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."

Comments

Good thing this wasn't discovered in 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

or Republicans would have resorted to calling these "Kerry particles"....

Only a bit

[0racle]

a bit more matter than antimatter survived, providing the universe with the planets, stars and galaxies visible today

Did they just call the visible universe only a bit?

Re:Only a bit

[Snarfangel]

Did they just call the visible universe only a bit?

Compared to the multiverse, it's just a trifle.

Re:Only a bit

[slidersv]

Actually "our" universe is much smaller: http://universe.nasa.gov/press/images/cosmos_perce nt_comp.jpg. Us "lighties" are really a minority since dark matter (recently proven to exist) and dark energy dominate.

P.S.: In Hawking radiation the effect of more matter than antimatter is also observed.

Re:Only a bit

[Stranger4U]

If I remember correctly from my astrophysics days, for every 8 billion anti-matter particles in the early universe, there were 8 billion and one matter particles. I would say an excess of 1 per 8 billion is "just a bit."

GiggityGiggityGiggityGiggityGiggity

[Stanistani]

I say this oscillation should be called the "Quagmire Effect."

I oscillate

[Anonymous Coward]

between (-1, Troll) and (5, Funny)

Re:So logically this means that...

[Em Adespoton]

Scary? I don't think it would really matter....

Antimatter Affecting Main Page

[Chagatai]

I think these mesons have caused some problems on the Slashdot main page. When looking at the article, I saw this:

Science: Mesons Flip Between Matter and Antimatter 7 of 6 comments

Someone must have snuck in an antimatter posting or something.

Re:Enough with the big colliders already!

[caerwyn]

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.

Re:Brother, can you spare a hadron?

[trip11]

Working as a physicist on the 'one in Geneva', there are a few answers to your question.

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.

New terminology

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Destined to become politicians

[The Master Control P]

Silly AC, everyone knows that morons are the binding particles exchanged by the neutron, vice-neutrons, and assistant-vice-neutrons in the core of an Administratium atom.

Re:Enough with the big colliders already!

[mph]

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 think you misspelled "engineering".

Re:Enough with the big colliders already!

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

...levies...

You want money spent on working out how to tax people more?

Oh! Shiny!

[Dr. Eggman]

Say what you will about the 18-mile-long International Linear Collider, but it is shiny; and I like shiny!



I certainly expect many /.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.

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.

Re:Oh! Shiny!

[kaffiene]

Science shouldn't be an intra-nation dick measuring competition, it should be about advancing knowledge. I personally don't care where these things get built so long as they get built.

Re:Oh! Shiny!

[wass]

I'm a doctoral student in physics (experimental condensed matter), and I can tell you that the US is already showing signs of declining in its lead in the sciences. While we are still very strong, many other regions (eg China and Europe) are also revealing trends of outpacing us.

At the 2006 March Meeting of the American Physical Society, some of us physicists (students and professors) went to Washington DC to lobby our Congressmen (see Congressional Visits ) about looming shortfalls of hard sciences in the USA and to encourage them to vote on upcoming bills to increase science funding.

There is alot of eye-opening data showing how Europe and Asia are significantly outpacing the US in terms of funding basic science education, in terms of the number of undergraduate and graduate degrees in the basic sciences, etc. Graphs plotting hard sciences degrees offered per year show the US lagging quite significantly (where we used to be leading 5+ years ago). Such trends are fairly worrisome because the hard sciences are tightly coupled to engineering and industry. Industries tend to attract to places with higher concentrations of scientists, so the US losing scientists will manifest itself in loss of industries down the line.

These are the kind of things that Senators and Representatives care about. To complicate matters there is a lag between industry and science, meaning that changes in science funding and numbers of scientists now won't be manifest significantly in industry until a decade or longer out. I met with two of my Congressmen and one of my Senators (really with their staffers), who luckily were familiar with this and assured us their bosses would be voting for the upcoming legislation to increase funding.

I come from a blue state, where the Congressmen are usually liberal with such education and funding programs. The red stater politicans were more hostile to funding sciences without seeing immediate industrial rewards. Such short-term thinking in those cases is what is leading to the decline of US scientific leadership.

On a different note, I've also seen major shifts in the attraction of foreign students to the US over the past few years. The Bush administration his been cracking down on student visas, which is also hurting our lead. In my department, within the past 3-4 years, each year a handful of good students accepted to the program are denied visas to enter the US (usually from China). Well, these guys aren't going to put their career on hold, and they'll go elsewhere. Many more foreign students are going to Canada and Europe, for instance, and the great brain drain that the US was known for the past few decades is beginning to show signs of reversing.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw in my two cents becuase I specifically lobbied my Congressmen about this very issue only six months ago.

Re:Oh! Shiny!

[evilviper]

I personally don't care where these things get built so long as they get built.

It's not some trivial "bragging rights" move. Brain drain is REAL, and very important for the economies of nations.

WWII pushing so many scientists to move out of Europe, is one of the main reasons the US became the top superpower in the world.

Re:Oh! Shiny!

[Fastolfe]

Let's assume for a moment that you live in a country that doesn't "compete" in this respect. Some scientists have a new idea, and they propose their idea to your government. You decide that it isn't worth the money and pass on it. They go to another government, and propose it to them. They decide to do it. Your scientists move. Your country now has fewer smart people than it did before.

Repeated enough times, this trickles down into education and your country's economy. You are now less capable than your neighbors. Your country's quality of life goes down. It is in your best interests to compete in this respect if you want to retain your smart people.

If we instead pretend that all of the countries of the world have signed treaties preventing their people from moving to other countries, this problem goes away. But without a competitive drive, spending on pure research is going to be based on the numbers, and based conservatively. Money spent on research will drop sharply and our rate of scientific advance will slow to a crawl.

You say that you "don't care where these things get built so long as they get built," but without this "dick measuring competition", they never would.

Re:I thought that....

[maxwell demon]

Isn't matter and energy the same thing?

No. Matter is, well, matter (i.e. electrons, protons, etc.). Energy is a property of matter/fields.

E=m*c^2?

The m here is "mass", not "matter". Again, mass is a property of matter.
BTW, this equation holds only for matter at rest; generally it's E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2.

So shouldn't energy have turned back into matter at some point?

Normally matter and antimatter are produced in equal amounts. Note that antimatter has positive energy (and positive mass) as well.

Cool discovery, but not unexpected

[vondo]

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.

Re:Interesting

[Elemenope]

Not stable enough. Most mesons have a half-life on the order of milliseconds or less. Besides, there is a theoretical upper limit for clock speed where one clock cycle is shorter than the time it takes for the signal to cross the chip (which, ostensibly, is the amount of time it takes for light to cross about a centimeter), and a more practical limitation that involves the functional switching speed of whatever it is you are building your logic gates out of. The matter/anti-matter occilation observed has a period that seriously pushes those limits.

Money

[Mark_MF-WN]

You are aware, are you not, that there would be enough money for all of those things ten times over if the cost of ONE war could be saved?

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).

3 trillion on 3 billion ?

[Mr Europe]

"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