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Mesons Flip Between Matter and Antimatter
steve writes "A team of over 700 physicists at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator have observed the B-sub-s meson oscillating between matter and antimatter states at 3 trillion times a second. From the Fermilab press release: 'Immediately after the Big Bang some 13 billion years ago, equal amounts of matter and antimatter formed. Much of it quickly acted to annihilate the other, but for little-understood reasons, a bit more matter than antimatter survived, providing the universe with the planets, stars and galaxies visible today.' The Standard Model predicted the oscillation, and Fermilab has been working for 19 years to confirm it. The announcement is good press for Fermilab, which is pushing Congress to build a new 18-mile-long International Linear Collider."
or Republicans would have resorted to calling these "Kerry particles"....
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
The Big Bang was the Big Mistake because more matter survived than anti-matter to form the universe instead of returning to the void. Philosophers are going to have a field day with this one.
I say this oscillation should be called the "Quagmire Effect."
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
between (-1, Troll) and (5, Funny)
They can't make up their mind.
The announcement is good press for Fermilab, which is pushing Congress to build a new 18-mile-long International Linear Collider."
If they want to get it built they will call it the American Linear Collider. Congress is not going to look too fondly on yet another international science or engineering project.
Science: Mesons Flip Between Matter and Antimatter 7 of 6 comments
Someone must have snuck in an antimatter posting or something.
--Chag
Isn't matter and energy the same thing? E=m*c^2? So shouldn't energy have turned back into matter at some point? Or is this a discussion similar to why life on earth has the chemistry it does when the "lightning in a bottle experiment" develops equal amounts of "left" and "right" handed molecules? Or could the universe have a preference, and condense out matter instead of anti-matter?
BTW, I AM NOT A PHYSICIST. (If it isn't aparent already.)
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
Almost all practical research derives in some way from "blue sky physics".
No, we can't immediately predict what will come out of this. But then, when electron spin was first discovered I'd imagine people were saying similar things- and only recently have there been reports that electron spin has been harnassed for storage/computation, which means it will finally come into the realm of practicality.
Not everything needs to have an immediate, obvious payoff to be worthwhile.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
First bigger is better. Although we haven't even turned on the LHC (large hadron collider)it isn't hard to imagine that at some point down the road we will reach the limit of what we can easily study here (much like fermilab is now). Do you realize just how long it actually takes to design, build, and get one of these things running? Decades really. And that isn't to mention the time spent just trying to lobby for funding. In effect we need to start now if we don't want to spend 5 years sitting on our asses waiting for construction. And you don't really want 5000 physicist, bored and with nothing to do?
Secondly, the LHC is a ring collider. This means that it has a large circle that it accelerates the particles in. While this has some advantages in that it is easier to run at high energies, there are disadvantages as well. One of the larger problems is polarization of the incoming particles. Basicly spinning particles in a circle randomizes the spin direction which makes it very hard to study. There are some clever tricks to get around this (Check out 'spin flippers' at RHIC) but a linear collider can study this much more precisely.
Another reason for a new collider is that it will collide different particles. Leptons not Hadrons for you physics geeks out there. Again the idea is that it will be harder to achive the same energy but the results will have much less error (roughly speaking). The idea of the NLC (next linear collider) is to be able to study in much more detail some very subtle effects that will be lost in noise at the LHC. And by noise I don't mean noise due to poor construction, but noise due to quantum mechanics.
A last reason to build the NLC in the US and not Geneva is that all of us American's are flocking to Geneva (Yes I'm one of them). We jokingly call CERN the american brain drain. It would be good for american science as a whole I do belive to employ more of us locally.
Arg, but it is late here and if I made any serious physics errors reguarding the LHC or NLC I appologize. Also this is a very hand waving sort of argument, very light on the details, take it as such.
B-sub-s Meson doesn't quite roll off the tongue in the press release.
Since these Mesons flip between matter and anti-matter regularly, I propose calling them...
Freemesons.
Unless the aliens are also traveling backwards in time and made of antimatter. Then we're screwed.
(actually there IS another part of CP called T which is time reversal, and is theorized to always cancle out the CP violation in the math)
That one is not linear, but circular. That is to say are linear accelerators at CERN, but afaik they're far shorter than at Fermilab. The new large hadron collider should come on line next year.
To my knowledge, the main beneficiary of these colliders are string theorists (who deal with the smallest accepted particle constituents). Improving our understanding of string theory will hopefully trigger breakthroughs in other areas like materials science, Relativity/Quantum theory unification and other disciplines (which apply to the areas that you mention).
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I am not a Real Physicist (TM), but I've got a degree in Mechanical Engineering; let's see if I can take a stab at it.
The short answer is that, yes, a sufficiently motivated particle physicist could tell the difference between living in a universe made entirely of matter and one entirely made of antimatter.
Here's a (partial) long answer: I read an article in Scientific American in about 1991 that explored how Alice (of Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass fame) could tell which universe she was in by use of physics. The logic started with checking whether electrons (positrons? you don't know in this case which they are) followed the right hand rule while passing through a magnetic field, which is a good way to tell if you have simply been turned to antimatter and transported to an all-antimatter universe.
The article then digressed into the truly fanciful, exploring how Alice would tell in everything were also switched left-to-right. The author concluded that it would still be possible with the use of a complicated particle accellerator setup and (if I recall correctly) various circular-polarizing filters. Alice would observe how certain sub-atomic particles decay under rare conditions, and the observed behavior would indicate a right-handed matter universe or a left-handed antimatter universe. I think the real point of the article was to show off the author's discovery of odd particle behavior, together with how clever he is =)
Of course, the point is still valid that if we lived in an antimatter universe, we'd simply accept that the left-hand rule is "how things are".
Note to any real physicists: if you remember reading the same article, or can post the exact details from first principles, go right ahead. I'm sure you're a better source than my memory of an article I read my junior year of high school =)
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Understanding the nature of the universe better is what could very well enable the creation of materials strong enough to create a space elevator or alternative forms of energy. Maybe we could learn how to control gravity if we learn more about what causes it... gravitons?
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Like Faraday's famous answer when asked by a politician what electricity was good for: "One day you will tax it."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
One useful thing that you can do with oscillations is have atomic clocks. Perhaps someday they will use this discovery to time to trillionths-of-a-second accuracy.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Say what you will about the 18-mile-long International Linear Collider, but it is shiny; and I like shiny!
/.ers here to grumble and groan about the ILC idea, but I like it. Even if it is a colossal expensive project in a time of world-striding debt, I think it is ultimatly in the nations best interest to build the ILC. First, it'll go a ways towards convincing the rest of the international that it need to be built here in the United States.
I certainly expect many
The US is the world leader in physics research, one of the few fields we still can claim that in. We have 8 of the world's Fusion power research facilities (and 4 more have been decomissioned for a total over time of 12,) more than the other nation in the world combined (if you exclude the ITER which we have rejoined.) But by letting the ILC go to Europe or Japan, we'd be deflating our physics potential. The ILC will be unparralleled in its power; attracting the brightest minds in physics today with real opportunity. If the ILC is in America, we'd be very attractive to those bright minds and with them opportunities to put their minds to work for our country. The LHC (slated to be the largest particle accelerator completed in 2007) would be the only comparable facility.
I think we lost out on a real opportunity by not building the superconducting supercollider. Whether or not you believe it was just being funded to show up the Soviets or not, I can't help but place it's closing as the begining of a distinct lack of focus on science in the US that is only getting worse today. Funding the ILC would at least be a demonstration that America still has interest in its scientific future, and at best would help us get the facility here and mark a hopeful turn in trends.
But showboating our physics prowess and bringing in a few eggheads isn't the only real benefit. The projects like the ILC and other big time projects like the ISS can invigorate the mind of our young children, prompting them to take an early interest in science and physics; the key factor in our nation's future. How many children do you know who want to be an astronaught because they hear about NASA and it's contributions to the ISS? It doesn't matter if it's international, as long as we participate in a meaningful way it gets talked about and can influence our kids.
So I think we should fund the ILC. Lets do it for the children.
Demented But Determined.
The things you mention are indeed not bad, but they're not physics research, they're mostly engineering. Physics research tries to broaden our understanding of the universe/multiverse/nature/god, whatever word you prefer, and sometimes applications do come from that research. It is possible that new forms of energy creation will be discovered in such an accelerator, or that some results give rise to understanding needed for new engineering efforts to build that cold fusion reactor or the warp drive.
The example you mention of the space elevator is already being tested, and the basic physics are very simple, however that does not mean that building one is simple, or at all possible. At the moment, the suitable material seems to be carbon nanotubes. It might be that the LHC will produce some "exotic matter" which might be stronger, or generate stable transactinides (some heavy nuclei are predicted to be stable but to create them some high energy collisions are needed), they might be used some day, just like Americium (smoke detectors) and Plutonium (nukes, nuclear reactors, radio-isotope batteries) are used today in spite of not being found naturally occurring on earth.
This is a bit off topic, but in the old pen and paper RPG called "MegaTraveller" there was a weapon for spaceships called a meson gun. It described the damage as being a form of radiation that can pass through the hull of a spaceship, irradiating the equipment, and thus causing internal explosions.
For the physicists, is this theoretically possible?
Most importantly, it will hopefully lead to the invention of the holodeck. :-)
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Disclaimer: I am a particle physicist.
This is a really cool measurement. But the summary is a little sensationalist. First, the B-sub-s is not the only particle that oscillates between matter and anti-matter. Kaons have been known to do this for decades and regular B mesons have been observed to do this for 20 years or so. In fact we've known for a long time that B-sub-s mesons oscillated. What we didn't know is how fast. We knew "really fast" but not a number.
In fact, the cool thing is that a B-sub-s, statistically, will oscillate many times between particle and anti-particle before it ultimately decays. Nothing else in this class of particles will do that. For instance, most B mesons will not change flavor before decaying.
But, this is a very interesting result.
It seems like you are confusing "physics" with "engineering."
1) space elevators: I think this would be a material science endeavor.
2) blimps: not sure what you want done with blimps. Aerospace engineering.
3) levees: civil engineering.
4) monolithic dome: umm?
5) sustainable housing: not sure what this means either, but it isn't physics.
6) alternative energy: a little too broad for me to classify.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
The scientists could be locked up for using this to prove the Earth is greater than 6000 years old.
Non Creationist speak = disagreeing with Bush = enemy combatant
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
But we digress. What was the topic? Antimatter? :P
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
that before anyone can understand how to make a cable strong enough to build the space elevator you want so badly, they will need to understand the particle behaviors that can only be seen by these big colliders, you fatuous troll.
Ubuntu!
Thanks! I needed that!
FairTax baby!
Actually, yes, that would be good. Otherwise you might discover that the indivisible unit of mass/energy in this universe is the "ficton", with unimaginable consequences.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Naah, I think he wants more money spent on dances, or ballrooms. Must be something to do with all those hardons!
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
Could this be used as a clock for faster computers? I've never heard of anything oscillating at such a fast rate.
And engineering pales into insignificance compared to the amount spent blowing things up. And hey, what if they discover the anti-graviton?
Deleted
I noticed your URL is ohio state. I also noticed at that URL that you are no longer there. However, I am looking at Ohio for physics grad school. Any thoughts on that? I'm also in HEP, been at CDF, looking to go for ATLAS or CMS (of course). I've spoken with Richard Hughes, and worked a little bit with him and Brian Winer on a hardware upgrade at CDF, but I was wondering if you had anything to say about Ohio's physics program?
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
...while it mostly wouldn't make a difference, Feynman (in his Lectures) once went on a tiff about the difference between matter and antimatter. He said that if you were in voice communication with a far-distant planet, there would be no way to determine whether those people were made of matter or anti-matter. The only way in which the two can not be switched is chirality; basically, an electron in a magnetic field revolves one way, and a positron revolves the other way. The problem is that this is a difference between left and right, and those two concepts are down to vocabulary. Feynman said that you might not know the difference until you held out your right hand to shake, and the other guy held out his left... at which point it would be time to run away very fast.
The whole universe just one bit... this is even more amazing than
Wait, the universe must have been created before 8 bits became standard!
Ok, now the joke's even gotten old to me.
Following the links I see that the decay time in seconds (clicking on the column header) is:
1.46Ã-10-12
How is this number to be read as seconds?
George Wyche
gwyche@io.com
That was Zen, this is Tao
haha, I read can you spare a hardon
Personally, as an American, I think most of my fellow Americans have forsaken science, logic, and reason, and modernity, and civilization, in general. I'm glad that physicists are finding a new home in Switzerland. In 20 years, when we're as backwards as every other religious fundamentalist theocracy in the world, and wonder what happened to our dominance, and you guys are over in Switzerland eating your chocolate and discovering new particles, please take a moment every first Tuesday in November to laugh at the ignorant Americans that used to be the world leaders in science. But don't piss us off too much, or Mullah Robertson will draw up a fatwah against you.
This post may sound sarcastic, but I'm dead serious.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You have never been to D.C. before, have you.
-- Douglas Adams, another man who thought that the universe could be a mistake.
Just picture one of those outdoor contruction yard toilet box things. Attach a grav-manipulator to it, wait until someone gets in and switch on. Just picture the look on his face when he steps out and finds himself floating in outer space. Now that would be hilarious.
Well, realistically, anyone who complains about the cost of these things is a fool of the highest calibre. Science represents a tiny, tiny fraction of the any nation's budget. An absolutely, amazingly small amount. Most money gets spent on war and beauracrats. Things like the ILC, the space program, ITER, welfare programs, protecting the environment, not letting psychopaths out of jail just to make space, snipers that shoot lobbyists and non-nude PETA activists on sight, are so inexpensive by contrast that to NOT to do them would be sheer insanity.
Anyway, if you don't like the science that particle accelerators do, demonstrate that belief by refusing to get any MRI or PET scans, gamma knife surgery when you get cancer, or any of the dozens of other medical technologies that either derive from science learned in particle accelerators, or use particle accelerators directly. Of course, the very instant you need one of those things, you'll suddenly be a profound believer in the value of that science (or a hypocrite -- also a valid option).
I did my undergraduate work at Ohio State. In my opinion it is a very good physics school. They just built a brand new physics building. The goal of this was to be able to facilitate more and better physics research. The grad students I know there seem to have benifited well from this also. If you're not planning on going to as school like MIT or Cal-Tech, but are looking at a large public school, I highly recomend OSU for physics. OSU has a big ATLAS group who are working on the pixel detector. If you want to talk to some of the professors there I would recomend K Gan or R. Kass. They both are very friendly and should respond to your e-mails about the graduate program there. In addition the computing program at the OSU physics department is top notch (good for us HEP ppl). The only downside is that OSU is a huge school with lots of politics. The physics department can shield you from lots of this though. If you have any questions you can drop me an email. I'm a grad student at Iowa State now so it is @iastate.edu with the same u/n as on ./
So LHC is basically this big search engine. It searches lots of new particles and new physics. But unfortunately it's a bit dirty - when the hadrons collide they produce a whole mess of crap, so sometimes it's a little hard to see the particle for the trees. So what you do is make a new linear collider (ILC) with leptons (read - electrons) which give a much cleaner collision. Also you can tune the new collider to the correct energies found by LHC and Tevatron, refining your results. On a personal note, I would hate to see ILC built in the US. It's a bad idea. They were going to build SSC (superconducting super collider) there and decided to can it after it ran over budget. Like someone mentioned already these things take decades to build. I can't imagine what that did to people careers. It's the equivalent of sending a probe to Mars and the thing fails - just devastating. It's too political in the US. One change of administration and the thing could get scrapped. With the likes of CERN in Europe, with many host nations contributing, that's a lot less likely.
"antimatter states at 3 trillion times a second."
But that's only American trillions (10EXP12) and not the real trillion (10EXP18)
10EXP Am RestOfTheWolrd
6 million million
9 billion thousand million (or milliard)
12 trillion billion
15 quadrillion thousand billion (or billiard)
18 quintillion trillion
For really big numbers, see:
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~manfear/numbers_names.php
(Disclaimer: also a particle physicist)
...) that tend to be "predicted" by (super)string theory.
:)
Actually, it's pretty unclear whether string theory will substantially benefit from LHC physics. Strings are certainly not "accepted particle constituents" and the energies at which they are most likely to exist (if indeed they do exist at all) are roughly 10^16 times higher than the LHC or ILC will directly probe.
The aspects of particle physics which will mainly benefit from the LHC and ILC are (other than experiment, of course) the understanding of electroweak symmetry breaking, strong interactions and the as-yet unknown TeV-scale physics. None of these need to use string theory in their calculations, and only a few classes of stringy model can be ruled out using the data that will be produced. Only the last one is even starting to probe the sorts of concepts (extra dimensions, supersymmetry,
That said, it's still very cool, even without the magic "s" word
I have one question.... :)
there is any way to distiguish the messons in their matter and anti-matter phase?..
may be a magnetic field?
because i was thinking.... what happend if i super cool a group of mesons and put them in a singnal with 3x10^12 (3 trillion)Hz to move them away if they are of the same type, and collide em if they are of the opposite.... you wouldnt get some kind of weird self consuming reactor? (that is, discrimininating matter and collide the ones of the opposite type)....or may be im just allucinating
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Shhhhhh, those doest not desire to anger the overlords!
heretical lips shall sinketh the divine barges of the gods!
--
silly, they won't use titles like 'mullah', it will be something bigger like 'lord emperor' or 'grand defender of the faith' or 'fuehrer'
> And you don't really want 5000 physicist, bored and with nothing to do?
There's so much interesting physics at other scales, they would be very bad physicists if they got bored. The arrogance of High Energy Physicists to claim that they are the one true only real interesting field of physics, and that all the mega funds should be poured into their Very Large Machines is hurting the rest of the discipline.
HEP hasn't been about blue sky knowledge for knowledge's sake for quite a while, but about little potentates gaining power, influence and wealth.
In fact, for every possible expremimental result of the Big Dick Collider there will be a theory that fits it, so High Energy Physics is actually the more boring field these days. Of course the most boring is string theory, which isn't even physics.
Interesting that "value-free" science manages to produce sexy press release-able results right about congress fund decision making time.
Go on, mod me flame bait. doesnt' change the fact that i'm right.
Maybe we could get them to change a lightbulb?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
This post made my evening just a little bit better. :) Thank you!
Legalize it.
So called 'red states' used to support education with their money. Take Florida for example. They used to not charge for tuition in the junior, or 'community' college system; and only nominal tuition and fees at the universities. The only bar was admission. You had to have demonstrated ability in entrance exams. High school grades were not so much a factor as universities knew that many high schools handed out social grades, with the children of wealthy and/or influential pupils given inflated grades at the expense of poor and especially ethnicaly stigmatized students like black, catholic, or other minority Americans. This was a farsighted long term strategy that brought prosperity to the south on a demographically wide scale. Regrettably, the Viet-Nam war brought fundamental changes to this policy as Republican policy makers discovered that most 'anti-war' demonstrators came from the ranks of the poor whose presence on campuses was make possible by inexpensive tuitions and fees in combination with cheap government 'national defence student loans (NDSL program) and outright grants from those same federal agencies. Under the Nixon regime, moves were started to reverse the affordability of college for poor students. These were the emasculation of the NDSL programs in favor of 'bank loans at competitive rates'; and the discontinuance of money grants to needy students. Other changes took place at state level in states controlled by republicans at any time. These changes generally took the form of tuition impositions and subsequent raises 'to make the university systems pay for themselves', and then 'so they would show a profit'. The result is our elitist educational establishment that we have today; and the academic stagnation that we have created for ourselves as a result. Less obvious changes come from the dynamics of the shrinking of our higher education opportunities as a percentage of the total elegible student populations through the years. Declining or stagnant enrollmants mean a shrinking teacher force. Then comes the choice to increasingly conservative college trustees and administrators: which instructors stay; which ones do we hire; and which ones we dismiss. In most cases, the most conservative/republican instructors were the ones that stayed and the ones that were hired. Outspoken or otherwise 'liberal' teachers found that changes in the tenure systems meant that they no longer retained as a practicla matter the freedom of speech that they once had. Modern 'colleges' in the United States are not the schools they once were, and do not deserve these advanced scientific programs as forces within those schools will use the possession of the same to advance fundamentalist religious agendaa espoused by conservative administrations at the expense of scientific advancement.