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Fermilab Discovers Untheorized Particle
alevy writes to mention that scientists at Fermilab have detected a new, completely untheorized particle. Seems like Fermi has been a hotbed of activity lately with the discovery of a new single top quark and narrowing the gap twice on the Higgs Boson particle. "The Y(4140) particle is the newest member of a family of particles of similar unusual characteristics observed in the last several years by experimenters at Fermilab's Tevatron as well as at KEK and the SLAC lab, which operates at Stanford through a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. 'We congratulate CDF on the first evidence for a new unexpected Y state that decays to J/psi and phi,' said Japanese physicist Masanori Yamauchi, a KEK spokesperson. 'This state may be related to the Y(3940) state discovered by Belle and might be another example of an exotic hadron containing charm quarks. We will try to confirm this state in our own Belle data.'"
At first I read it as "unauthorized" and thought someone will have a lot of explaining to do.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Just a thought, if they want any more financing out of all this publicity, they should come up with a better name than Y(4140). Seriously, They are going to get some level of coverage for this, which they can use to try to get more financing. But if they stick with Y(4140), well it may not amount to nearly as much as if they called it say the Mystery Particle of Doom or something.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Does the creation of a previously unanticipated particle imply issues with current theory significant enough to make the LHC experiment less useful? Even if we find the Higgs, the current model will still be insufficient.
For its name, I nominate Splork!
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
"This state may be related to the Y(3940) state discovered by Belle and might be another example of an exotic hadron containing charm quarks. We will try to confirm this state in our own Belle data."
That was my yearbook quote!
Comment of the year
Thanks for "dumbing down" the article summary:
"...new unexpected Y state that decays to J/psi and phi,' said Japanese physicist Masanori Yamauchi, a KEK spokesperson. 'This state may be related to the Y(3940) state discovered by Belle and might be another example of an exotic hadron containing charm quarks"
Well. That makes things a whole lot clearer now!
or it may be an error, like this other newly discovered untheorized particle may be:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/03/looking-for-exotic-matter.ars
This is why we need to invest in science research, you never know what you might discover when you start looking. Its a shame the US Superconducting Super Collider (which would have been more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider) wasn't built 15 years ago. Where might we be now? Whats $12 billion dollars to make discoveries like this?
Wow, I totally saw that as "exotic hardon"... "hadron" is now my favorite word of all time! :)
"might be another example of an exotic hadron containing charm quarks. We will try to confirm this state in our own Belle data.'"
If we already had it all figured out, it would get pretty boring very quickly.
Sometimes it is reassuring to know that there might be possibilities that we not yet aware of.
I took an offer a couple of weeks ago to work at Fermilab (my start date is in two weeks). Hope there's work left for me to do when I start =)
Damn horde spokespersons always ganking me while I'm herbing for frost lotus in winterspring.
Yeah, "KEK" you too motherf***er!
damn it, after all those years and all that viagra I thought I finally had my Hadron!
Our stranglets we send to you as our emissaries and you destroy them. All your base are belong to us.
Yes, I did skim through the articles.
At several places they claim that photons are weightless as they are not affected by the Higgs field. But, but Photons ARE slowed down, in many circumstances. What am I missing here? Apart from Physics 101 and beyond...
We _know_ that the current theory is insufficient. It doesn't explain gravity, for one thing.
LHC will allow to test some alternative theories, so we really need it. Also, we still need to check the existance of Higgs.
Charm my ass..
He just makes fun of the special olympics.
gives me a massive exotic hadron.
isn't that from the Conway discussion?
Jeez. Small world.
At least, that's the guess. If they're wrong, that would be much more interesting!
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
So that's where my right sock is
Is this the second major hole in the Standard Model? I know neutrinos having mass is sort of a hole. But this sounds like a much larger break with the Standard Model. Anyone following this have more information?
God's just fucking with them.
They deviated a bit from standard analysis procedures. They boosted the anti-mass spectrometer 105%. Bit of a gamble, but they needed the extra resolution.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
"The glimmering rectangular shape that had once seemed no more than a slab of crystal still floated before him, indifferent as he was to the harmless flames of the inferno beneath. It encapsulated yet unfathomed secrets of space and time, but some at least he now understood and was able to command. How obvious - how necessary - was that mathematical ratio of its sides, the quadratic sequence 1 : 4 : 9! And how naive to have imagined that the series ended at this point, in only three dimensions!" -- Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 A Space Odyssey
It was just a bat clinging to the inside of the accelerator.
fuck those cripples.
I, for one, welcome our new untheorized overlords.
It seems to me using computers to process oodles of information could introduce stuff that really isn't there. Like random number generators of the past that actually show patterns when graphed three dimensionally or two dimensionally.
Maybe it is just bug in the CPU's of said systems manifesting regularly when analyzing the data sets...
The regularity would "seem" like a new particle.
Just a thought....
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
"The Y(4140) particle decays into a pair of other particles, the J/psi and the phi, suggesting to physicists that it might be a composition of charm and anticharm quarks. However, the characteristics of this decay do not fit the conventional expectations for such a make-up. Other possible interpretations beyond a simple quark-antiquark structure are hybrid particles that also contain gluons, or even four-quark combinations."
a) how would researchers get from this data to understanding what the particle actually consists of?
b) what would be required to tell if this relates to any of the particle predictions by the An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything?
MilkMiruku
Just like Data used to say.
Some of the very best science has come from somebody looking over data, scratching their head and thinking, "That's funny..."
...laura
Sorry, this paper http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.2229 only has a 3.8 sigma excess. You need a 5 sigma excess to officially claim discovery. However, 3.8 is still very interesting.
charmed quarks
They are a type of quark named "charm quarks".
They are not a quark that has been bewitched.
the new particle probably showed up, because ...
it couldn't get a new mortgage and had to move out
They're magically suspicious.
Also they should rename the SciFi channel to Psi Phi.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I bet in about 200 years, as long as CERN doesn't kill us all, they will find out that protons and electrons really are there own unique universes, and that our universe if just some photon floating around, along with n+1 more photons.
Lots of discussion for what I think not two of the people who replied to this thread actually understand.
Maybe a juxtaposition in the phrase 'hardon' brought you to this page?
That's ok, we don't understand gravity either. See http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Pioneer_anomaly
I understand that sometimes you have to "sell" something to the masses, but sometimes it's better to take the long way around and instead of selling it to them, work on educating them. There's a subtle difference. Marketing is jazzing up the name is marketing. Explaining it's significance and telling you what we could do with that knowledge is education. Education has a longer term significance, and encourages the masses in general to learn more. In the US the populace is getting less and less interested in becoming educated because we are too concerned with marketing and sound bites and what sounds good without explaining what is good.
Besides, the words Calculus, Gravity, Physics, and neuropsychology weren't picked for their marketability.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Good, David wins again.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
As Isaac Asimov wrote, the most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I've found it!), but "That's funny...".
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
. . . or does it make the LHC more dangerous?
So, there was this one guy who rephrased a word and more than 80 comments followed. None of those comments had anything to do with the actual news, just jokes and garbage. Is this slashdot nowadays? Trying to come up with the most original joke or comment. Or is it that none of the users here have any idea of physics!?
according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, March 20th is the anniversary of the first publication of Einstein's theory of relativity.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
No wonder they haven't found that bosun that Higgs lost if they keep getting sidetracked by inconsequential crap all the time. 'I'm gonna look for the bosun right after i finish tidying my cd shelf!', 'Oh, I just have to watch Dr Who on the TV first', they are no better than kids. GROW UP!!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
The Ooops-Leon, which was "discovered" due to an error in reading the data. It was going to be called the upsilon. Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman was the lead on the experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oops-Leon
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
and might be another example of an exotic hadron containing charm quarks.
And that, my friends, is why I'll stick to software engineering, thank you very much.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Fermilab stitched up CERN good and proper. Remember children, never outsource your customer satisfaction.
How convenient is that. You give your main competitor dodgy magnets, shutting them down for months, then you proceed to make all the important discoveries.
Why, oh why, didn't the CERN people make their own magnets?
Stick Men
Why, is Boson suspected of foul play?
That which does not kill us makes us... st
...working on Y(1440).
True, since the new particle is Y(4140); nobody even remembers Y(1440).
Annoying only the dyslexic.
Um. Not sure why parent is modded Troll for that. If there's a charm particle he clearly has a bunch of 'em; is that supposed to be bad? Are social skills that much of a foreign particle to us that we think saying y'have 'em is an insult..?
That which does not kill us makes us... st
Whenever you want the latest on interesting stuff at Fermilab, Tommaso's blog is the place to start, he works with the CDF group. This is his post on the Y(4140).
Also, please correct the summary - there was NOT a discovery of "a new single top quark". There was a discovery of an interaction ("a production") which proceded with a single top and another quark as opposed to the more common ttbar (top+antitop) "production".
Sometimes I can't believe what I read on /.
Uh... I authorized it. Problem?
(Signed) H.B.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
He just makes fun of the special olympics.
Jeez, what a retard.
For some reason, I keep thinking of that episode of "Highway to Heaven", where the special needs coach bends his finger into a fish-hook shape and puts in his mouth..
"A Special Love" or "The Squeaky Wheel".
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I wonder how this maps to Garret Lisi's wonderful TED presentation on "a theory of everything"??
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_everything.html
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
From the description in the article, the new particle wasn't predicted, but still appears to fit with the Standard Model.
This is not an everyday occurrence. It helps point to a new family of hadrons ("exotic" hadrons), so it's an interesting discovery.
On the other hand, it all fits within known physics.
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
I have two observations to make
1. This article, while sounding like it has some potentially important or at least interesting impacts on our global understanding of particles, is not really written anywhere near the layman's level of comprehension, which includes myself. I am not familiar with any of the acronyms or anything deeper then a light familiarity with the terms/names of the science involved. This article would have a similar information giving result if all it said was "Some genius particle lab scientists found some new particles no one ever thought of before. If you're a particle physicist click on the link and we'll tell you all about it. If not, move along home."
2. Most everyone here, based on reading the comments, has a similar level of comprehension as I do with regards to this article, the discovery, and it's potential significance. Mostly everyone seems to be just making jokes about this or that like the particle names, people's incorrect reading of the words in the article or comments (unauthorized, hardon, etc), or other references to scifi and modern day culture.
This story *sounds* interesting to me as it appeals to my sense of exploration and curiosity to learn new things but beyond that this stuff basically reads like sub-atomic particle physics to me. (lame joke, sorry)
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
Who ordered that?
No. Even if we did not find this particle and found the Higgs, the current model would still be insufficient, as it does not account for gravity. Moreover, the Standard Model deals with elementary particles, while this "particle" is actually a resonance, a shortly lived, bound state of several elementary particles. The mathematical concepts on which quantum field theory, in its present form, is built, are not very well suited for describing bound states, so our understanding of such bound states, within the Standard Model, is rather poor. Therefore it is no surprise that such unpredicted composite "particles" show up every now and then (this is not the first one, it is a fairly common occurence).
"You can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them." [Condoleezza Rice]
This has nothing to do with the Higgs. All they have potentially discovered is a new quark bound state. The fact that it is not expected is also not surprising since it is fantastically hard to be able to calculate what bound states there should be.
This is because quarks bind via the strong force and while we understand the principles behind this force what they imply is that at low energy the basic mathematical method typically used (perturbation theory) does not work because the force becomes so strong. Unfortunately nobody has found a real way around this so approximations are used and, not being fundamentally correct, these sometimes get things wrong.
As a particle experimentalist it looks like there are two promissing approaches to really solve this properly. The first is using huge, massively parallel computers and a technique called lattice QCD where you divide space and time into points and solve numerically. The computing power has just recently begun to be enough to start producing useful, believable results. the other technique is a result of string theory that has shown that a really strong force like QCD is mathematically equivalent to a weak force (which can be calculated) but in more than 3+1 dimensions....so there might actually be something useful coming out of string theory sooner than anticipated!
'We congratulate CDF on the first evidence for a new unexpected Y state that decays to J/psi and phi,' said Japanese physicist Masanori Yamauchi, a KEK spokesperson. 'This state may be related to the Y(3940) state discovered by Belle and might be another example of an exotic hadron containing charm quarks. We will try to confirm this state in our own Belle data.'
Holy shit, all those words registered as English but I understood absolutely nothing in the article.
No, correction, "We congratulate" does track.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
This discovery does not imply any problems with the Standard Model at all.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
have you ever watched the Special Olympics?
Its a triumphant example of how humans can overcome difficulties and succeed.
Also, with beer and a creative drinking game, it can be hilarious.
Go read the transcripts between Obama and Jay Leno on 3/19. He flat-out makes fun of the special olympics.
Thats one thing iff I laugh at them. Another thing completely if the President does.
That there were no such things as sub-atomic particles until we started looking for them, and that each particle came into existence only because some scientist went looking for it specifically.
Nullius in verba
Only if it makes you want to stand in front of the particle beam . . .
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
They found Jack Thompson's brain?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The bosun did it, singing.
What people don't understand about the LHC is that not finding the Higgs is almost a bigger result than finding it. If we find the Higgs we can go "yep, that's it just as we expected." If we don't find it, it means our whole understanding of the universe is wrong and we will need the LHC more than ever to find out what the hell is really going on.
The LHC is not only there to find the Higgs, it is also there to search for stuff we don't know about, just like this particle. No matter whether the higgs exists or not, the LHC will find things that will revolutionize particle physics
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1452#comic
If it's not the God particle,
And it's not the Oh My God particle,
Allow me to introduce ....
The OMTFG particle.
Why nobody was able to find any alien civilizations yet ? - That's because of there are black holes in place of them now.... Why not ? Congratulations ! We are step closer to the anti-sun ! Black hole - is that the top of the mankind capabilities they could "create" ? For every small problem with collider smart scientists say: ohh well, - we didn't account for that small issue. Keeping things this way, there could appear the moment when there is nobody left to say: ohh, - we didn't account for that small issue. 99% of population are delegating their future and safety to the remaining 1%. They also hope that this 1% knows all possible consequences. Isn't that scary ? If present science are so sure about all possible consequences of creating black holes using Large Hadron Collider or any collider that size, than why any expirements needed ? How people that are not "against science" can guarantee any HollyDolly mother, that she's childs are in safe place, if they are going to create something that they know nothing about ? Especially if this nothing has one way information flow. Information can enter black hole but can't escape.
That doesn't mean we don't understand gravity. Your own link gives a long list of possible explanations of the Pioneer anomaly other than gravitational anomalies. It just means we don't know what it is we don't understand — maybe gravity, maybe something even more exotic, maybe something mundane.
Read the article in the latest Astronomy magazine. Really, we are puzzled by it.
Probably not the Torah (i.e. the Old Testament of the Christian Bible), as that was written about 1100 BCE. It has to be old, really old. Think more like the Egyptian texts or Gilgamesh as you mention.
I know people are puzzled by it, but once again, the Pioneer anomaly does not prove that "we don't understand gravity". We don't understand the Pioneer anomaly. Whether it has to do with gravity is another question.
I have not authorized it.
/. Bozos also!
And, as an addendum, I have unauthorized YOU!
In my Soviet Higgs-Boson Universe, YOU are unauthorized.
And that goes for the rest of you
Now get out of my damn cloud chamber!
-
Extracting sunbeams from
"Moreover, the Standard Model deals with elementary particles, while this "particle" is actually a resonance, a shortly lived, bound state of several elementary particles."
I don't get this thing about bound particles.
If we have the ability to arbitrary say 'that thing there that looks like a particle actually isn't', then what's to say that *all* the particles we currently consider 'elementary' aren't just resonance modes? Seems like it would be a simpler model.
I'm pretty sure that nature- at least in the macroscopic domain - doesn't make much of a distinction between what it considers 'objects' and what it considers 'aggregations' or resonances or waveforms or whatever. It's all just interlinked stuff that we happen to detect in one mode or another.
To the extent that current quantum maths maintains this arbitrary-seeming idea of certain particle-events being 'elementary', it suggests that it's broken.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
just out of curiosity. references follow...
http://sifter.org/~aglisi/
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/15/2322225
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/22/0210218&from=rss