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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
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
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
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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.
I assume that's 10^-13 seconds. Ten seconds to thirteen seconds would be a very long time as these things go.
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.
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:
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.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
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?
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).
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.
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?
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
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.
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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.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
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.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
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.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
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
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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).
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
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.
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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.
!true. You !make (assumptions || hypothesis) && !(proof). Please; Bring( proof )->clarify.
Of Code And Men
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