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SELEX at Fermilab Discovers New Particle
sellthesedownfalls writes "Scientists at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will announce on Friday, June 18 the observation of an unexpected new member of a family of subatomic particles called 'heavy-light' mesons. The new meson, a combination of a strange quark and a charm antiquark, is the heaviest ever observed in this family, and it behaves in surprising ways -- it apparently breaks the rules on decaying into other particles. See the Fermilab Press Release."
Heavy-Light Mesons!
My bad, I sneezed into the particle accelerator. Sorry guys.
Many things will end up breaking the "rules" before it's all over.
Now, I think this is the lifetime of the usual shorter-lived mesons, but still...
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
IANAP(hysicist) ... Do these mesons occur in nature? If not, how can it be claimed a new "discovery." In the same manner, I can glue a poptart to a can of coke and "discover" a new product that has the edible goodness of poptarts and the drinkable properties of coke.
Victor Ninov at Lawerence Berkley National Laboratory.
Let's hope Fermilab is more certain about this discovery.
Download my free songs!
I feel so dirty.
The best description of this phenomenon comes from James Ross in the official press release:
Stand clear of the doors. The doors are now closing.
Actually, they do occur in nature. Specifically, they occur when a sufficiently energetic cosmic ray strikes our atmosphere.
This is the same reason that many physicists laugh off the idea that they're going to create a mini-black hole that would sink to the earth's core and destroy us all. The universe is constantly running even higher-energy experiments in our atmosphere all the time - we just haven't placed our detectors in the right place! (To be fair to our hard-working particle physicists, you would need a VERY large detector hovering high in the air if you wanted to catch these things in nature.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
...it apparently breaks the rules...
Because it couldn't be that we've made a mistake. It was the naughty meson's fault.
-... ---
...it's a new discovery!
We certainly expected that there would be a strange-anticharm meson, but until it was observed, there was no way to tell it's mass (except in a very broad range of likely masses for members of the heavy-light mesons) and it's lifetime. Quantum chromodynamics, while in many respects a remarkably precise theory, still has to have the masses of the particles put into the equations. In a real Theory of Everything, we'd be able to calculate the mass of such a meson before we'd seen it.
These particles certainly exist in nature, but because their lifetime is so short, you'd have to be right where they were created to be able to see them before they decayed. Since our detector-on-the-surface-of-a-neutron-star project (affectionately called the DOTSOAN project) has had its funding denied again, the only place we can be observing right where they were created is right here on Earth in the accellerators.
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
Stuff like this is utterly fascinating. It's another way to examine the universe and try to figure out how it works. Trying to figure out the strong force will help with figuring out nuclear properties. And since everything has nuclei....
Also, experiments like this might poke holes in the Standard Model, which could lead to new area to explore in High Energy physics. Who knows what nature has hidden at the fermi level?
And yes, I used to do particle physics, so this immediatly caught my attention.
Farnsworth: It's a single atom of jumbonium. And element so rare, the nucleus alone is worth more than $50,000.
Bender: How much more?
Farnsworth: $100,000.
"Why can't everyone just be straight with me?"
"Because we live in a bendy world, dear."
Look at what they had for lunch on 06/17:
Aztec Tortilla Soup
Hot Italian Sub $4.75
Chicken Picata $3.75
Thai Beef $3.75
Roast Beef Cheddar on Kaiser Roll $4.75
Beef Strombolis $2.85
Marinated or Cajun Chicken Caesar Salads $4.75
It's a wonder they got any work done that day...
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
If the data and rules disagree (and the data is valid) then "the rules" were never ever really correct. This is the most interesting and cognitively confounding element of science. So many experiments cause the perceived "rules" to change when in fact the true rules of the universe never change, only our approximations and estimations of them. This is why I wonder if so much of science is really just curve-fitting (F = m*a + delta, where delta contains relativistic effects, quantum effects, etc.) Similarly, I wonder if E = mc^2 + delta, where delta includes effects unseen because we haven't tested the formula over the entire span of possible conditions (energies, distances, mass concentrations, etc.)
As an aside, a friend in college was religious because of this very issue. He hated the fact that science couldn't "make up its mind" abut what was true or not -- for him, an erroneous certainty was more comfortable than a changing, but progressively more correct uncertainty.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Obviously any experiment that yields unexpected and reproducable results is great news for quantum theorists.
I'm wondering if the theoretical predictions presented in the article tip the scales toward or away from any of the various theories of quantum structure. In particular:
"SELEX also saw the new meson decay about six times more often than expected into an eta particle (a rarer but well-studied member of the meson family), rather than into the expected particle, called a K meson."
It seems obvious that this experiment highlights a failure in our understanding of the strong force.
It really is turtles all the way down.
Have you read my blog lately?
"The distribution of the D0 K+ combined mass for all candidates in the data sample including Anti-particle combinations (D0bar K-). There are two clear peaks. The lower, at a mass of 2570 MeV/c2, is the known DsJ(2573) meson, discovered in 1994. This peak's width is more than the detector resolution showing the the "natural width (Gamma)" of this state due to its short lifetime. The value measured for the natural width of 14 MeV/c2 is consistent with previous measurements. The detector resolution is better by a factor of 2 in this D0 K+ decay mode than in the Ds+ eta0 mode making Selex more sensitive to the lifetimes of these state in this decay mode."
Shit man, I could of told you that.
I think this stuff DOES actually matter, I mean, physicists discovered quantum entanglement and now there's a the tantalizing possibility of the development unbreakable cyphers, quantum computers etc. Who knows what magical technology will come from these seemingly obscure discoveries. And I dare say that it doesn't take a physicist to come up with ways to harness these technologies, all it takes is a curious mind.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
"Cap'n - I think if we reverse the heavy light mesons, we can interuupt the Klingon's charmed anti-quark field just long enuf to escape!"
Shatner: "Scotty, you only have 60 seconds, hurry!"
And, BTW, congrats to the Fermi team. I have plenty of friends employed there, I always like to see new discoveries. Good job, guys.
The fire at Los Alamos has had one significant consequence. A secret scientific document was discovered in a bunker whose security systems were mostly destroyed by the fire. This document was leaked to the public last weekend.
Actually it reveals nothing that we didn't already suspect. But it does show that besides arsenic, lead, mercury, radon, strontium and plutonium, one more extremely deadly and pervasive element is known to exist.
This startling new discovery has been tentatively named Governmentium (Gv) but kept top secret for 50 years. The new element has no protons or electrons, thus having an atomic number of 0. It does, however, have 1 neutron, 125 deputy neutrons, 75 supervisory neutrons, and 111 team leader neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
These 312 particles are held together by a force called morons, that are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since it has no electrons, Governmentium is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.
According to the discoverers, a minute amount of Governmentium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would normally take less than a second. Governmentium has a normal half-life of approximately three years. It does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the deputy neutrons, supervisory neutrons, and team leader neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium mass will actually increase over time, since, with each reorganization, some of the morons inevitably become neutrons, forming new isodopes.
This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as the "Critical Morass."
http://www.appleseeds.org/governmentium.htm
Please direct all bug reports to
... quantum physics would start to get pretty boring after a while.
It's always fun to find a fault in the theory and then find a way to fix the theory, especially when that fix is elegant and makes all sorts of really cool predictions that you could not have made before.
Those fine folks who subscribe to my arXiv.org RSS feeds probably have already read the full paper:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0406045
My RSS feeds can be found at:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~cmhogan/arXivRDF/
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it. -John Archibald Wheeler
Yeah; they're all hole, no donut.
I tell you, man, this Atkins thing is going *way* too far.
... Wellcome our new subatomic, particle supercharged, dually quarked master
NO SIG
"It's like watching a water bucket with a large hole and small hole in the bottom," Russ said. "For some reason, the water is pouring out the small hole six times faster than it's coming out of the large one. Something unusual must be going on inside the bucket."
Doesn't this attempted decryption of the universe break a provision in the DMCA? If that's not applicable, then I'm sure Microsoft will be getting a patent on it any day now.
There have been times where the best fitting equations were just like you say. They had parts that didn't correspond to any real understanding. They just made the equation work. Those are emperical results.
Much science is about taking those emperical results and coming up with theory that explains what they mean.
That's because the "rules" are bounded on our existing knowledge. Way back when the rules stated that if you sailed for too long, you'd fall off the edge of the (flat) earth, or that the sun orbited around the earth.
I'd expect that in the future, what we take for granted as a rule will be stretched, shrunk, or even broken. I'm not sure when it will be "over," but chances are that we'll be over before we learn all we could about the universe (possibly due to misunderstanding how it works).
>Look
You see a meson.
>Examine meson.
It's too small for you to see.
>Examine meson with microscope.
The meson appears to be composed of too smaller particles, a quark and an antiquark.
>Examine quark.
The quark is strange.
>Examine antiquark.
The pleasant blue glow leads you to conclude that this is a charmed antiquark.
>Rub antiquark.
Your fingers are too big and clumsy.
>Rub antiquark with cue-tip.
You suddenly feel lucky.
Two elf-nymphs enter the room. They look at you expectedly...
I, myself, am charmed by strangeness.
> While the SELEX experiment stopped taking data in 1997,
> an extended analysis revealed this new particle lurking
> within their data.
Nice to see the costly technology paying off long after the experiment is over.
Pure science is worth the money.
As a taxpayer, I like to know that research will have practical benefits.
So, if the Fermilab folks could tell us whether this will lead to any or all of the following useful devices, I would greatly appreciate it:
1) Warp Drive
2) A way to make all the stars in the galaxy go supernova at once
3) Bring back all the socks that vanish in the dryer
4) Mr. Fusion
5) Flying Cars
Yeah, so God did these amazing miraculous things thousands of years ago, then conveniently stopped. Where are the burning bushes today? Where are the cities being smote? Where are the heretics being turned into pillars of salt? Where are the booming voices of God from the heavens? Oh yeah, and don't forget... the Universe was created a few thousand years ago, too. Uh huh... RIGHT. Fucking idiot.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
It's true, it's not as easy to make discoveries as it used to be. This experiment for instance has 125 co-authors and finished in 1997, so it had to go on for years before that. And it's a small experiment by comparison. So perhaps it's not as easy for an individual to make contributions as it used to be in these fields. But you could probably still do a lot on a (relative) table-top with things like Bose-Einstein condensates, atom interferometry, etc.
That said, there's plenty we don't understand about the big issues. We don't know what most matter is. We don't know why the universe seems to be expanding faster than it should. We don't have any theory of quantum gravity. We don't know why galaxies formed, and why they formed so damn fast. We don't really seem to completely understand the strong force - and it's prying the lid off things like this that will get us there.
So, as a physicist, I'd say there's still cool stuff to be done. You just might have to work hard in a lab or behind a desk for years and years to do it.
I dislike their frequent use of the word. It seems to imply that this field is somehow solid in it's knowledge of how these particles work, when in reality it's really alot of clever guesswork. It would seem to me that what they mean by contradiction is merely a seeming contradiction because our assumptions, obviously, have come into question. I know it'd be a pain to be so annoying accurate all the time but could quantum science, in general, please qualify this more often?
Be a little less quick to assume you're unraveling reason itself and start recognizing that if you have a contradiction, then it's because some premise of yours is wrong.
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.
In my mind, I like to envision this guy (Victor Ninov, who presented fraudulent data on super-heavy atoms) strung up and shot for the damage he's done to the public perception of science. Somebody always brings this up when a discovery is announced.
Here at the CDF experiment (as well as for essentially all of the Fermilab collaborations), there exists a procedure generally known as the "blessing" of analyses, wherein one has to submit results in (multiple) meetings of collaborators who do overlapping work. Much sniping and nit-picking ensues, but the end result is typically a thorough internal peer-review process before an analysis can be made public. You would be quickly discovered here if you tried to just generate some data. Though I don't know how they do it at LBNL...
Anyway, I look forward to out meeting Monday where we'll review evidence for observation of this D_s state here.
(I Am A Lowly Grad. Student Physicist.)
Anecdotal evidence! I'm sold!
The complexity of all these different particles will collapse into something much simpler when we look at it all from a different angle. Since I can't think of any other way to discover this "different angle", I am in favor of the physicists continuing with the current research methods -- finding more and more new and bizarre particles until it becomes obvious what we're actually looking at.
String theory, where all particles are just different vibration frequencies of otherwise identical loops of "string", is rather appealing. But it seems we can't quite wrap our math around it yet.
Of course the universe is under no obligation to be simple or elegant, but it just often seems to be the way -- a random complex thing becomes simple and obvious when viewed in the appropriate context.
Cheers.