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New Type of Particle May Have Been Found
An anonymous reader writes "The LHC is out of commission, but the Tevatron collider at Fermilab is still chugging along, and may have just discovered a new type of particle that would signal new physics. New Scientist reports that the Tevatron's CDF detector has found muons that seem to have been created outside of the beam pipe that confines the protons and anti-protons being smashed together. The standard model can't explain the muons, and some speculate that 'an unknown particle with a lifetime of about 20 picoseconds was produced in the collision, traveled about 1 centimeter, through the side of the beam pipe, and then decayed into muons.' The hypothetical particle even seems to have the right mass to account for one theory of dark matter."
Chewons
I wish it was the god particle, rendering the whole point of building the LHC an epic fail. It would just be deliciously ironic.
The New Scientist article points to a paper at arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.5357
with the rather less sensational title:
Study of multi-muon events produced in p-pbar collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV
I'm amused to note that the author list stretches over three pages, which I gather is common for this sort of paper.
John Conway talks about this over at Cosmic Variance: http://cosmicvariance.com/2008/11/02/cdf-ghost-muons/
An absolutely good question. I've been wondering about the effect of radiation from GRBs, blackholes, and other radiation sources in the Universe for a while now. That radiation must have an effect other than raising the ambient temperature a little bit. Even if the radiation is not enough to fry all life on this planet, it's possible that radiation may have an effect on the Sun's activity... which in turn directly affects our climate.
I do understand that the collider is a bit different than our Sun, but does anyone know what effect gamma ray bursts have on the efficacy or activity of our Sun?
With all the hubbub about global warming, I've been getting more interested in what affect our planet's climate. Recently we have found/discovered a few things that might have some effect. While it seems a small thing at best, what is not known is the effect of combined events (or lack of) from outside our solar system on how our Sun behaves.
Note: I am not convinced that man has not contributed to climate change. I simply am not convinced that we truly understand how and what controls our climate. I'd like to know all the factors that have nothing to do with mankind's interference. Until we do, there is no method to fully describe the climate model, nor predict any change to it.
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Not to ask the blatantly obvious, but if it's the right mass for one theory of dark matter, I can't help but wonder where they are all being produced. Given a life of 20 picoseconds, I can't imagine that there would be monstrous factories of these things all over the universe to account for the stupidly large amount of mass they are supposed to account for. How come we haven't found them before?
I thought the same thing at first, but the article states that they are theorizing that the particle produced is not a dark matter particle itself, but rather the particle that carries forces between dark matter particles. It is entirely possible that there are stable dark-matter particles, but for the force-carrying particles to be unstable when produced in isolation.
The Tevatron is big money science. the LHC is bigger money science.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I work in electrical engineering, and unfortunately very few people play with scopes and irons anymore. "Hardware" engineering is mostly abstract concept juggling on computers these days.
I'm the guy with the 45 year old tube scope with Nixie tube digital readout and the two soldering irons...
The first thing to realise, regardless of which side of the debate you are, is that there is a lot more politics than science being done on climate change.
I believe this is why the acceptable term has now become 'climate change' rather than 'global warming'.
I'm pretty certain that we do influence the climate. But Parent has a very good point that argument without all the facts is still nothing more than rhetoric.
There are plenty of theories on either side of that debate, but way too much political pressure (agenda?) to even allow for any form of educated and intelligent debate.
Whoever thinks this is Al Gore vs. Big Oil definitely hasn't looked into it deeply enough.
If you want to reduce CO2, *plant trees*. Elaborating a CO2 tax scam is merely a tool for social control.
Mind the frickin' laser...
I conjecture that it's the same old physics, and that we only understand it a bit better.
Physics is not Truth, nor is it nature or reality. It is an attempt at a scientific model of nature. When we only had Newtonian mechanics, General relativity was new physics. New models, new math, new science, same reality.
That's because it takes a lot of electricity to cool the collider down. Europeans like to use a lot of electricity to keep their buildings warm in winter, which drives up the price of electricity. So they wait for summer when electricity is cheaper and the giant German solar panel farms are pumping out lots of jiggawatts.
More than possible. Of the force carrying particles we know of, only the photon is stable. The graviton, if it exists, should be stable. But the W+/-, Z and all the various flavours of gluons are unstable.
The real stuff has gotten pretty tough. I had the challenge once to rework a preproduction board to prove a design change. I was way out of my comfort zone.
Resistors these days are the size of a juvenile flea. If you drop one, let it go man... it's gone. ICs aren't much better. You have to use IPA and a lintfree cloth just to clean the soldering tweezers. It takes a 60x microscope and a steady hand. I was really regretting my caffeine habit. And the tiny static charges make everything sticky. The leadfree solder takes more heat so you have to be extra careful not so bake the components to death. And don't stab yourself with the tweezers. They look like pencil erasers in the scope but they'll penetrate your skin with no resistance, burning the whole way.
It worked. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. I am thrilled to have had the experience. I wish I knew a vendor for the surgical point soldering tweezers.
Respect to the asian ladies in the factory that do this all day for a pittance, with nothing more than a magnifying glass and grim determination.
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an unknown particle with a lifetime of about 20 picoseconds was produced in the collision, traveled about 1 centimeter
That is 16000 times faster than light..!
There are several mysterious particles that aren't easily identified by the Standard Model. One in particular is the X(3872) particle, which was discovered by Japanese scientists and confirmed by other laboratories. It might be a tetraquark particle or even a meson molecule, but scientists are just guessing for now.
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2008/04/13/the-charming-case-of-x3872/
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
But Parent has a very good point that argument without all the facts is still nothing more than rhetoric.
With respect, thats not necessarily a very good point at all.
The OP, for example, illustrates that we don't have all the facts regarding particle physics.
The application of your "very good point" to this would result in our concluding that anything involving particle physics is "nothing more than rhetoric".
Taking a slightly broader view, one can conclude that either all scientific fields are "nothing more than rhetoric", or that one can in fact, draw meaningful conclusions in the absence of all of the facts.
I would humbly submit that evidence overwhelmingly supports the latter position.
It may be true to say that in the abesence of sufficient facts, one has nothing but rhetoric, or that the confidence we can have in and the accuracy of conclusions is proportional to the completeness of the facts on which they are based...but thats an entirely different position to the one you took.
The question, regarding climate change (and, perhaps more importantly, the anthropogenic aspects thereof) is not whether we have all facts or not, but rather whehter or not we have sufficient facts from which to draw meaningful conclusions.