Message to the Physics Community, Thursday, May 7, 2020

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Dear Physics Community,

The Ragon Institute and Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR) have been having webinars on COVID-19 related matters and they are excellent:

Advisories

  • Remote teaching tips from Biology

Physics Department

Neutrinos as monitors – Pappalardo & Stanton Fellow Rachel Carr has a new article on using neutrinos to monitor reactors and bomb tests.

Rare decays – in the 1990s, the E787 experiment measured K+->pi+ nu nubar, which was very sensitive to the top quark mass, unknown at the time.  As E787 kept taking data, the collider experiments kept not finding the top quark – the lower limit on the top mass went up, and the expected number of events for E787 went down.  Their last paper was in 2008 and they had found 1 event, with an expected background of 0.3. There was a successor, E949.  Some very good physicists came from these experiments.

Now a new experiment KOTO has measured K0->pi0 nu nubar and observed 4 events, way more than expected.  Is it? Poisson statistics? Popular story here and paper here.

Los Endos

Six feet – lots of papers about the six-foot physical distance guidelines.  Fluid dynamical modeling, calculation, and estimates from other diseases.  I’m not going to post it all – just Google.  Where I come down is this – the viral load from COVID-19 in the air is like radioactivity and in radiation safety, you practice ALRA – as little as reasonably possible.  Six feet is a start and you wear a surgical mask, but don’t just hand six feet from people – keep fare away when you reasonably can. Just be cool.

Peter

P.S. I am posting these messages in my blog roll here. Thanks to Physics Council, Cathy Modica, Vicky Metternich, and Christina Andujar for input and comments on these messages.