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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
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
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.
damn it, after all those years and all that viagra I thought I finally had my Hadron!
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.
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.
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?
It was just a bat clinging to the inside of the accelerator.
Photons don't slow, they redshift. You're probably thinking of the speed of light in non-vacuum.
They're magically suspicious.
Also they should rename the SciFi channel to Psi Phi.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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"
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
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!?
Go ahead, Gordon. Insert the specimen.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
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. "
Uh... I authorized it. Problem?
(Signed) H.B.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
And that, my friends, is why I'll stick to software engineering, thank you very much.
Meanwhile, in other news, researchers announced the discovery of yet another form of buffer overflow. The discovery was announced by a laboratory in Russia, where a newly discovered malformed URL was accelerated toward an IE8 target.
Have gnu, will travel.
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!
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
Here's my read on it: quarks are the constituents of a wide range of particles, from protons and neutrons to B-mesons etc. The fundamental interaction that holds these particles together is the "colour force" or "strong nuclear force", which arises due to the exchange of gluons between quarks in the same way that the electro-magnetic force arises because of the exchange of photons between charged particles.
Virtual particle exchange is made possible by the uncertainty principle, which for a massless particle like the photon produces forces with infinite range, but for gluons, which have mass, it results in a short-range force. As well as mass, gluons also have "colour charge", so they interact with each other as well as with quarks, resulting in the confinement property of the strong force: if you try to pull two bound quarks apart, the gluons holding them together self-interact in a way that makes the force stronger rather than weaker. If you pull really hard you get new quarks popping out of the vacuum, and jets of exotic particles. You never get a naked quark.
Computing the bound states of quarks is really, really hard because the force is so strong. The basic technique we use in quantum electro-dynamics is perturbation theory, where we get an approximate result and then apply a series of smaller and smaller corrections to it. Because of the self-interaction of the gluons, for quantum chromo-dynamics these corrections get larger and larger, and various other mathematical techniques have to used to get a well-behaved answer.
This means that while we can predict pretty well the excited states of atoms, we can't do that for quarks. I would bet the most likely form of this particle is some kind of multi-quark object (more than just a simple pair) whose existence depends on the details of the colour force. We are still learning what those details are, and this particle and others like it will be useful laboratories to reveal them.
So the significance of the discovery is that it provides us with a new way of studying quantum chromo-dynamic interactions. Not the world's biggest deal, but still very cool and useful.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
a) Combining quarks into hadrons in different ways leads to different properties of the resulting bound state. The mass is an obvious example. Unfortunately, while rather easily accessible experimentally, it is hard to predict the mass of bound states with high precision in QCD (the theory describing the strong force). Others properties can be more powerful here. For example the intrinsic angular momentum (spin) and the parity of the bound state. The decay product trajectories from particles with different spin/parity will show different angular distributions. By measuring these distributions one can rule out certain combinations.
b) In general what would be required is someone working out in more detail how these predicted particles would interact with known particles, in this case charm and strange quarks. I just read through the article you linked to. According to the article, all predicted particles are gauge bosons, i.e. they introduce new interactions. The number in the name Y(4140) refers to the mass measured in MeV. A gauge boson with such a low mass coupling to quarks would have been noticed already. Furthermore, the reported observation does not hint anything exotic. Just something that is perfectly allowed in the Standard Model, although not fully understood in its dynamics yet. So I'm afraid, no, this is not a candidate for your favourite model.
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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.