its experimental verification a century ago is therefore an essential milestone that is worth celebrating in full. We reassess…
The preponderance of matter over antimatter in the early universe, the dynamics of the supernovae that produced the heavy elements necessary for life, and whether protons eventually decay -- these mysteries at the forefront of particle…
A permanent electric dipole moment (EDM) of a fundamental particle violates both parity (P) and time (T) reversal symmetry and combined charge and parity (CP) reversal symmetry if the combined reversal of charge, parity \textit{and} time…
During the second world war, Canada made several important contributions to the wartime work of the Manhattan Project. The three main contributions were: establishing a domestic nuclear research laboratory in Montreal to investigate heavy…
We discuss, from a historiographical point of view, which was the degree of certainty that the physicists directly involved in the birth of Quantum Mechanics (Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Dirac and Schr\"odinger) gave to the atomistic…
In this overview talk, I give highlights of the first three years of the LHC operations at high energy, spanning heavy-ion physics, standard model measurements, and searches for new particles, which culminated in the discovery of the Higgs…
Hideki Yukawa, Sin-itiro Tomonaga and Shoichi Sakata pioneered nuclear and particle physics and left enduring legacies. Their friendly collaboration and severe competition laid the foundation to bring up the active postwar generation of…
More than 40 years ago, neutrinos where conceived as a way to test the validity of the solar models which tell us that stars are powered by nuclear fusion reactions. The first measurement of the neutrino flux, in 1968 in the Homestake mine…
A quantum system driven by a weak deterministic force while under strong continuous energy measurement exhibits quantum jumps between its energy levels (Nagourney et al., 1986, Sauter et al., 1986, Bergquist et al., 1986). This celebrated…
Humankind is confronted with a "nuclear stewardship curse", facing the prospect of needing to manage nuclear products over long time scales in the face of the short-time scales of human polities. I propose a super Manhattan-type effort to…
We present quantitative measurements on a classic experiment proposed for the first time in 1947 to illustrate the phenomenon of a chain reaction in nuclear fission. The experiment involves a number of mousetraps loaded with solid balls.…
It's been a remarkable decade in neutrino physics. Ten years ago this summer, at the 1998 neutrino conference in Takayama, the Super-Kamiokande collaboration reported the observation of neutrinos changing flavor, thereby establishing the…
The T2K long-baseline neutrino-oscillationexperiment was started in January 2010 for the purpose of physics data-taking. Until the massive earthquake on March 11, 2011 in Japan, $1.43\times 10^{20}$ pot data were accumulated. In this data,…
We discuss a direct test of the relation of time and energy in the very long-lived decay of tritium (H3) (meanlife \tau ~ 18 yrs) with the width \Gamma ~ 10^{-24} eV [set by the time-energy uncertainty (TEU)], using the newfound possibility…
Significant advances, both in the theoretical understanding of rupture processes in heterogeneous media and in the methodology for characterizing critical behavior, allows us to reanalyze the evidence for criticality and especially…
The attempts to find the right (underlying) theory for the nuclear force have a long and stimulating history. Already in 1953, Hans Bethe stated that "more man-hours have been given to this problem than to any other scientific question in…
It is seldom acknowledged the tremendous burden that the Nuclear Age leaves on future generations, and the environment, for an extremely long time. Nuclear processes, and products, are activated at energies millions of times higher than the…