Warped Passages - Lisa Randall [230]
supersymmetry A symmetry that interchanges partnered bosons and fermions.
symmetry A property of an object or a physical law such that certain physical operations are undetectable.
symmetry transformation A manipulation of a physical system that does not change its properties or behavior; the action that transforms different configurations that are related by symmetry into each other.
T-duality An equivalence between physical phenomena in a universe with a small rolled-up dimension and another universe with a large one (the size of the radius of a curled-up dimension is exchanged with its inverse).
tachyon A particle that signals an instability and superficially appears to have negative squared mass.
tau A short-lived particle with identical charge to the electron and muon but heavier than either.
tension Resistance to being stretched that determines how readily a string will oscillate and produce heavy particles.
TeV (teraelectronvolt) A unit of energy equal to one trillion eV.
Tevatron The high-energy collider currently in operation at Fermilab that collides beams of TeV-energy protons with TeV-energy antiprotons.
theory A definite set of elements and principles with rules and equations for predicting how those elements interact.
thought experiment An imagined physics experiment through which you can evaluate the consequences of a given set of physical assumptions.
top quark A short-lived, heavier version of the up quark; the heaviest known quark.
translational invariance The independence of physical laws of location in space.
transverse polarization Wave oscillation perpendicular to the direction of motion.
ultraviolet catastrophe An infinite energy emitted at high frequencies that is predicted by the classical theory of a blackbody.
uncertainty principle The basic principle underlying quantum mechanics that restricts the accuracy with which pairs of quantities (such as position and speed) can be simultaneously measured.
up quark One of the elementary quarks that compose the proton and the neutron.
vacuum The state of the universe with the lowest possible energy and no particles.
vacuum energy The energy carried by the vacuum, the state in which particles are absent; also known as the cosmological constant.
velocity The quantity that specifies both speed and direction of motion.
virtual particle An ephemeral particle allowed only by quantum mechanics; virtual particles carry the same charge as the corresponding true physical particles but have the wrong energy.
warp factor The overall scaling of a metric that varies with respect to one coordinate.
warped spacetime geometry Spacetime that would be flat (more generally, each slice would have the same shape) except for an overall scaling that varies with the position in a particular direction.
wavefunction A quantum-mechanical function that determines the relative likelihood of the corresponding object being at any point in space.
weak force One of the four known forces; the weak force is responsible for beta decay of neutrons into protons, for example.
weak gauge boson An elementary particle (with three varieties, W+, W-, and Z) that communicates the weak force.
weak scale energy The energy at which the symmetry associated with the weak force is spontaneously broken. The weak scale energy determines the masses of elementary particles.
weak scale length The length, 10-16 cm, or one ten thousand trillionth of a centimeter, that corresponds (via quantum mechanics and special relativity) to the weak scale energy. It is the range of the weak force—the maximum distance between particles that can influence each other through this force.
weak scale mass The mass that is related to the weak scale energy (of 250 GeV) through the speed of light. In conventional mass units, the weak scale mass is 10-21 grams.
Math Notes
1. This isn’t really a math note, but the Saturday Night Baby is three-dimensional. [Figure M1]
Figure M1. Saturday Night Baby.
2. A metric on space can take the form ds2 + axdx2 + aydy2 + azdz2, where x, y,