Slashdot Mirror
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."
"No charge."
Even in the field of particle physics, there had to be a slacker somewhere.
axion () means worthy in greek. ;)
Fortune Rota Volvitur
Hire them to find Bin Laden!!
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Don't forget all the baby particles. :p
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?
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
Isn't that known as the slutty little neighbor of the sub-atomic world?
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axion
That's crazy. How do they know it's called an axion? ... ;)
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.
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.
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?
Are they positive?
Presumably then, they can only detect them at the very end of the 10^50 seconds.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
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.
My blog
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.
We must defeat the Axion of evil.
God spoke to me.
No Charge! Shouldn't be too hard to justify the cost of this research! ;)
Anyways, pretty good!
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
The existance of such a particle is axionatic in the physics world.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
Find free books.
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.
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!!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Here's the link http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-59/iss-8/p30.sh tml
Geeks have their own language. Lots of them. Perl, java, c++, mathematical notation, the geekcode, etc.
Man, you really need that seminar!
free transactions in a micropayment environment
-- All your bass are below two Hz
but this story left me feeling kind of neutral about the whole thing.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
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.
Find free books.
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.
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?
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.
They already did...
~Belly
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...