Slashdot Mirror
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.
"The announcement is good press for Fermilab, which is pushing Congress to build a new 18-mile-long International Linear Collider.""
What's the matter with the one in Geneva?
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!
I wish that they'd work on something that didn't involve building huge colliders! I'm sorry, but I've had enough of reading about every larger colliders needed to prove the existance of some subatomic particle. Let me know if you figure out anything useful to do with those particles in the present. I'm not interested in particles our events that may have happened in a few milliseconds after the big bang. There are lots of physics things that I'd like money to be spent on: space elvators, blimps, levies (nah no one is interested in keeping the waves out), http://www.monolithicdome.com/ , sustainable housing, and "alt" energy. I guess that I'm not happy with this research because they just keep wanting bigger colliders to prove/disprove the existance of particles. Um, I might care if we could build or use those particles, but if the only way that we could even notice one is building these things what's the point?
Ahh, yes I forgot this is blue sky physics research.
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)
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
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.
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?
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.
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!
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
...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
You have never been to D.C. before, have you.
-- Douglas Adams, another man who thought that the universe could be a mistake.
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).
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
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.
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.