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New 'Mystery Meson' Sub-Atomic Particle Discovered
securitas writes "The BBC reports that scientists in Japan have discovered a new sub-atomic particle that defies current theories of matter and energy. The 'mystery meson' X(3872) was revealed while studying beauty quarks at the KEK High Energy Accelerator Research Organization Tsukuba meson factory. 'It weighs about the same as a single atom of helium and exists for only about one billionth of a trillionth of a second before it decays into other longer-lived, more familiar particles.' Scientists say the lifespan 'is nearly an eternity for a sub-atomic particle this heavy' and may require a change in current theory. Possible explanations for this include the particle being comprised of two quarks and two antiquarks, instead of the usual one-one pairing. More explanation and illustrations at KEK."
Do we know whether this particle violates the Standard Model? Because if it does, that could mean a real revolution in Physics.
Finding God in a Dog
It is always changing and bringing new and exciting information.
Save Sam and Max!
I hate it when I come in for lunch and the lab has "Mystery Mesons".
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
...was revealed while studying beauty quarks...
I knew it wasn't just in the eye of the beholder.
She was always my favorite character in the "SubAtomic Defenders" series. But like a lot of her fans, I resent the description of her as "heavy". Perhaps zaftig would be a more accurate phrase. All I know is she filled out her uniform in a pleasing way.
from the Institute of Physics
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Too bad the US cancelled the Superconducting Supercollider some years back.
Why? It cost too much.
And how much are we spending in Iraq for benefits denied to our own citizens?
Priorities?
...Mr. Arthur Dent, please report to the particle physics lab and make confused faces.
That is all.
Hammer of Truth
So what does this mean for the String Theory?
I didn't use the preview button, so get over it!!!!
Mike
gotta love how they study something by smashing it into peices. I always pictured using the same technique to study how a radio works by shooting bullets into it, and then observing the peices as they fly out of the radio :-)
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
If this is "Overthrow the Standard Model"-class Big News, I would like to see it duplicated first. Otherwise it's just an invisible purple dragon floating in my garage...
I'm not surprised that unsual particles like this are being discovered. Perhaps the long halflife of this particle suggests that aggregation can lead to stablization. In the same way that neutrons are stabilized by protons on the nuclei of everyday matter, I'd bet that mesons can be stabilized either by other mesons or baryons.
Perhaps this won't overturn pre-existing models for elementary particles, but lead to extensions of theories on how aggregates of these particles behave.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
One thing I'm not clear about when we're talking about sub-atomic particles - how do we know we've got it right? I mean, the idea that these are particles - discrete physical entities if you like - comes from observations of effect and are, as far as I can tell, purely abstractions of what is actually going on. Sometimes abstractions - which of course helps the human mind get understand complex things - can actually mislead. How do we know we've got our thinking right about how sub-atomic particles work?
(/me straps in for the impending moderation roller coaster)
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Actually, June's Scientific American had an interesting article on The Dawn of Physics beyond the Standard Model.
:(
It's too bad the full text of this article is available only for subscribers
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
...ever get the feeling that partical physicists are just sharing one big self-delusion?
"Hey Bob, did you hear? Joe discovered a new kind of...uh...Meson!"
"A...Meson? Oh...yeah, Meson, of course. I know what that is."
"Yeah, check out this graph, see that spike right there for 1 billionth-trillionth of a second?"
"Uh...yeah! Yeah, I see it! Right there!"
"No, over there."
"Right! Right over there! Wow, that's great. Well, I'm off to go discover a...uh...new kind of...Foofara?"
"Wow....Foofara huh? Wow...that's awesome...Good Luck!"
"Another Contradiction" is much too strong a statement. The Standard Model has two problems (1) it doesn't play well with gravity, so it can't be the "final answer", and (2) it is so ridiculously successful that no one knows quite where to go next in theoretical particle physics. The SM is more or less able to give the right answer to any question we're able to ask it, right up to the edges of black holes or the first tiny fraction of a second after the birth of the universe. There are some problems too complex for our calculational techniques and approximations (i.e. we can't calculate the physics of many bound states precisely or derive human behavior), but there aren't really any contradictions. The recently reported new particle is more likely to lead us to tell us our calculational approximations aren't very good, rather than that something fundamentally new (though one can always hope!) Particle physicists are always hoping to find something fundamentally wrong with the standard model - it's just an extremely good approximation to the right answer, and until the approximation breaks down you don't know how to improve it.
No, but we can tell you to shut up, as even you admit that you haven't the slightest clue what you're talking about.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Years back, IBM had an advertisement in Scientific American. It showed a stop-motion picture of a hammer smashing a watch, and pieces flying out. The text said something to the effect of, "Imaging learning how a watch works by smashing it and examining the pieces as they fly out. That's how we do subatomic physics." The gist of the ad was that IBM computers helped in that daunting process.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
No it's not. Physics research has a lot of benefits. X-Rays, MRI, etc are all consequences of trying to study the atom.
A college Philosophy professor of mine tells a story about high energy physics and the practitioners thereof. He was researching a book on the philosophy of science and was interviewing one of the researchers at Fermilab (I think).
After discussing some of the esoterica of the field, my professor says "Okay. Off the record, do you *actually* believe that some of these particles exist outside of mathematical equations?"
Scientist looks around and replies "Not really. But this stuff is a lot of fun!"
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
That's the way things are done for lower-mass particles (muons, pions, etc.), but heavier ones with even shorter lifetimes still don't travel a measurable distance and have to have their lifetimes measured as in my post above.
Hurrah! down with the standard model!
Warp speed and time travel might yet be possible!
Wow, I've learnt how to answer my own questions..
Question
Is time quantized?
Asked by: Chris Ingram
Answer
I guess that the simplest answer to this would be: 'Yes, everything is quantized.' However, unfortunately this is one of the biggest problems in modern physics. No-one is really sure how it should be quantized but the idea of quantized time as well as quantized space and quantized gravity is part of the elusive theory of quantum gravity.
Some of the best minds in the world have been tackling the problem for years now. Einstein failed to united quantum theory with his own relativity, Richard Feynman couldn't do it (although QED was a definite step forwards) and even today some of our most famous physicists such as Kip Thorne, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose are still unable to unite quantum theory and relativity.
In answer to your question then. Yes, time is theoretically quantized and in an ultimate field theory it would be a quantized field much the same as the particle fields that we can already see in unified field theories. However, no-one has yet been able to come up with a consistent theory of space, time, fields and matter which shows exactly how time is quantized.
Answered by: Edward Rayne, Physics Undergraduate Student, Cambridge UK
exists for only about one billionth of a trillionth of a second
So, exactly how long is that? In the US, that would be 10e-21 seconds. But this is being reported by the BBC, and most of the English speaking world outside of the US doesn't consider 1 billion = 1000 million (instead it's 1 million million). So is it 10e-21 seconds or 10e-36 seconds (if I did my math right, which I probably didn't)? That's a rather large difference, and I couldn't find a definitive reference in any of the linked articles or PhysicsWeb.
That said, how do you detect particles that exist for this short a period of time anyway?
For those of you interested in reading the actual paper, have a look at http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0309032 Warning: Contains sentenses like "We determine a ratio of product branching fractions" and "measurement of the width for this decay channel" - scary stuff!
No. Its been a while since 1 billion = 1 million million was common usage in Britain.
We use 1000 Million like the US now. Well, I'm sure there are *some people* who don't. You know how people get attached to archaic measurements. But the common usage is 1000 Million.
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
Next on Entertainment Tonight: overnight particle physics sensation D Meson X(4158) is threatening legal action against the popular tabloid, "Physics Review" for what it claims is "misleading representation" of its relationship with D Meson X(1924), which it has recently been spotted interacting strongly with at the posh KEK Tsukuba Positron-Electron Supercollider in Japan. X(4158)'s lawyers also stated that further intrusions into the popular particle's privacy by the subatomic paparazzi would not be tolerated, and that a particle's spin-orientation is none of your business.
The price for building the SSC was a small fraction of the cost for even the limited International Space Station we actually built, much less the original planned ISN they kept in the budget the year Congress axed the SSC. Spending a few billion on the SSC, which was guaranteed to either give us the Higgs boson or prove the Standard Model wrong (the exciting if unlikely option) and thus provide some new basic science strikes me as a much better investment than tens of billions on the politically motivated ISN. I'm willing to invest money on real space science (Hubble, Galileo, many others), but too much money that supposedly for science goes to political stunts like the Moon landing instead of projects of actual scientific value. I'm not sure how practical generating power on the moon is and beaming power down has obvious security implications.
For the poster who asked about how old the Standard Model is and why we haven't seen applications, the Standard Model was created in the 1970's so it's very young by physics standards. We're just beginning to deal with the implications of quantum mechanics for silicon chips and the basics of that area of physics were established in the 1920's. Technology lags physics by a substantial amount of time. However, the physics of particle accelerators themselves has led to enormous advances in medicine and manufacturing as such techniques are used to look inside the human body for disease as well as inside microprocessors for defects, so it's been far from useless even from a shortsighted perspective.
Basically, it is possible to know how fast it's going (simple mechanics) and it is possible to see (or deduce) where it came into being and where it disintegrated into bits-- measure the distance between them and you have time.
It's a really really short time, but particles ejected from a collision in a particle accelerator are going really really fast-- they get to cover some distance in that short interval.
-- MG
there is truth to the conspiracy that we are all controlled by the invisible force of the 'free mesons'.
"exists for only about one billionth of a trillionth of a second"
Remember, people: "billion" and "trillion" mean very different things to people in different English-speaking parts of the world. Exponents and/or SI prefixes are the proper way to express numbers like this.