Higgs Field and the wrinkling of Graphene.

[sjastro]

Very interesting stuff.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/44994

Regards

Steven

[CraigS]

Ok, so here's a couple of quotes from this article, which should serve to summarise it:



So this guy is suggesting that studying the 'energy landscape' of Graphene, may tell us more about the behaviours in Higgs quantum field theory, the details of which, are 'mathematically difficult'.

(So this reminds me of the analogy developed for studying Hawking Radiation. Ie: using lasers colliding in the optical domain, to create an artificial black hole).

I suppose any new information discovered using this analogy, might speed up the hunt for the Higgs … gotta find it before they can predict its behaviours under variable conditions, eh ??

Cheers

[CraigS]

The more I look at this, the more interesting it becomes.

It seems the ripples arise due to spontaneous symmetry breaking, but the ripples are themselves, caused by interaction between 'flexural phonons'.

This mechanism is similar to what happens in crystal oscillators.

The propagation of Phonons through a crystal lattice, also reminds me of density waves in the arms of a spiral galaxy.

Interesting.

Cheers

[avandonk]

What are these Phonons? I have never heard them!

Bert

[sjastro]

Not another phonon joke:).

Steven

[renormalised]

Phonons are the sound equivalent of photons within a (crystalline) solid, e.g. graphene crystals.

They're the modes of vibration setup when a sound wave travels through a crystal lattice. If you remember your harmonics from high school, you'll know that harmonic vibrations within a solid (as well as pure sound waves in any other medium) occur as fundamental tones and overtones of the fundamental. These can be expressed similarly to light waves/particles in a quantum sense, i.e. the phonons have a dual particle/wave nature and behave accordingly. Each phonon has a particular wavelength and frequency and this is expressed as the harmonic vibrations within the crystal lattice.