Cosmology, Relativity, and Gravity Commons^™

An Analysis Of The Debate Over Creation, Evolution, And The Timeline Of The Universe At An Ecumenical Christian University, Mason Pohlman

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

Throughout a significant portion of history and within modern culture, the fields of science and religion appear to be competing for the same holds in a person’s belief system. Universities are where academics and the sciences are the prevailing held truth, while in churches, the Bible reigns as supreme authority. However, in a Christian academic setting, the predominate school of thought in belief systems might turn into a little more of a melting pot. By analyzing gathered personal data (via surveys and interviews), one can begin to piece together the predominate thoughts on the apparent conflict between religion and science …

An Analysis Of Frenkel Defects And Backgrounds Modeling For Supercdms Dark Matter Searches, Matthew Stein

Physics Theses and Dissertations

Years of astrophysical observations suggest that dark matter comprises more than ~80 % of all matter in the universe. Particle physics theories favor a weakly-interacting particle that could be directly detected in terrestrial experiments. The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) Collaboration operates world-leading experiments to directly detect dark matter interacting with ordinary matter. The SuperCDMS Soudan experiment searched for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) via their elastic-scattering interactions with nuclei in low-temperature germanium detectors.

During the operation of the SuperCDMS Soudan experiment, ²¹⁰Pb sources were installed to study background rejection of the Ge detectors. Data from these sources …

Environmental Testing Of Lasers For Jpl's Cold Atom Laboratory, Carey L. Baxter

STAR Program Research Presentations

NASA’s Cold Atom Lab (CAL) is a multi-user facility designed to study ultra-cold quantum gases in the microgravity environment of the International Space Station (ISS). One of the main goals of CAL is to explore the unknown territory of extremely low temperatures—possibly as low as the picokelvin range!—where new and fascinating quantum phenomena can be observed. At such temperatures matter stops behaving as particles and instead becomes macroscopic matter waves. CAL will be remotely controlled to perform a multitude of experiments and is scheduled to launch in 2016. In order to anticipate problems that might occur during and post-launch, including …

Information Content Of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, Marcelo Gleiser, Nikitas Stamatopoulos

Dartmouth Scholarship

We propose a measure of order in the context of nonequilibrium field theory and argue that this measure, which we call relative configurational entropy (RCE), may be used to quantify the emergence of coherent low-entropy configurations, such as time-dependent or time-independent topological and nontopological spatially extended structures. As an illustration, we investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of spontaneous symmetry breaking in three spatial dimensions. In particular, we focus on a model where a real scalar field, prepared initially in a symmetric thermal state, is quenched to a broken-symmetric state. For a certain range of initial temperatures, spatially localized, long-lived structures known …

Essentials Of The Theory Of Abstraction - Lecture, Subhajit Kumar Ganguly

Subhajit Kumar Ganguly

In not favouring solutions or sets of solutions, the principle of zero-postulation drives away any unwanted incompleteness from the description of the world. It is the interactions between the possible exhaustive set of solutions that creates the impression pointedness or directiveness in the universe, leading to the formation of clusters, as discussed earlier. These interactions may be chaotic in nature, giving rise to attractor points where the directiveness inside any given system asymptotically seem to approach. It is this directiveness, in turn, inside a given system or in the universe as a whole, that is the cause of all known …

Condensation States And Landscaping With The Theory Of Abstraction, Subhajit Kumar Ganguly

Subhajit Kumar Ganguly

The Abstraction theory is applied in landscaping. A collection of objects may be made to be vast or meager depending upon the scale of observations. This idea may be developed to unite the worlds of the great vastness of the universe and the minuteness of the sub-atomic realm. Keeping constant a scaling ratio for both worlds, these may actually be converted into two self-same representatives with respect to scaling. The Laws of Physical Transactions are made use of to study Bose-Einstein condensation. As the packing density of concerned constituents increase to a certain critical value, there may be evolution of …

Affinity For Scalar Fields To Dissipate, Arjun Berera, Rudnei O. Ramos

Dartmouth Scholarship

The zero-temperature effective equation of motion is derived for a scalar field interacting with other fields. For a broad range of cases, involving interaction with as few as one or two fields, dissipative regimes are found for the scalar field system. The zero-temperature limit constitutes a baseline effect that will be prevalent in any general statistical state. Thus, the results found here provide strong evidence that dissipation is the norm not the exception for an interacting scalar field system. For application to inflationary cosmology, this provides convincing evidence that warm inflation could be a natural dynamics once proper treatment of …