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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."
My bad, I sneezed into the particle accelerator. Sorry guys.
It's a bound state of two quarks. The charm quark is "heavy", i.e. relatively massive, while the the strange quark is less so.
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
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.
Doubtful.
They "discovered" that nature behaves in a certain way. How is it not a "discovery"? You can't call it an "invention" because it's not like they're designing these particles before creating them.
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'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
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.
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
BTW, even if there were particles which only existed in the high energies of the big bang and for 10^(-20) seconds afterwards, producing them in a hypothetical super-accelerator would still constitute a "discovery" rather than a creation or invention.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
>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...