## Friday, February 18, 2011

### MINOS in May

It's still some time off, but anyone near California should put this in their diary ... a MINOS talk scheduled for May 1, 2011. The abstract states:
MINOS has previously reported the results of $\bar{\nu}_{\mu}$ disappearance from a direct observation of muon antineutrinos ... In the present analysis we have a (forward horn current) $\bar{\nu}_{\mu}$ data sample with $7.1e20$ protons on target, which will be used to improve the previous measurements. This talk summarizes the agreement between data and simulation in the Near Detector at Fermilab.

1. Are there anyone looking at the concept of particles as attractors? I stayed up last night and got some computer programming done and have made some progress on getting the elementary particles to show up as attractors in a Hopf algebra.

A pure density matrix is already idempotent. But when you start with a general Hopf algebra element and iterate it, i.e. x^n, you get something that quite quickly converges on an idempotent. So it's a way of picking out a subgroup of the Hopf algebra that might happen to have a particular symmetry, etc.

2. Carl, kneemo and I are both essentially using attractors. Knots can label periodic orbits on the attractor surface. For example, the two holed Lorenz attractor is a branched surface containing all knots in positive generators. The words in $X$ and $Y$ around the holes define the knot diagram.

3. It seems to me that if you take "attractor" literally, you're introducing a form of dissipation into quantum mechanics. And that means you have a (microscopic) arrow of time.

4. Well, we have been talking about at least two distinct clock type measurements all along, but they are not independent. The microscopic one, as you put it, would be associated to long path words (like $X^n Y$) from high dimensional qudit spaces. Using the MUB norm of $1/ \sqrt{d}$ as an analog of $1/ \sqrt{\hbar}$, we see that these dimensions are inverse to the cosmological time steps that are counted by $\hbar$, in the Riofrio cosmology. So if you want to think of it as dissipation, it cannot be in a strictly classical sense.