Slashdot Mirror
Matter, Anti-Matter, and a New Subatomic Particle?
sciencehabit writes "Physicists may have finally figured out why the universe contains more matter than antimatter. The key lies in a flaw in the relationship between the two and a potentially new subatomic particle. 'Other researchers, however, say the results, published today in Nature, should be interpreted cautiously. It could all be an effect produced by run-of-the-mill particles'."
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
well he's a programmer after all. the big bang was the beginning of the alpha, blackholes are memory leaks, spatial expansion is feature bloat and the disparity between matter and antimatter resulted because of a calculation error in Excel.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Very good question...
I do work on theoretical particle physics at CERN, so I would be the kind of person to take Garrett's paper and make predictions for colliders/astrophysics from it. (and hence, find methods to prove/disprove it) I'm not currently working on his theory, nor do I know of anyone who is. I only looked carefully at his paper when I posted the above comment (though I knew about it). I previously understood that he claimed the Standard Model was contained inside E8. If that is true then there are essentially no new predictions, just an interesting coincidence. However I see now that his theory is not the Standard Model, but a SU(2)xSU(2)xSU(4) Pati-Salam model. This implies several new particles that could be seen at the LHC. Garrett claims several things which are not totally justified and require some more calculations to find out (for instance...that the gauge groups unify).
The Pati-Salem model is well-studied (though not currently -- it was popular in the 80's). It is often known as a "leptoquark" theory. However I do not see in Garrett's paper the particle content necessary to make leptoquarks, nor the particles (higgses) to break the SU(2)xSU(2)xSU(4) to the Standard Model's U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3).
I think the problem is sociological. Garrett made a big splash in the gravity community, but I haven't heard a peep from any of my colleagues in particle physics. I will ask around at CERN next week. I know of no good reason why people are not studying it more carefully and making predictions (though, I'm sure Garrett is, but his background is gravity, not colliders).
Flash in the pan? Lots of stuff in the popular press is. For instance TFA is probably an effect of non-gaussian errors, but by making a splashy title they've gotten themselves a Science magazine article. Garrett got his flash partly because of his non-traditional lifestyle. Moral of the story is that the things that appear in the popular press are usually "hero" or "eureka!" stories. But science is full of neither heroes nor daily eureka's. I could complain further about the state of science reporting...
Keep in mind that there are literally hundreds of theories capable of explaining TFA (assuming it's not a statistical fluctuation), and you won't hear about them in the popular press because they're not sexy and hard to explain. For instance, a 4th generation of quarks or a complex higgs sector. Garrett's theory might be one of them, we don't know yet. We don't usually explain these theories to the public because explaining 100 different complicated theories, 99 of which must be wrong...is probably a waste of the public's time. Instead, we'll turn on the LHC this year, which will undoubtedly generate tons of popular articles, and hopefully at least one mostly-correct theory. ;)
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I think thats a little harsh although has some grounding in reality. It is true that theoretically, there are many many theories out there which predict unobserved particles and one is invented almost every week. The Higgs for example, supersymmetry (SUSY) is another mainstream one. Simply put we have no idea whats going on except that the Standard Model seems to describe it amazingly well. However its incomplete, has many prob such as the baryon asymmetry one being discussed, then the many theories which try to solve these problems and all (or almost all) bring in new particles. This is the scientific method, we do an experiment, we note we dont full understand it and then we hypothesize a theory to explain it. We then test this theory to see if its correct and this is where most of the new theories fall down.
In particle physics right now, the problem is that we have a model, the Standard Model, which we know is incomplete (doesnt include gravity for a start) but it more or less explains every experimental result we've every produced (neutrino masses are argueably accommodated with some small extension). We lack experimental data to even give us a hint what might be beyond it and this has been the case for a long time. So theory has had nothing to do but invent crazy models and wait for the experimentalists to catch up (which we hope to do this year, it'll be exciting). Hence why you see a lot of crazy models around with zero experimental evidence supporting them.
The other problem is that we are all tired and sick of the Standard Model, we want to know whats beyond it so people really really want to find evidence of new physics beyond it. This means that people are quick to jump on small effects and claim its new physics which is probably where you are coming from. Usually they get shouted down by the rest of the quickly community but it does happen with alarming regularity (see pentaquarks, 160 GeV Higgs last year as two recent examples). Whats worse is that for something like the result in the article, its an indirect evidence in a QCD environment which basically means there are so many effects going on, this could easily be explained by the Standard Model. So basically nobody believes it for now. QCD is what binds mesons (such as the B+,B0) and baryons (such as the proton and neutron) together. Unfortunately, we cant solve it right now, except for high energies so often there are many effects which later turn out just because we make a mistake in our approximations in order to get a solution. Compare with the CDF Run I jet excess which later just turned out because QCD effects werent being taken into account. This is the reason that physicists wont believe anything which says new physics right now unless theres a clear unambiguous peak in a mass spectrum, ie make and detect a new particle in your detector. Now this could be genuine evidence but we've all been here before so I think the community takes the feeling that we'll wait for more supporting evidence and for people to offer up alternative explanations before we say its new physics.
No, it couldn't. One thing that is definitely known is that the dark matter is not made of regular atoms (baryonic matter). Baryonic matter is known to comprise no more than about four percent of the total density of stuff in the universe, versus about 25 percent for dark matter. If the universe were 25 percent baryonic, all sorts of measurements would come out differently than they do:
(1) The primordial abundance of elements, which is observed to be about 76 percent hydrogen and 24 percent helium and a trace of lithium, would be very different. See here
(2) The signatures of acoustic oscillations in the Cosmic Micrwave Background would be much larger than they are observed to be. See here
(3) Any extra baryons would show up in the hot gas between galaxies in large clusters, which is very accurately measured by X-ray satellites. See here.
(4) Dark matter consisting of small condensed objects like Jupiter-sized planets would show up in gravitational microlensing surveys. They don't.
We don't know what dark matter is, but we sure as hell know what it's not, and it is not ordinary matter that just happens to be dark. There are multiple, independent lines of evidence which support this conclusion.