Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Next week is all B-Modes

There is a paper in quarantine that will dominate next week in physics it's all about B-modes

Time to start your background reading here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-modes

Happy reading

Edit: I see adam is on the case (http://resonaances.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/plot-for-weekend-flexing-biceps.html)

Looks as though they have their B-Modes. Just have to work out what it's all about.

At a layman level it gives you an indirect measure of what a gravity wave would look like.

So the chances of the Ligo detectors seeing a gravity wave just went up by many thousands fold because you can at least sort of calculate what you might expect it to look like so Bill will be happy

You will note Jester gave you the big warning.


There is stuff to work through and ultimately it may need LIGO to settle it.

Significantly if verified it also says GR is correct and was there as near to the start of the big bang as we can get. It also means with a very high probability gravity is quantized.

Lubos does a really good analysis:
(http://motls.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/bicep2-primordial-gravitational-waves.html#more)

Gravity is not my specialty but almost all the science sites will be carrying details throughout the week however as the discovery is on par with the Higgs, so hit them for more detail.

http://profmattstrassler.com/2014/03/17/bicep2-new-evidence-of-cosmic-inflation/

Matt Strassler's blog is worth a look.

Naturally, he is cautious, as usual, but is updating as new info comes in.

"As always, I have to caution you that although I’m fairly impressed, and reasonably optimistic about this measurement, it is a measurement by only one experiment. Until this measurement/discovery is confirmed by another experiment, you should consider it provisional. Although this is too large a signal to be likely to be due to a pure statistical fluke, it could still be due to a mistake or problem, or due to something other than gravitational waves from inflation. The history of science is littered with examples; remember the 2011 measurement by OPERA that showed neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light was far too large to be a statistical fluke. Fortunately there will be other experiments coming and so we’ll have a chance for various experiments to either agree or disagree with each other in the very near future."

Actually not a bad read from Matt. As I said earlier I suspect LIGO will have a fighting chance to see a grav wave which will confirm the result as you will note the signal was stronger than people expected.

Lubos has done an interesting background on what theories are compatible with the Bicep2 result and which aren't.

The one that caught me by surprise was that the standard model isn't compatible but he only gives a vague reasoning referencing another paper so yours truely has got some work to do

http://motls.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/bicep2-some-winners-and-losers.html