Tiny Particle With No Charge Discovered

ZonkerWilliam writes to mention PhysOrg is reporting that a tiny particle with no charge, called an 'axion' has been discovered. From the article: "The finding caps nearly three decades of research both by Piyare Jain, Ph.D., UB professor emeritus in the Department of Physics and lead investigator on the research, who works independently -- an anomaly in the field -- and by large groups of well-funded physicists who have, for three decades, unsuccessfully sought the recreation and detection of axions in the laboratory, using high-energy particle accelerators."

Comments

Three decades?

[Anonymous Coward]

Three decades? Dear god, I don't think there is any charge left in that sex life ;-)

Re:Three decades?

[__aaclcg7560]

Don't forget all the baby particles. :p

What did the bartender say to the axion?

[Anonymous Coward]

"No charge."

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[morgan_greywolf]

Now where's that big friggin' hook....

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Now where's that big friggin' hook....

In the box with or without the cat.

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[i_should_be_working]

Ugh. Now where's that big friggin' gong...

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[joe_bruin]

"No charge."

Don't be confused. This particle has no charge, it's free as in beer.

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[proxy318]

An atom walks into a police station and says "One of my electrons has been stolen!"
The police say "Are you sure?"
And the atom replies...

"Yes! I'm positive!"

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[Anonymous Coward]

With AND without the cat.

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[Samah]

First we had the iPod, then the Mini, then the Nano...
"The new iAxion is so small it will fit in your... well pretty much anything, holds no songs and doesn't require charging!"

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[bcat24]

I think that's been done already.

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[Surt]

With the cat. Dead or Alive, the cat is still there.

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[O.W.M]

With the cat. Dead AND Alive.

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[StuckInSyrup]

The cat is dead. It is in the box since 1935. No cat can live this long. Deal with it.

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[Chris Mattern]

> Dead or Alive, the cat is still there.

What's volleyball got to do with it?

Chris Mattern

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[OfficialReverendStev]

But how do you know? It seems to me that the cat exists simultaneously in that box and any other area which you cannot directly observe. Until you open the box, of course.

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[silentounce]

But if it is dead, is it still really a cat?

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean with AND without the cat?

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[Da_Weasel]

Yes, it is a dead cat.

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[silentounce]

So a dead cat and a live cat are the same thing? That sounds like a business opportunity. I've got it...

PetsMort.

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[beckerist]

Speaking of "no charge" I'm fairly sure I read that the particle discovered was actually a chain of carbons trailed by a hydrogen (a metaphoric "caboose"). That would make the particle NEGATIVE in nature! I might be wrong about this, as what I'm reading is called an anion and you guys are all talking axion's (and probably AM wrong about this, I've been out of particle physics now for a solid 6 years and my brain has moved on to less complex tasks...) Anyway, interesting read if you haven't already:

http://dsc.discovery.com/

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[beckerist]

Eh different thing altogether, it helps if I read TFA! The anion's were the first negatively charged objects found in interstellar space via radio waves. These axion's are very tiny, no charge and don't seem to be very stable (let alone having to be created in a lab vs. space!)

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[Surt]

Or possibly a dead parrot.

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[Hyperspite]

But you still don't know until you open the box ;-)

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd hit some of that pussy.

Re:What did the bartender say to the axion?

[snowleopard10101]

What happens when an electron has sex with a proton?

Won't hold a charge...

[__aaclcg7560]

Even in the field of particle physics, there had to be a slacker somewhere.

Re:Won't hold a charge...

[Del Vach]

What do you expect? The scientists are coddling them with all the emphasis on recreation!

Re:Won't hold a charge...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be so negative!

Re:Won't hold a charge...

[EinZweiDrei]

Theoretical physics is no stranger to this kind of irresponsible behavior. Fortunately, it can be resolved: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/52324

Re:Won't hold a charge...

[Gilmoure]

Doood!

and it means...

[MagnusE]

axion () means worthy in greek. ;)

Re:and it means...

[alexhard]

axion () means worthy in greek. ;) I actually read 'geek' first and sat here wondering 'when did we get our own language?' for a couple of seconds..

Re:and it means...

[kryten_nl]

Actually it's named after a detergent according to the Axion - Wikipedia page.

The name was introduced by Frank Wilczek, co-writer of first paper to predict the axion, after a brand of detergent- because the problem with QCD had been "cleaned up".

Re:and it means...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"I actually read 'geek' first and sat here wondering 'when did we get our own language?"

Linux and BSG. Frak and fsck are interchangable.

Re:and it means...

[MagnusE]

oh yes, the detergent that took its name after the greek word axion meaning worthy: "well done, axion, bravo!!..." and it shares almost the same pronunciation with "action"... Short, catchy names, love them!...

Re:and it means...

[psykocrime]

"I actually read 'geek' first and sat here wondering 'when did we get our own language?"

About the time regular expressions were invented...

Re:and it means...

[zolaar]

j00 mU57 b3 n00 h3R3...

They find an axion??

[brxndxn]

Hire them to find Bin Laden!!

Re:They find an axion??

[Cyberax]

Well, physicists can do this, but this would involve smashing Earth to pieces and looking at its debris.

BTW, and they would need about $10000000000000000000 funding for LEC (Large Earth Collider).

Re:They find an axion??

[fimbulvetr]

Well, physicists can do this, but this would involve smashing Earth to pieces and looking at its debris.

BTW, and they would need about $10000000000000000000 funding for LEC (Large Earth Collider).

About the same requirements as the US military then, eh?

Re:They find an axion??

[a strange guy]

Or a giant check for all of earths money!

Re:They find an axion??

[Metteyya]

About the same requirements as the US military then, eh?

That'd be about two zeros more, AND Large Earth Collider does guarantee the effect.

Re:They find an axion??

[Anonymous Coward]

And it would still be cheaper and faster than what we are doing now; which waiting for the next election.

Re:They find an axion??

[I Like Pudding]

It's not the Large Earth Collider that kills people, it's the large Earth collision

Re:They find an axion??

[Anonymous Coward]

"BTW, and they would need about $10000000000000000000 funding for LEC (Large Earth Collider)."

What is that, like, 50 rupees?

Re:They find an axion??

[Zonnald]

Large Earth collisions don't kill people. People kill people.

Re:They find an axion??

[schon]

the US military then, eh?

That'd be about two zeros more Hey, that's a horrible thing to say about the president and secretary of defense!

Re:They find an axion??

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL.
Brilliant!

Re:They find an axion??

[Jesus_666]

I don't think they'll vote bin Laden out of office...

Re:They find an axion??

[somersault]

Actually, I think yuo'll find that while Large Earth collisions don't kill people, it's that certain sound they make that does it.

What defines matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this anti-matter? Can we go warp speed yet?

Re:What defines matter?

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

This is not anti-matter. Anti-matter is like normal matter with the batteries reversed.

Detected...

[PresidentEnder]

how, exactly? I understand that the usual electronic detector won't work, so they use an electronic detector of some sort (this from the article), but how does that, um, happen? Anyone with more knowledge care to elaborate?

Re:Detected...

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

FTFA-

"They didn't know how to handle the detector for short-lived particles," Jain said. "I knew that for this very short-lived particle -- 10-13 seconds -- the detector must be placed very near the interaction point where the collision between the projectile beam and the target takes place so that the produced particle doesn't run away too far; if it does, it will decay quickly and it will be completely missed. That is what happened in most of the unsuccessful experiments." Instead, Jain used a visual detector, made of three-dimensional photographic emulsions, which act as both target and detector and that therefore can detect very short-lived particles, such as the axion. However, use of such a detector is so specialized that to be successful, it requires intensive training and experience. In the 1950s, Jain was trained to use this type of detector by its developer, the Nobel laureate, British physicist Cecil F. Powell. Jain has used it throughout his career to successfully detect other exotic

Re:Detected...

[drrck]

Well in TFA they described a three dimensional photographic emulsion, used not only as a target but as a detector as well.

Think of it like those high speed film clips of a bullet going through a block of ballistics gel. The particle hits the emulsion and leaves a detectable wake.

Re:Detected...

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Sooner or later it hits something or decays, at which point you get charged particles which you can study by seeing how much a magnet bends them. And even a neutral particle can have plenty of effect: your eyes are electronic detectors for neutral photons, after all.

Re:Detected...

[MyNymWasTaken]

I know this is /., but did even you think about RTFA before asking such an obvious question? The answer is the first line in the article.

Using a visual target/detector (emulsion), Piyare Jain has revealed the path of the axion, a tiny particle with no charge, a very low mass and a lifetime much shorter than a nanosecond.

Re:Detected...

[jfengel]

I assume that's 10^-13 seconds. Ten seconds to thirteen seconds would be a very long time as these things go.

Re:Detected...

[Aglassis]

Think of it like those high speed film clips of a bullet going through a block of ballistics gel. The particle hits the emulsion and leaves a detectable wake.

This is a bad description. The wake of a bullet going through ballistics gel is due to the electromagnetic force. The axion, in contrast does not experience that force. Like the neutron, it must be discovered indirectly (though it is more difficult to discover than a neutron). A useful part of the article:

After they are produced, axions rapidly decay into two electron pairs, the electron and the positron, he explained.

So basically, they discovered it by observing the electrically interacting positron and electron pair produced very close to the production with a specialized type of photographic film.

Re:Detected...

[mcmonkey]

The theory behind the detector is actually fairly straightforward. The reaction occurs in a magnetic field. You get one sort of response from positively charged particles. You get the opposite response from negatively charged particles.

When you get no response, that's your particle with no charge.

Re:Detected...

[Broken scope]

Wait... the electromagnetic force between atoms?

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

The theory behind the detector is actually fairly straightforward. The reaction occurs in a magnetic field. You get one sort of response from positively charged particles. You get the opposite response from negatively charged particles.
 
When you get no response, that's your particle with no charge. Interesting. How do you observe neutral particles if they don't interact? This is like claiming a neutrino has no charge because you didn't see it deflect in a magnetic field. When questioned later you admit that you didn't see anything. Of course, the follow up question would be "How do you know that a neutrino passed through your detector then?"

A neutron was an easy neutral particle to detect because it is a dipole (being composed of charged quarks). The same is not true for non-dipolar axions.

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

how, exactly? I understand that the usual electronic detector won't work, so they use an electronic detector of some sort (this from the article), but how does that, um, happen? Anyone with more knowledge care to elaborate?

It's actually quite easy.

You do use an electronic detector, and find all of the positive and negative particles.

Whatever is left is an axion.

Re:Detected...

[Aglassis]

Wait... the electromagnetic force between atoms? Absolutely. There are four forces, but only two that people interact with on a day to day basis: the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force. Every time that I cut myself breaking a glass bottle, burn myself on a lightbulb, feel the warmth from sunlight, or get shot by a bullet I am interacting with the electromagnetic force (though the gravitational force might alter the trajectories of the glass bottle and the bullet).

Re:Detected...

[mOdQuArK!]

Ah, I guess you believe that when you place your hand on the surface of your desk, the atomic nuclei of the molecules in your hand are actually touching the atomic nuclei of the molecules that the desk is made out of.

I guess it doesn't have anything to do with the charged particles that those atoms are made out of, and that they wouldn't use the electromagnetic force to interact with each other.

There surely is stupidity here, but I'd look more to your own ignorance than with the grandparent's commentary.

Re:Detected...

[Aglassis]

"The wake of a bullet going through ballistics gel is due to the electromagnetic force."
 
And the Universe is powered by stupidity. The wake of a bullet going through ballistics gel is caused by the shockwave of the bullet's impact with the surface of the gel; a bullet is not a charged particle, nor magnetic, and it's way to big to create the ionization effects that traditional particle detectors use. I don't know how it is possible that, not only could say that a bullet causes a wake due to electromagnetic force, but that a mod actually believed that bullshit. Thank you for your comment. I am happy you are interested in physics. There are 4 forces: electromagnetism, gravity, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Please feel free to tell me which forces you believe allow the shockwave of a bullet to develop. Be as technical as you wish (I have extensive experience in advanced physics). I will give you a hint though: particles that have a net neutral charge can still interact electromagnetically whenever the distances between the interacting charges isn't assumed to be infinite (think dipoles).

I hope this is a good learning experience for you and I hope that you don't recklessly call other posters stupid next time.

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of posting anonymously is that I can bash stupid americans as much as I want without getting downmodded.

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot. The bullet is solid and interacts with the gel because of the electromagnetic force holding the atoms together and the shockwave it causes is through the electomagnetic force.

Re:Detected...

[GeffDE]

So yes, there are 4 fundamental forces and all other forces are developed from these. However, what is the force applied to a mass suspended on a spring with spring constant K and displaced X? Well, it's -KX. Sure, the electromagnetic forces between all the atoms in the spring are what cause the force and you can even use Young's modulus and/or chemical bond theory to find what the "atomic spring" constant is...but that's senseless and pedantic. Similarly, if you want me to describe why that shockwave develops, it is because of momentum. The bullet imparts some of its momentum and energy to the gel, and causes the viscosity of the gel is what causes the wave to propagate, just like when we talk about sound waves in air, or ocean waves. I sure as hell hope you don't resort to electromagnetism to describe those. What I was saying is that using the bullet analogy is stupid because, while technically correct, its completely vacuous. And in fact, particles that have a net neutral charge only interact electromagnetically in distance scales where the separate regions of positive and negative charge are distinct (like atomic nuclei). Two neutral atoms don't interact (electromagnetically, or at all) until their two regions of negative space get close enough together that they begin to have an effect on each other. But you know, that's roughly 8 order of magnitude off of the scale of a bullet, and, again, talking about a microscopic (and quantum!) system in terms of a macroscopic problem is, as I said before, stupid.

Re:Detected...

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Ahh the insightful clueless ;-) What do you think is the main force that causes the atoms in the bullet to repel the atoms in the gel?

I'll give you a hint: If they got really close, it would be the strong nuclear force repelling the nucleus of the two atoms. But, they never get that close. Another hint: it isn't the weak nuclear force. Yet another hint: it isn't gravity. Now, how many fundamental forces are there?

Re:Detected...

[phyruxus]

Saying that the wake is due to electromagnetic force is like saying that car-crash whiplash is due to seatbelts or bumpers.

The wake is due to the transfer of kinetic energy from the bullet (okay, the bullet as measured from the frame of the gel) to the gel (in it's frame). Electromagnetics is just the medium of this transfer.

A bullet sitting motionless in gel creates no wake... but the electromagnetic force is still there.

Clearly, the wake is not "due" to the electromagnetic force, it is a "product" of said force (and the kinetic energy of the speeding bullet).

I applaud your mischievous wordplay, and I await the potential wrath of your advanced physics knowledge.

Re:Detected...

[Broken scope]

Okay just checking. I was like wait a sec.... were talking on the quantum level here not the macro level.

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, could someone describe to a lay person how electromagnetism causes (e.g., sound) waves to propagate in air?

*ducks*

I really am serious: Isn't it just one atom colliding with another and transferring its momentum? There is no electromagnetic relationship between the atoms, or even if there is a brief one, wouldn't the momentum be transferred without it?

Thanks.

Re:Detected...

[Aglassis]

Wow, you must be fun at parties calling everyone stupid for disagreeing with you. My mention of the electromagnetic force is critical in this discussion because there is no evidence that the axion is composed of charged particles that when superimposed produce a zero net charge. If it had then those particles it could be detected electromagnetically (i.e. even the neutral neutron will bounce off of certain particles due to electromagnetic interactions--though I should note that strong nuclear interactions are also significant for a neutron). And without the electromagnetic force there will not be a wake through a ballistics jell which is the original issue that I pointed out.

I don't really care that it bothers you that I have simplified this to the simplest case (but as Einstein would suggest "no simpler"). Sure you can describe the perturbation of a ballistics jell with forces that are composed of special cases of the electromagnetic force but the fundamental point is that without the ability to interact electromagnetically at the lowest level all of those forces result to zero.

If an axion has a zero fundamental charge you can talk about impulses all night long but they still do not mean a damn thing. When you discuss subatomic particles you cannot use the special cases of the forces that we have come to love (because they make our lives simple). Spring constants have no meaning. Pressure has no meaning. Even things like angular momentum take on bizzare new forms that cannot use the classical theories.

Re:Detected...

[cheebie]

The force that causes "one atom to collide with another" is electromagnetism. When the electron clouds of two atoms get too close, the like charges of the electrons repel each other. This only happens when the atoms get really close, because more than a few (whatever unit it is. Picometers?) away, the entire atom is essentially electromagnetically neutral. Assuming it's not an ion. But if you get close enough, the field of the electrons is stronger than the field of the protons. So, when two atoms bump into each other, the electromagnetic forces push them apart again.

Re:Detected...

[JourneyExpertApe]

He forgot to mention how slowly axions travel.

Re:Detected...

[xPsi]

IAAP. As another posted stated: Those forces described are ultimately related to the electrons in the materials of the bullet and gel interacting, via electromagnetic forces, in very, very complex ways. Solving real macroscopic dynamics problems from that point of view isn't generally practical. Obviously, it is easier (and tractable) to think in terms of "effective forces" ("Gel on Bullet", "A on B", etc.) or kinematically (momentum transfers, etc.), as you stated.

The wake is, strictly speaking, large scale lattice vibrations due to molecular bond stretching. But PHYSICALLY, it is basically purely electromagnetic (and probably something even more fundamental at some deep level). One might argue there is some Pauli-Exculsion going on, but that's not strictly a force of nature, although it can act like one.

Re:Detected...

[dgatwood]

No, it's subtraction. It lasts for -3 seconds.

:-)

Re:Detected...

[FST777]

No charge, no wonder.

Re:Detected...

[Aglassis]

I wasn't trying to be mischievous. Really!

The point that I was trying to make is that a zero charge particle doesn't interact electromagnetically so we can't use conceptual examples that involve the electromagnetic force regardless of how trivial to describe it. There do exist many particles that do interact electromagnetically and you could say they travel through a medium (such as a bubble chamber) like a bullet through a ballistics jel. Heck, I've even seen the extreme examples of this where I was able to observe Cherenkov radiation from a nuclear reactor's fuel elements (where a charged particle moves faster than the speed of light in that medium producing a really pretty blue light).

But the axion itself does not interact electromagnetically so by itself it does not produce a wake. The electron and positron produced will certainly produce wakes, but that point needs to be pointed out explicitly. The axion is not detected directly from electromagnetic interactions, only its decay products are (which are released symmetrically around the axis of the axion).

Re:Detected...

[drooling-dog]

And the Universe is powered by stupidity... I don't know how it is possible that, not only could say that a bullet causes a wake due to electromagnetic force, but that a mod actually believed that bullshit.

Every day I find a little gem on Slashdot, and today this was it.

Re:Detected...

[GeffDE]

I didn't call anyone stupid; I called the analogy stupid. And I maintain that it is stupid because a bullet in a ballistics gel is a classical system. I don't know all these advanced physics topics with great levels of intricacy like you do; but I do know that quantum mechanics is based upon statistics and probabilities. When you have a sample that is so large that the statistics of that system can truly be defined as a normal, Boltzmann distribution, you have a classical system. That's why, even though the exact position of an electron in a copper wire may not be known, a current will still flow through that wire if differing voltages are applied at either end. That is one reason why your analogy was not good. I made a grievous error in my initial post by being technically incorrect; however, the message of what I was saying still stands, and it is what I clarified in my initial response.

Your analogy was stupid because it compared apples to oranges. You first make an analogy of a subatomic system to a classical system, and then you yell at me for equating the two. I did the opposite! I said it was stupid to talk about a microscopic system when talking a macroscopic system. I have no quibble with any of the facts you state*. They're all correct. But all your advanced physics knowledge and all these facts are both clouding the issue and your argument. The axions cannot use a regular electromagnetic detector because, like neutrinos (I think; as I have said before, I'm not intimately acquainted with subatomic physics), they interact very weakly with real matter (i.e. they have very little to no electromagnetic interaction, due to being not just net neutral, but fundamentally neutral). The detector that had to be used did indeed detect electromagnetic signatures (photons, I would surmise) because this axion, a fundamentally neutral particle decayed into two not neutral things and these interacted with matter, but the difference between it and the regular detectors is that the interaction site where the axions were created could exist inside the detector. Now, the electromagnetic stuff that this detector is detecting is not like the electromagnetic stuff that ballistics gel is detecting. This is detecting a photon, a packet of electromagnetic energy, an electromagnetic wave; ballistics gel is detecting a wave caused because different pieces of matter are colliding thanks to the electromagnetic force.

The two are different. Quite different. And that is another reason I didn't like your analogy. You obviously know a lot of physics. However, I am surprised that you didn't pick up the difference between an electromagnetic wave and/or photon and a wave of matter that the electromagnetic force mediates.

Now, just one last thing. What I was saying in my previous post was not that you were making things simpler, it was that you were making them more complex. As you said, the special cases (like spring constants) are made to make life simple because they are simpler than having to integrate the electromagnetic field equations over all the particles in the ballistic gel! I was complaining that you were making things way more complicated than they needed to be. That was my last quibble with your analogy.


That all said, I would be glad to hear your response, and again, sorry to have implied that you were stupid. I was complaining about the analogy.

Re:Detected...

[phyruxus]

Excellent...

I wrote a brilliantly pithy reply and capped it off with self deprecating humor... and closed the wrong window. :) hahahaha

I'm not disagreeing with your explanation, I'm just being a rhetoric whore because your use of "due" gives the sense of electromagnetism being a sufficient cause for the gel wake, instead of just a necessary one.

Curses, curses! ;) (this must be my karma for taking a smug tone with a scientist over a linguistic piffle.)

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey! Someone post more funny physics jokes. This pissing contest is getting a little dry.

Re:Detected...

[Aglassis]

I didn't make an analogy. I only disputed the analogy given by another poster. I think you might have confused my initial response with the views of the parent of which I was responding. I like the ballistics jel analogy when it applies (for example with charged particles). But I certainly don't recall making any analogy during this discussion (other than the side comment that a neutron will 'bounce'--though I qualified it).

However, I am surprised that you didn't pick up the difference between an electromagnetic wave and/or photon and a wave of matter that the electromagnetic force mediates. I had no intention to discuss the dynamics of the ballistics jel analogy (that I didn't make) when my point was that no dynamics could exist due to the absence of a charge on an axion.

I understand that you (and other posters) think that I've been sort of a semantics-nazi during this discussion, but this was not my intention. I just don't want conceptually false analogies to be used that then allow people to make false statements about the characteristics of an axion in the future. In my opinion, understanding how a subatomic particle is detected is critical to understanding what it is. I certainly don't expect everyone here to be able to give a complete scientific description of the properties of an axion, I just expect them not to give misleading statements. If I heard the ballistics jel analogy without knowing better I would ask myself "If an axion can disturb a ballistics jel then doesn't that mean that it is composed of charged particles or is charged itself?"

I made a grievous error in my initial post by being technically incorrect; however, the message of what I was saying still stands, and it is what I clarified in my initial response. And I was probably too harsh on my response. I think we all finally understand the basic points that both you and I were trying to make. I should have been a little more explicit in the beginning to have avoided a lot of confusion.

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

NERD FIGHT!!!11!!1
 

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey! Someone post more funny physics jokes. This pissing contest is getting a little dry.

Fair enough.

An atom walks in to a bar and mentions to the bartender that he's missing an electron.
The bartender asks "Are you sure?"
The atom responds "I'm positive."

Two strings walk into a bar. The first one goes up to the bartender and asks "Can I get a beer?"
The bartender gives him a beer and turns to the second string who then asks "Can I get a beer?8sfC,.!~3^jhaWFclaij 28jf(243j"
The first string then explains "You'll have to excuse my friend, he's not null terminated."
(computer joke since I couldn't think of another physics joke at the time)

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

A thoughtful, well informed, and intelligent /. discussion?

NO WAI!!

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting ... so, just to check my understanding with an example, this photo depicts what is merely a large number of electromagnetic reactions?

Re:Detected...

[PresidentEnder]

Thanks. I read the entire article. Then I was confused, so I re-read it. Somehow I managed to miss that part both times. I asked how this works.

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

but it doesn't make you any smarter.

Re:Detected...

[Alsee]

Lockerroom trashtalk:

My brain occupies greater volume than your brain!
Oh yeah? Your ancestor wasn't a monkey!
Was so!
Was not!
Was so!
Was not!
**Snatch**
Heay! No fair! Gimme me back my glasses!
Nyah nyah! The only girl that would ever date you would have to be the square root of negative two! Irrational AND imaginary!
When my mother gets here she's gonna make you give my glasses back!

-

Re:Detected...

[ceoyoyo]

I kind of appreciate the strong force holding my protons, neutrons and nuclei together as well.

Admittedly, the weak force doesn't generally have immediate bearing on my life.

Re:Detected...

[Alchemist253]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Pauli exclusion principle a special case of the general exclusion principle, i.e. any proper wavefunction is antisymmetric wrt exchange of identical fermions and symmetric wrt exchange of identical bosons?

And isn't this a fundamental postulate of quantum mechanics?

This is how the "desire" of atoms to not pack too closely was explained to me in fundamental terms in p-chem back in college. But I'm an organic, not a physical, chemist, so I could be way off base here.

Re:Detected...

[dkf]

Yes that's purely electromagnetism in action (except for the gravitational field holding the interacting parties down, of course).

Re:Detected...

[GNious]

That would be Tachyon.. Close but !banana.

/G

Re:Detected...

[pasamio]

And on top of that the force of the floor against the interacting parties is also another example of electromagnetism. The force that the atom in the ground enforces against the force of gravity _and_ the parties lowest appendage (remember, all mass has gravity so both parties are also attracting the ground, though no where near as much as the Earth attracts them not to mention the electromagnetic opposition of the atoms). This made my day :)

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know all these advanced physics topics with great levels of intricacy like you do...

That was quite obvious from the start. You didn't need to spell it out.

What never ceases to amaze me is the tendency of arrogant people not knowing what they talk about to keep yapping, instead of keeping quiet and avoid exposing their ignorance for everyone to see. Is it a genetic trait, perhaps?

Listen (or read, or observe - whatever.) Learn what you need. Then respond. Simple, isn't it? Keeping quiet of course does not mean you shouldn't ask questions. That's part of learning.

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

So what happens if two neutral particles collide (gently)? I assume they do not pass through each other, but what force explains their interaction? Or, is there no such thing as a 'neutral particle' (i.e., even neutrons consist of charged quarks)?

Re:Detected...

[PhotoGuy]

Where is the "+1 Incredibly Polite & Informative" when you need it...

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry for the AC response. What you say is correct (good memory). Pauli Exculsion is actually the same thing as what you described as general exclusion. Multi (identical) boson wavefunctions are symmetric while multi (identical) fermion systems (like electrons) have antisymmetric wavefunctions. In other words, fermions can't be in the same physical state as another identical fermion. As you said in your post, a practical consequence of this is the shell model. Electrons don't all end up in the ground state of the S orbital for a multi-electron atom because electrons can't be in the same state (the heuristic up and down arrows per orbital help you keep track of that). Under some conditions (e.g. some astrophysical systems), this fermion exclusion can actually "push back" like a real force, even though strictly speaking it isn't a fundamental force.

Re:Detected...

[emlyncorrin]

Actually they attract the earth exactly as much as the earth attracts them (every force has an equal and opposite reaction force), otherwise there would be a net force causing the earth-boxer system to accelerate. It's just the effect of the same force on the earth is much less noticable.

Re:Detected...

[cheebie]

If they get even closer, other forces probably come into play. The exact details are beyond my knowledge (interested in physics, but only a few classes that touch on this.)

I would guess that the Weak force would force them apart when they get really really close.

Or your notion of charged quarks could be correct.

Re:Detected...

[poser101]

So... are you saying that nothing ever actually "touches" anything? For example, I hold a rubber ball in my hand: the rubber ball is levitating in my hand because of the repulsion between my hand's electrons and the ball's electrons?

Re:Detected...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick, where's the barycentre of the three body earth-boxer-boxer orbital system?

A particle with no charge?

[elmCitySlim]

Isn't that known as the slutty little neighbor of the sub-atomic world?

Re:A particle with no charge?

[rgbecker]

A particle that costs nothing clearly violates the laws^H^H^H^Haxioms^H^H^H^H^Hassertions of economics.

This is a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

From the last time I heard the axion was supposed to take a particle collider the size of the solar system. This is certainly curious. Additionally, the axion theory is a competitor to the string theory. If the results are true both the standard model and the string theory are going to be thrown into disarray.

Re:This is a big deal

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

TFA states that the axion supports the standard model. Silly string theorists will just change their model to accomidate the axion, something they do regularily.

Re:This is a big deal

[AuMatar]

String theory will merely add a 29th dimnension where axions can exist to make the math work.

Re:This is a big deal

[cinexero]

That was a joke.

Opponents of string theory claim that string theorists merely create higher dimensions to explain new particles. Higher dimensions that are not testable. Which leads to the second complaint about string theory; lack of testable predictions.

Re:This is a big deal

[TubeSteak]

String theory will merely add a 29th dimnension where axions can exist to make the math work.

Which is why some people don't consider string "theory" to be a real theory.

Isn't it one of the basic rules of science that if you can't test it, it isn't a theory.

Re:This is a big deal

[spiro_killglance]

Not sure which particle your were thinking of but the axion was supposed to be really light, in the eV range, its the gravitino
that is in the plancks (need a atom smasher as big as the solar system) mass range. String theory does have axions in it as well
as stacks of light neutral particles called moduli. The article didn't say how they knew or why they thought that particle was an
axion. The experiment found at light neutral particle with mass ~19 Mev (or maybe 7 Mev) that decays to electron positron pairs, they didn't say the had a spin measurement, if its not spin 0 with negative parity its definitely not an axion. Another experiment (PVLAS) last year found evidence a particle with mass in the milliEv range, that fits more with an axion. So maybe this is something
else.

Re:This is a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Wikipedia article linked to previously: "It should be noted that the existence of axions is also a necessary component of string theory ." !!!!!

(posting ac because I already moderated this discussion).

Re:This is a big deal

[Firehed]

Anyone care to translate that out of Particle Physicist?

Re:This is a big deal

[DragonWriter]

TFA states that the axion supports the standard model. That it is "critical to the Standard Model", as TFA states, does not mean that it is somehow decisive between string theory and the standard model. AFAICT, axions are predicted by string theory as well, and the particular properties they are determined to have in practice may help determine which versions of string theory are tenable and which are less so. So there is no need to "change" string theory to "accommodate" the axion.

Re:This is a big deal

[Alaria Phrozen]

Uhm, no. The Big Bang is a theory, but people don't go around trying to create mini universes. Sure you could argue that they "test" it with observational data, but that's not really performing experiments either now is it?

And as a Mathematician, why are you limiting the concept of a "theory" to the land of science? You scientists are constantly being bound by the restrictions of the physical world around you!

Isn't it one of the basic rules of grammar that if you are asking a question, you use a question mark?

Re:This is a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me second the parent post. I am an experimental physicist though not a particle / high energy person. The MeV energies their talking about sound completely inconsistent with astrophysical limits I expect. This would be a huge deal were it to be the real thing so my level of skepticism is very high.

Re:This is a big deal

[DragonWriter]

Which is why some people don't consider string "theory" to be a real theory.

At least from a little googling around, it seems that various versions of string theory predict axions, and different versions of string theory seem to predict different properties of axions, which suggests that searching for axions and determining their properties is, indded, a test of string theory.

"String theory" does the same thing every other field of science does: it makes models, generates predictions from those models, and if they are refuted, goes back and makes new models, with new predictions. String theory isn't a theory, its a related group of hypotheses which make (conceptually) testable predictions (though generating practical tests is often hard, but "science" isn't just what is easy.)

And those predictions are tested, and models are refined. Just as everywhere else in science.

I don't get the bizarre string-theory hate. Sure, its counterintuitive. So is the relation of space and time in relativity.

Re:This is a big deal

[AuMatar]

Testable doesn't mean you can recreate it- it means it makes some predictions about how the world is now that can be tested. Big bang predicts levels of background radiation and other things that can be tested for.

String theory doesn't predict anything. Its not testable. Its not science. Its caused some interesting advances in math to solve certain aspects of it, but thats about it.

Re:This is a big deal

[pizza_milkshake]

but people don't go around trying to create mini universes.

Funny you should mention... http://www.casavaria.com/sentido/science/2006/06-0 802-new-universe.htm

Re:This is a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

various versions of string theory predict axions, and different versions of string theory seem to predict different properties of axions, which suggests that searching for axions and determining their properties is, indded, a test of string theory.

No, because you can make up a string theory for about any conceivable particle/property that might be discovered. A "test of string theory" in any meaningful sense of the word test would need to be one that is potentially able to falsify string theory as a whole. Ever heard of Popper?

Re:This is a big deal

[CETS]

but people don't go around trying to create mini universes.

Ummm...this guy wants to:
Build Your Own Universe

Re:This is a big deal

[Iron Condor]

From the last time I heard the axion was supposed to take a particle collider the size of the solar system. This is certainly curious. Additionally, the axion theory is a competitor to the string theory. If the results are true both the standard model and the string theory are going to be thrown into disarray.

Oif -- couple'a misconceptions ere:

1) The axion is an outcropping of the standard model -- people are looking for it because the standard model says it ought to be there.

[ 1.5) Until it makes predictions for the masses of the elementary particles, it should be called the "sub-standard model" to begin with ]

2) Therefore the Axion cannot possibly be in conflict with string theory either, as string theory is an attempt to derive the standard model from something more fundamental. Wherever the standard model says something, the goal of string theory is to say at least the same thing (and ideally to say something more precise or more fundamental. But certainly not something in conflict with it).

3) If anybody actually ever found an Axion, you'd read about it in Nature. Science. Possibly Phys Rev, and quite likely arXiv. Not New Scientist, which is really more a 'weekly world news of science reporting'. Publishing in New Scientist is pretty much an admission that you have nothing publishable, really.

Re:This is a big deal

[blamanj]

Additionally, the axion theory is a competitor to the string theory.

Well, IANANP, but Wikipedia sez:
It should be noted that the existence of axions is also a necessary component of string theory.

Re:This is a big deal

[Kamineko]

They'll just mix 'em together into some kind of 'Strixion Theory'.

Re:This is a big deal

[mako1138]

Particle physicists measure mass in units of electronvolts/c^2, which is written without the c^2 for convenience. The electron is about 0.5 MeV, and the proton/neutron are about 1 GeV. So this experiment supposedly found axions with mass ~10 MeV, whereas theory says they should be on the order of eV -- big discrepancy.

Re:This is a big deal

[TapeCutter]

"String theory doesn't predict anything. Its not testable. Its not science. Its caused some interesting advances in math to solve certain aspects of it, but thats about it."

I agree, and until it makes a testable prediction it will remain as pure maths (or metaphysics if you like that turn of phrase better). This doesn't mean it's a waste of time nor does it mean that it will always be untestable, it just means that right now it is not science.

Re:This is a big deal

[Alsee]

String theory doesn't predict anything.

Actually sting theory predicts axions. As per Wikipedia on Axion: It should be noted that the existence of axions is also a necessary component of string theory. But that is a fairly weak prediction of string theory, as other models also predict the axion.

String theory is stuck in a bizarre limbo in that the interesting predictions it does make involve math that's so hard that we can't actually understand what the predictions are. :)

-

Re:This is a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically string theory does have a testable prediction. It predicts that somewhere in the mass range from zero to Mpl (~10^19 GeV, for comparision the proton is ~1GeV and the heaviest known particle is ~171 GeV and with the LHC we can probe to ~2000 GeV) atleast one additional neutral spin-1 boson exists.

Not that we have currently have the technology to do so or will have in the near (or even likely far future) and those are approximately the energys of the big bang....

Okay in practice it has no testable prediction :)

Re:This is a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand this hatred for string theory.

"Strng theory doesn't predict anything!"

Well maybe it doesn't. So? The periodic table we use is just one of a hundred ways we could layout the elements on a table. Does that mean we should throw it out? Or should we keep it because the one we use is the most beutiful and obvious way for it to be laid out? If you have a choice between having 50 different equations all seperate, and one big matrix where all those equations fit together like one beautiful puzzle, would you rather memorize the 50 equations, or just the one matrix?

Re:This is a big deal

[DaAdder]

String theory doesn't predict anything. Its not testable. Its not science. Its caused some interesting advances in math to solve certain aspects of it, but thats about it. Doesn't this mean that even if it's just an interesting exercise, that it's all been worthwhile in the end?

Re:This is a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Stupid troll. The periodic table, by its layout, predicts lots and lots of things about the chemical and nuclear behaviors of elements. Go back to your seat on the White House science advisory council and stop bothering us.

Re:I propose we weaponize this immediately

[__aaclcg7560]

Hey, Clark, you're just mad because Superman got lucky with Lois Lane. Let see you fly around with a red cape!

Wiki

[hamster3null]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axion

Re:Wiki

[strider44]

In late 2006, Piyare Jain and Gurmukh Singh claimed the discovery of an unexpectedly high mass (6-20 MeV), very short lived (10-13 s) particle that may be the sought after axion (Jain and Singh, 2007).

Wow this discovery is so amazing that they have published the paper a year in the future!!!

Re:Wiki

[blamanj]

A lovely bit of trivia there:

The name was introduced by Frank Wilczek, co-writer of the first paper to predict the axion, after a brand of detergent - because the problem with QCD had been "cleaned up".

Not news

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhhh, they've already discovered a non-charged subatomic particle...the neutron.

Re:Not news

[morgan_greywolf]

Uhhhh, they've already discovered a non-charged subatomic particle...the neutron.

No, neutrons have a neutral charge -- that is, that their net charge is neither positive (+) nor negative (-). But they have a charge. Protons have a net positive charge, electrons have a net negative charge and axions have absolutely no charge at all.

Re:Not news

[Rinzai]

No, the quote was

"Only at that very short distance did I find the peak signal of this very-low-mass, short-lived particle [the axion] with a neutral charge," he said.

There's no such thing as "a neutral charge." (You must be thinking along the lines of the tri-state boolean variables in Java.) There are only two charge states: positive, and negative. Combine +1 and -1 and you get 0--that's not "neutral," that's by-God-friggin'-zero. As in none. Nada. Zip. Nothing. Goooooose-flappin'-egg.

Re:Not news

[Rinzai]

Geez, I'm an idiot. Ignore that post. I blame the cold medication.

What I meant to say, was--nothing. Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Not news

[OrangeTide]

then I will search for the particle that is charged both negatively and positively. I'd call it a paradoxion.

Re:Not news

[l0cust]

Can you explain that a bit more please. How is a neutral charged particle differentiated experimentally from an uncharged particle ? Won't both of them show the same electromagnetic characteristic unless we break down into some "closeness" parameter where the charge density shifting may result in the neutral charged particle to start displaying some net charge in a particular direction(?) If they have already done that, then can you explain how do you confirm if its in fact an uncharged particle or merely a neutral particle which has not been subjected to electromagnetic field of the required strength at the required distance - specially considering that the particle was unknown before the experiment.

Re:Not news

[CTachyon]

Speculation from a non-physicist follows...

The neutron, despite having a net charge of 0, is not truly "chargeless": the neutron is a composite particle, made up of 3 quarks (1 up, 2 down). The up quark has a positive charge (+2/3), and the two down quarks each have a weaker negative charge (-1/3). At a good distance from the neutron, it is indeed neutral. However, if you throw an electron at it, the electron can bounce off (the electron's -1 charge repels a down quark's -1/3 charge) or otherwise change direction. A similar thing happens if you throw a proton at it, except that the strong force is likely to glue them together instead.

(Aside: the neutron and proton are themselves examples of the same phenomenon if you replace electric charge with color charge. A proton looks "white" (strong neutral) from a distance, because it has one quark each of red, green, and blue. A neutron is the same. However, when a neutron and a proton get close, the quarks stick together because, say, the neutron's red quark was closest to the proton while the proton's blue quark was closest to the neutron. They start trading gluons, causing them to stick together and form a nucleus, which is best described as a gluon orgy between tri-curious quarks.)

The axion, if it's a real particle (way too early to tell), would be a non-composite neutral particle. That is, like an electron or a neutrino, it doesn't have anything hiding inside it, so it doesn't look different when you're up close.

What makes the axion interesting is that it doesn't interact at all via the strong or weak forces, and it's electrically neutral so it doesn't even do much with the electromagnetic force. Only gravity and strong magnetic fields affect it. A different axion, one that's light-weight and stable (as opposed to the heavy, unstable "axions" suggested by this experiment), is actually a dark matter candidate. If a bunch of low-energy axions clump together, they can form a Bose-Einstein Condensate and act as a single dark matter WIMP (weakly-interacting massive particle).

Re:Not news

[l0cust]

Thanks. That was very informative. However I still have a question. Since the up quark has (+2/3) charge and the two down quarks have (-1/3) charge each, why will the behavior of an incoming proton/electron be consistence in every trial since, as far as I can tell, they are both experiencing the same net electrical force at a distance and the force experienced at close quarters will depend on the alignment of quarks in the neutron at that particular instance. So an incoming electron may be diverted away from or attracted to the neutron depending upon if the down quarks are aligned closer to the impact zone or the up quark are closer to it. I think I am missing something obvious here (I am not a physicist obviously). Also, is there a possibility that quarks themselves are are made up of even mroe fundamental blocks whose net charge determines the charge of a particular quark? In that case, would the presence of a fraction of those entities in a particle like axion necessarily divert an incoming proton/electron from its path to a determinable degree, since the force of interaction may be too small to make a significant change to the course.

Re:Not news

[CTachyon]

Re: different behavior depending on which quark is closest, yep, the behavior of an electron hitting a neutron is essentially random because it depends on which quarks are where at that moment. Since the up quark and the electron don't generally interact, the electron will just zip toward the up quark, then go right through -- well, going out on a limb since I don't really know particle physics, I suppose they could have a weak interaction that did something like electron + up => e-neutrino + down, but the down+down+down baryon (Delta minus) isn't a stable particle so the electron would have to be moving rather fast to do that. Too slow, and it'll just zip through the up quark and bounce off the negative charge of one of the down quarks behind it.

Re: composite quarks, modern physics says that it's extremely unlikely. The most obvious argument is from entropy. The more levels you have to dig through to find something "whole" (non-composite), the more entropy the entire system will have because those smaller parts have ways they can move around (degrees of freedom) that will suck up as much entropy as they can. Especially when you combine this with the fact that modern physics says there is a maximum possible entropy for a given volume (which happens to be a black hole that fills the volume), it seems very unlikely that quarks are made of something deeper. At the absolute most, there's one more layer to go, but even that seems rather unlikely.

Advertisements

[Marxist Hacker 42]

In the original article included an axion digital picture frame already on the market- I guess capitalism is faster than physics.

Tiny Particle with no charge?

[codergeek42]

Isn't that called a Neutron? Heh.

Re:Tiny Particle with no charge?

[jfengel]

A neutron has a mass of 940 MeV. This sucker is around 6-20 MeV. Compared to that, the neutron isn't tiny; it's gi-freaking-normous.

Re:Tiny Particle with no charge?

[Null Perception]

I believe you mean MeV/c^2

Re:Tiny Particle with no charge?

[John.P.Jones]

So he's comparing the 'size' of an object by energy and you pop in with a remark that he should be comparing object 'size' by mass, so you propose changing the units by dividing by the constant c^2?

Einstein would be so proud.

Re:Tiny Particle with no charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is expected to give the mass in eV/c^2 as the ggp did when working with SI units in particle interactions, and the /c^2 is commonly omitted because it is implicit. Particles don't have well defined sizes in the traditional sense so (afaik) the only simple thing you can do to gauge their 'size' is compare their rest mass. The gp wins the "asking the question you already know the answer to" award.

Re:Tiny Particle with no charge?

[LordHugeMongus]

I believe he meant HugeMongus :)

Re:Tiny Particle with no charge?

[KiloByte]

the /c^2 is commonly omitted because it is implicit

/c^2 is omitted because in any system of units of measure relevant to particle physics, c=1.

Re:Tiny Particle with no charge?

[thebagel]

I don't think a neutron would qualify even if size weren't an issue. Supposedly this is a "tiny" particle that isn't composed of other charged particles; a neutron, however, is composed of other charged particles. Or did I miss something somewhere?

Re:Tiny Particle with no charge?

[jfengel]

I do mean that, though MeV is a common shorthand for MeV/c^2, and it's what they used in the original article.

Called "axion"?

[necro2607]

That's crazy. How do they know it's called an axion? ... ;)

Re:Called "axion"?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was funny until the ;)

Re:Called "axion"?

[Anonymous Coward]

They asked Ian.

Re:Called "axion"?

[cp.tar]

How do they know it's called an axion?

Because you cammot prove it... they just defimed it as such.

Re:Called "axion"?

[ArcherB]

It's neutral. It should have been called the Swission, Blondion, Alpion or something similar.

Re:Called "axion"?

[necro2607]

haha yes I know, it was a joke :(

Re:Called "axion"?

[Anonymous Coward]

You now, I'm sure, realized that was an awkward response... Good joke, though.

But seriously, Swiss are blondes?

Re:Called "axion"?

[ZX3 Junglist]

Funny thing is, its name is actually "Axionakhstanformakebenefitgloriousscienceofsubato micparticlephysics" but "Axion.." was all the particle was able to say before the 10^-13 seconds passed.

Re:Called "axion"?

[blake3737]

That was it's first name. As as they figured out it's name, the "axion" changed it's name again.

Cool that he had to use an analog detector

[Chirs]

I think it's kind of a neat ironic twist that he needed to use an analog detection mechanism to position the detector close enough to the target to detect the particle.

Re:Cool that he had to use an analog detector

[Anonymous Coward]

See!! See how the analog hole can not only cost starving artists billions daily but it also makes it possible to cornhole the laws of subatomic physics!!

Re:Cool that he had to use an analog detector

[DrFalkyn]

I dont't thats intersting at all. Virtually all instrument readings are analog, until they are digitized by an ADC.

Sorry

[mkiwi]

A new particle! OMG Physics!

Seriously, my sig has been that way for months :)

Neutrino, maybe, but not neutron.

[volpe]

In the context of subatomic particles, I think "neutron" is as large as they get.

Actually, now that you mention it, wouldn't a neutrino qualify?

Long Lived Axions

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at this article, axions are described as:

The axion's extreme lightness (trillions would occupy a sugar-cube volume of space yet weigh less than does half of a proton) and nearly nonexistent coupling to radiation conspire to make the particle incredibly long-lived, perhaps as long as 10^50 seconds. The universe itself is estimated to be only 10^18 seconds, or 100 billion years, old. The axion's longevity would make it a stable particle for all intents and purposes.

But the particle found is extremely short-lived. So what's the deal here? Has the expectations changed since the article was written?

Re:Long Lived Axions

[Scarblac]

Presumably then, they can only detect them at the very end of the 10^50 seconds.

Re:Long Lived Axions

[jpflip]

It turns out that the axion can have a wide range of properties, depending on its mass and its coupling to ordinary matter. There are regions of parameter space in which the axion is heavy enough and strongly-coupled enough to decay rapidly. Professor Jain is claiming to have detected such a short-lived version of the axion (or, at least, some sort of short-lived neutral particle).

Most models for axions are much lighter and have much weaker interactions, giving them much longer lifespans. That's what's being described in the article you cite. An axion with those properties would be an ideal candidate for dark matter - tons of them would fill the universe, and they'd be nearly undetectable due to their weak interactions.

Most searches for axions focus on the longer-lived possibilities for this reason, so far with no success. I'm intrigued if this claim is true, but I'll wait to see what other physicists think.

Re:Long Lived Axions

[stigmato]

That would imply that they existed before the formation of the universe as we know it, since its estimated to be only 10^18 seconds.

Re:Long Lived Axions

[Kingrames]

cue the dramatic music.

Re:Long Lived Axions

[Scarblac]

I know, it was a miserable attempt at making a joke...

Re: Jimmy Neutron's cousin

[TaoPhoenix]

Johnny Axion and Jimmy Neutron next, at 8:30 AM on Saturday.

They say the axion has no charge?

[Z1NG]

Are they positive?

Re:They say the axion has no charge?

[M00TP01NT]

That's a negative, Z1NG.

Re:They say the axion has no charge?

[mdemonic]

Then I will remain neutral.

Making Light of Axions

[DumbSwede]

Are these the same Axions cited in Wikipedia? And that I remember being written up about in New Scientist?

There have been various ongoing experiments involving coupling them to photons with high magnetic fields and even creating ghost photons that appear after a beam of photons is shot through a strong magnetic field at a wall. Being coupled to Axions in some fashion by the magnetic field the photons reappear on the other side of the wall purportedly to illuminate a surface, if however weakly so.

I for one, do not welcome our new Overlords

[CrazyJim1]

We must defeat the Axion of evil.

Re:I for one, do not welcome our new Overlords

[blake3737]

You forgot to invite poland you insensitive clod!

No Charge eh?

[vivin]

No Charge! Shouldn't be too hard to justify the cost of this research! ;)

Anyways, pretty good!

Tiny particle without charge? so what

[dinther]

Tiny particle without charge? so what. I have a tiny particle like that. It is the battery in my old IPod Shuttle that won't hold any charge either.

So...

[stonedcat]

Since since it has no charge, does that mean it belongs to the public domain? Or will there be a GNU type license involved?

Everyone just assuned this particle existed

[davidwr]

The existance of such a particle is axionatic in the physics world.

Re:Everyone just assuned this particle existed

[Anonymous Coward]

Is your "m" key broken?

But is there an

[Andy_R]

equal and opposite reaxion?

Re:But is there an

[Anonymous Coward]

A good try at a pun, but the anti-particle of a non-charged particle is itself.

New Particle.....

[IHC Navistar]

All hail the mighty Mom particle, for it keeps the Universe in order.....

true?

[bcrowell]

This would be very important, if true. However, there's at least one thing that makes me wonder whether it's right:

Jain has used it throughout his career to successfully detect other exotic phenomena, such as the charm particle, the anomalon, the quark-gluon plasma and the nuclear collective flow.

I used to do low-energy nuclear physics research, and although this stuff is at higher energies, a lot of it sets off my B.S. detector. The information I've been able to find about the anomalon makes it sound like it's flaky. The statement in the article also makes it sound as if Jain discovered the other things on the list, but actually I think what it really means is that he participated in experiments, where his contribution was that he did the emulsion technique. From what I know about the continuing work on the quark-gluon plasma, it's not a specific, definite, yes/no thing that can really be considered to have been discovered, and I don't think emulsions have been particularly important in that work, either.

It's unfortunate that the paper isn't available on arxiv.org. However, IOP will let you read it if you set up an account. Well, I'm not a specialist in relativistic heavy ion physics, or emulsion techniques, but the paper doesn't look very convincing to me at all. In figure 4, they claim to see two peaks, one near 7 MeV, and one near 19 MeV. The statistics simply don't look convincing. All I see is a spectrum with some noise in it, where they've picked what look like two big statistical fluctuations and called them peaks. They claim it's significant at the 3-sigma level, which actually isn't a very high level of statistical confidence, especially for such an extraordinary claim.

Re:true?

[Anonymous Coward]

The information I've been able to find about the anomalon makes it sound like it's flaky.

Most research these days in the field of theoretical particle physics could be considered "flaky".

Re:true?

[rentedflowers]

You're missing the really groundbreaking development here, though.

This is a /. article, claiming a scientific discovery, that is traceable to a peer-reviewed journal article. A well-respected journal, no less. This is truly a first.

Re:true?

[Anonymous Coward]

Truly, we have found the Axion. And it is us...

Re:true?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ancient guy (can't even figure out how to use arXiv?) at small university uses archaic technology to detect particle totally unanticipated by theory? Writes up discovery using Excel plots in a minor journal? This sounds like an even better investment than the one my Nigerian friend e-mailed me about. Where can I sign up?

Re:true?

[mcelrath]

This can't possibly be the axion. If it were a particle it must show up as a narrow peak in Fig.2(a) due to the claimed lifetime in Fig.1(a). The width of a particle in the Q graph is 1/lifetime, and the claimed lifetime is so large that it's width must be tiny -- literally a line on the graph (smeared by detector resolution). But instead Fig.2(a) is totally smeared out. This must be some off-shell phenomena or fakes. It is not a particle.

Also, the standard for claiming discovery of a new particle is 5 standard deviations. The reason for this is because we often see fluctuations below this that go away with more data. The small peaks he does claim after massaging his data are only three standard deviations.

So, the claim that it's a particle is dubious. The claim of a discovery is absolutely wrong. This does not meet the criteria for a particle discovery in particle physics.

Re:true?

[moochfish]

Oh, don't be so negative! ;)

Re:true?

[jwiegley]

Take that!!! Oh, wait, I just realized I don't understand the counter-argument.

nevermind.

Re:true?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, he seems to be a theorist or phenomonologist rather than having been involved in experiments during his career. I agree the data looks less than convincing.

I work in this field. We were sitting around reading the paper (parts of which read like an undergraduate essay). When I mentioned the author to our senior person who is a contemporary of Jain, he blurted out "Oh, that stupid son of a bitch!?" I've never heard this gentleman say anything like that in the years I've worked with him and this was not personal, just an assessment of his abilities from first and secondhand knowledge.

I'm taking this with an ocean full of salt....

Re:true?

[radtea]

So, the claim that it's a particle is dubious.

For some reason the IOP won't let me at the full paper even though I've set up an account, but the mention of emulsion detectors set my radar off. I did work on a possible axion candidate (the anomalous e+/e- pairs from ORANGE and EPOS experiments in Germany in the late 80's, whose results are now widely believed to have been fraudulent after the non-detection at Argonne) and one of the interesting things about digging through data that don't make no sense is that the field tends to become an X-files-like catch-all of weird stuff that no one has ever been able to explain.

Emulsion results figured in a number of speculations, and it became clear that they are not used much because they are extremely hard to interpret and extremely easy to mess up.

The idea of a nuclear emulusion detector is simple: you bang a beam of whatever into a photographic emulsion layer edge on, and then develop it and look for particle tracks. For the tiny fraction of events where everything stays pretty much in the plane of the emulsion, all is well. For the vast majority of events that have lots of transverse momentum, you're pretty much screwed. Properly registered multi-layer emulsions can help, but it is a business fraught with interpretive errors and strange anomalies that no other detector technology finds.

It may be that the flakey emulsion detectors with all of their known problems really are better at what they do than everything else, or it may be that detectors that are known to be problematic are producting problematic results. I know which conclusion Ockham would jump to.

In fairness to the experimenter, the short lifetime of this axion candidate makes emulsions appealing, but I'd be very cautious about any new particle candidate that could only be detected in emulsion experiments. If I were still in the game, I'd be thinking about how to replicate these results in an independent configuration, maybe with some kind of finely-layered scintillation detector.

Re:true?

[Puff Daddy]

Admit it, you didn't understand the original argument either. I'm admittedly not a physicist, but I would like to think that I know a whole lot more physics than your average person. When I read articles like this I realize that I only know enough about the subject to start to realize how much I don't know. Seriously, props to all of the physicists out there that can actually understand, or at least convince me that they understand, any of the new research out there. Lord knows I've tried. That's why my degree took a sudden turn toward biology.

Re:true?

[bcrowell]

(the anomalous e+/e- pairs from ORANGE and EPOS experiments in Germany in the late 80's, whose results are now widely believed to have been fraudulent after the non-detection at Argonne)
Fraudulent, or just the product of wishful thinking, and cuts on the data engineered so that they would make the peaks appear? I knew some of the people involved (Greenberg, Rhein, Kaloskamis, Lister, Betts), and I don't recall anybody suggesting that it was outright fraud.

Re:true?

[bholzm1]

Fraudulent, or just the product of wishful thinking, and cuts on the data engineered so that they would make the peaks appear? I knew some of the people involved (Greenberg, Rhein, Kaloskamis, Lister, Betts), and I don't recall anybody suggesting that it was outright fraud.

It was just erroneous methodology at ORANGE and EPOS (and EPOS II). After the APEX results were in, most of the people involved (as good scientists should) accepted the results and moved on.

Re:true?

[psifishdot]

You can also think about it this way. If this was conclusive evidence of the axion, it would have been published in Science or Nature. At a minimum, it would be worth a Physical Review Letter. However, it was published in the Journal of Physics G which is somewhat less prestigious. This is even worse than the pentaquark. The pentaquark might not exist, but at least it was mentioned in Science.

Re:true?

[gordguide]

Especially groundbreaking since it's about a charge without a particle.

No, wait a minute; that's my cable bill.

Nevermind.

It makes perfect sense

[Thunderstruck]

That an independent researcher would headline something like this, rather than some "well-funded" group. How could you ever write a grant to research something that is free of charge?

Re:It makes perfect sense

[bcrowell]

That an independent researcher would headline something like this, rather than some "well-funded" group. How could you ever write a grant to research something that is free of charge?

Hee hee...

...but seriously, one of the things that smells really fishy about this is that there are only two authors on the paper. Relativistic heavy-ion physics is a field that normally involves huge collaborations. You get maybe 50 or 100 authors on every paper. There's just no possible way, politically, that these two American guys could submit a proposal to CERN, do an experiment, publish results showing physics beyond the standard model, and not have any other names on the paper. If physicists at CERN believed the result, you'd better believe that some of their names would be on it.

Re:It makes perfect sense

[yakineko oni]

well, sure, usually there needs to be a whole pile of collaborators on these things, but the more observers there are, the higher the chance that the results will be changed by the observance of the phenomenon...

Quality Joke

[Rik Sweeney]

An Axion was arrested today on suspicion of bad conduct, but was later let off without charge.

Ba da ba dum, *pshhh*

UB

[Anonymous Coward]

UB thats how we do!

Re:UB

[unterderbrucke]

ya ma nga
doing it up in capen as i type

Terrible name. Spelling checkers will "correct" it

[dpbsmith]

A million spelling checkers are going to keep "correcting" it to axon or axiom or anion.

Neutrons?

[copdk4]

arent those Neutron thingies without charge too?

Three Decades!!!

[Nom du Keyboard]

3 decades.

30 years.

10,957 days.

262,968 hours.

15,778,080 minutes.

946,684,800 seconds of your life.

All to find a virtually infinitesimally particle with no charge at all.

That, and mention on Slashdot: Priceless!!

Re:Three Decades!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I'm sure he may have done one or two other things in that 30 year span, like sleeping, eating, driving, vacations, hobbies, friends, family, whatever, maybe he even enjoyed doing this too. I applaud accomplishments that are difficult, not whiny losers whining and losing about others that may have detected heretofore undetected particles in our universe. ESPECIALLY when they whine about it using bad mathematical approximations. That just takes the whole damn gourd. So my advice, either stop losing or stay out of the way of the useful men / women / robots of science that accomplish these great things. My 0.21824 pesos.

mo it ism't brokem

[Anonymous Coward]

Amy other questioms?

Oh...

[The Great Pretender]

So that's where I left it!

same old

[roman_mir]

white is the new black and the dimension is the new epicycle.

Re:same old

[Anonymous Coward]

YES!!! My meme has caught on!

Extra Dimensions are the epicycles of the 21st century!!!!

Anonymous Theoretical Physicst

In a related story

[VinB]

A small charge without a particle was found wandering a Wall-Mart parking lot in western Mississippi. Developing...

not a particle

[swell]

A source who wishes not to be identified at this time has assured me that this is not a particle at all. His explanation is hard for me to translate into English. The gist of it is that the item discovered is a 'place holder'. There is/was/will be a particle at the general location of the 'axion', but the actual particle probably resides in another dimension. Please forgive my crude interpretation. I will try to clarify if there is interest.

Funding

[OldManAndTheC]

Dear Sir,

Your proposal intrigues us. If you can flesh it out with further details, we are certain that a mutually satisfactory agreement can be reached. Eagerly awaiting your reply.

Sincerely Yours,

Galactus, LEXX, and Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz

Re:Funding

[Anonymous Coward]

The Vogon I can understand, but why would Galactus want to blow up a perfectly edible, tasty planet?

Re:Funding

[Anonymous Coward]

Galactus is getting on in years, he's not what he once was. He's got dentures now and finds it much easier to eat planets if they're mashed up like applesauce.

Re:Funding

[Jesus_666]

Maybe he has taken up snorting?

"Physics today" covered axion searches in August

[ebers]

Here's the link http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-59/iss-8/p30.sh tml

geek language

[LunaticTippy]

Geeks have their own language. Lots of them. Perl, java, c++, mathematical notation, the geekcode, etc.

Re:geek language

[Poltras]

!true. You !make (assumptions || hypothesis) && !(proof). Please; Bring( proof )->clarify.

Re:geek language

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know which is worse, the fact you wrote it, or the fact I understood it

Re:geek language

[somersault]

if (!You.Life.Get) You.Suck;

Re:geek language

[Jzor]

Tsk tsk...

Slashdotter You = new Slashdotter(912633);
if(!You.get(new aLife())) You.suck == true;

filthy neutrals

[joey_knisch]

"I hate these filthy neutrals Kif! With enemies you know where they stand but with neutrals? Who knows! It sickens me."

But what is it's SPIN?

[iamlucky13]

Charge: 0
Mass: between 10^-6 and 10^-2 eV/c^2
Spin: 1/2???

Not knowing is killing me. Do we not know the spin, or did it just for some reason get left out of both the physorg article and the wikipedia article? The Wikipedia article does say something about a fermionic superpartner called the axino, from which I would infer the axion is a fermion and axino a boson, but it doesn't explicitly say.

Re:But what is it's SPIN?

[mapkinase]

Isn't it obvious?

Re:But what is it's SPIN?

[poser101]

From the talk page of the Wikipedia article:

Given that the decay spectrum of the supposed axion is e+e-, the axion must be a boson (and as an effective degree of freedom from chiral condensate it could hardly be anything else).

A use for axions...

[swordfishBob]

free transactions in a micropayment environment

Particle physics news usually gives me a charge...

[thewiz]

but this story left me feeling kind of neutral about the whole thing.

Re:"Physics today" covered axion searches in Augus

[zigziggityzoo]

So that would make it "Physics from 4 Months Ago".

Tiny Particle With No Charge Discovered

[Dr. Di-boson]

This story is completely incorrect. The paper of Jain and Singh, available at http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0954-3899/34/1/009 does not claim that the axion has been found. They simply report the observation of a couple of narrow resonances which can be interpreted as a signature of new particles. The scientific interpretation of these resonances is unclear at this point. In fact, astrophysical bounds completely rule out that one of these resonances is the so-called axion. I work in this field, so I know. I have no idea how the press is getting the idea that this means the axion has been found. It is *not* based on scientific facts.

Re:Tiny Particle With No Charge Discovered

[Anonymous Coward]

I had both Jain and Singh as professors. Somehow, I'm gonna doubt the certitude of this one.

Re:Tiny Particle With No Charge Discovered

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the press's fault this time. Jain and Singh do claim to have discovered a "high-mass, very short-lifetime axion". Considering that both of these properties should be ruled out by previous experiments, that's not a very sensible claim, but they do claim it.

Re:Tiny Particle With No Charge Discovered

[bigdavesmith]

To view the paper, the site requires a membership (yes, I know it's free). Can we get a link or torrent to get around this?

Re:Tiny Particle With No Charge Discovered

[Mark-Allen]

>> It is *not* based on scientific facts.

This is SlashDot, and it isn't based on scientific fact either. So we're even.

--
Mark-Allen

"Need to make a sig but it keeps loosing it's charge."

Re:Tiny Particle With No Charge Discovered

[Anonymous Coward]

Their paper doesn't claim that they found the axion, but their press release does. (Note: press release currently slashdotted.)

Possibly this discrepancy is the fault of the university's press office though.

no respect for the co-author

[Goldsmith]

What's it say about his co-author on the paper that the University of Buffalo says Jain "works alone"?

I guess post-docs don't actually count as people.

Re:no respect for the co-author

[ancient_kings]

Silly Wabbit. Post-docs aren't people! So they don't deserve to be on a paper! Shheeesh!

Oh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda like the SM physicists did with dark matter? "Oh man. These observations don't fit with our theory!" "Quick! Make something that fits!" Dark matter is born.

The real question is....

[ancient_kings]

can physicists now bullsh^H^H^H^H extrapolate this particle to account for the missing 96% of the universe's mass? Is this particle dark matter? Dark Energy? Regular plain old classical matter?

Re:The real question is....

[acrollet]

fecal matter?

Well gee I'm not a physicist, but...

[Hrothgar The Great]

probably resides in another dimension

Are you sure you heard this from a real source? Are you sure that maybe you didn't get drunk and pass out while your television was playing DRAGONBALL Z RERUNS?

Re:Well gee I'm not a physicist, but...

[zpeterz63]

>probably resides in another dimension

Are you sure you heard this from a real source? Are you sure that maybe you didn't get drunk and pass out while your television was playing DRAGONBALL Z RERUNS?

One of the prevailing interpretations of quantum mechanics is the multiple universe theory. Why does a 2 slit interference pattern show up when only one photon at a time is getting through? One explanation is that in half the universes the photon goes through one slit and in the other half it goes through the opposite. The photon then interacts with all of it's multidimentional twins to form the pattern that is observed.

Schrodinger's Cathouse

[EinZweiDrei]

So, it's Erwin Schrodinger's 60th birthday, and his friends all decide to pitch in and surprise him with a prostitute.

The party comes, the stripper shows up and wraps herself around Schrodinger and pulls him close, and whispers in his ear "I can offer you some super positions..."

So, Schrodinger says: "I'll take the soup".

Or.....

[Anonymous Coward]

An Implodium 238 Space Modulator.

OT

[l0cust]

Thanks for the laugh. Needed it :)

doubt these are axions

[cosmicl]

A few things sound strange about this report. The title does not mention "observation of", or "evidence for" . Instead it is "Search for new particles decaying into electron pairs of mass below 100 MeV/c2" This means the author either chose not to use the stronger words of observation, or evidence in the title, or was unable to convince the referees to allow it. Nuclear emulsion is a low rate detector. If this effect is real, it reasonably likely that someone would have seen it by now, particularily the work did not require an accelerator. I did my dissertation in particle physics looking at an apparent enchancement in the number of +/- particle pairs produced with low relative velocity. They were produced by 28 GeV/c proton collisions on liquid hydrogen. I noticed an enhancement that at first look had the signature of some new particle or resonance. It was really exciting for a few days. It was not a new particle. Rather it was an enhancement, predicted back in the 1920's due to a modification of phase space arising from the attractive electromagnetic force between particles of opposite charge. It was interesting because the dominant force in the collision producing these particle was the much stronger strong-nuclear force. With a bit more work, I was able to show this enhancement for several types of charged particle pairs. (And finish my thesis.) I doubt this enhancement is what is happening in this axion claim. But there are mechanisms for creating enhancements that are not axions, especially if the statistics are limited and the number of trials (statistical penalty) not counted properly. Finding axions would be an extraordinary claim. It would need to be supported by extraordinary proof. It seems unlikely this paper contains either.

Wow, now this is disturbing

[unc0nn3ct3d]

Does anyone else find it disturbing that this is the top Google Ads link on that page about Axioms? http://www.faithmeds.com/diamaxol.html?kwgroup=dia betes+research&utm_source=Google_C&utm_medium=PPC& utm_campaign=Diabeticine&utm_term=diabetes%20resea rch Now that is fucked up

Look, it's very simple.

[jd]

The mathematicians invented nullity (see later slashdot article on dividing by zero), so the physicists now have to one-up them on nothingness. I'm expecting any day now to hear NASA announce the discovery of planets that don't actually exist.

Re:Look, it's very simple.

[mbelly]

They already did...

Thank you

[hovis]

I wasn't aware anything COULD be translated from particle physicist, but that made great sense, tyvm

Wow... this one must be a real little phantom...

[Panaqqa]

Considering how tough it was to prove the neutrino's existence - yet we still managed to do that decades ago. This one must have been like trying to find a flea's egg on a black cat... in the dark... without knowing the location of the cat... using an orbital telescope.

Axion?

[Ginnungagap42]

Personally, I'd have called it the offon.

Heim Unified Field Theory?

[scorp1us]

Linky

Heim UFT calls for a neutral electron. Could this be it? Honestly, I don't know, and its be nice to hear from someone more acquainted with physics than myself.

Axions in Buffalo

[BuffaloBill]

If it is true that they discovered Axions in Buffalo, its about the only thing around here that comes without a charge!

Nice!

[Chtulhu]

But does it run Linux ?

Ob. Futurama

[DarthVain]

What makes a good man go neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?

Finally!

[psybre]

Well I was wondering what was wrong with me!
It's just too many axioms after all.
~psybre

Confused

[dunc78]

So does this discussion mean that an axion could travel right through a chunk of lead because it couldn't interact with the lead particles? If two axions collided, which of the four forces would be involved?

Moo

[Chacham]

Tiny Particle With No Charge Discovered

In our day, with mad corporations charging for everything, where air, dirt, and water are sold for high prices, where ideas are protected by law, and fighting for things to be free marks you as a unsociable freak, finding a particle--no matter how small--that comes at no charge, is very significant.

That the discoverer did not immediately take ownership shows great humanitarian value.

The only issues i see now are, giving her an award that is worth more than the particle would seem to add ulterior motives to not owning it. And, being a lone free particle, it shall surely be sold at auction for its unqiueness, as long as James Tiberias does not point out the very contradiction in its own existence, which would cause it to implode.

great!

[cascadingstylesheet]

>Testable doesn't mean you can recreate it- it means
>it makes some predictions about how the world is now
>that can be tested.

Great! Then I can *scientifically prove* that OJ is innocent.

My theory (which involves LAPD officers driving around with
spare vials of OJ blood) explains all the observations ...

If I had mod points...

[Rayor]

I'd mod parent up as funny.

"finding caps nearly three decades of research.."

[monkeyboythom]

To find...nothing!

Hey, that's a great way to wrap up all that spending!

Sorry...not interested.

[RapidDemon]

I think we already have these. They're called NEUTRONS have you heard of them?

Re:Sorry...not interested.

[Finkle's The Mayor]

...but an Axion isn't a Neutron.

imagine a beo...

[Anonymous Coward]

bah...