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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.
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?
Yeah, maybe not doom. People are already upset of the minuscule chance of LHC creating a black hole. Maybe they should name it in honor of Obama who hails from the same state (Illinois).
Call it the Hope particle.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Perhaps they learned their lesson from the whole "God Particle" thing. If I were a physicist, I'd be really bloody annoyed after about the third time some babbling moron, convinced that my work had theological significance, interrupted me. Nobody is going to interrupt the guys working on Y(1440).
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!
Hrm. How about we call the mystery particle the "Obamaton"? Or perhaps it's a new type of quark, closely related to the 'strange' quark, the 'change' quark?
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.
If it's related to the quark, it should be called Rom or Nog.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I dunno. It might cause a reunion of The Village People, if they can figure out a way to handle the extra syllable.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It was just a bat clinging to the inside of the accelerator.
If it's related to the quark, it should be called Rom or Nog.
Hmm. If I was a particle physicist, I'd be leaning more toward "nagus".
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Yea, but with doom in the name, maybe they could get there hands on some of that sweet DHS "anti-terrorist" money. "We gotta do more basic science research, don't want the terrorists getting there hands on the doom particle"
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
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
Anti-terrorism, scare mongering is so 2008. Economic Stimulus is the new antiTerrorism. But I can't think of a better name than Hope.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Nobody is going to interrupt the guys working on Y(1440).
That's because Y(1440) is a particle of no real consequence... not like Y(1441), the only unknown particle capable of stabilizing a miniature black hole long enough for it to grow by 'eating' the nearby matter.
If they had discovered that particle your work
would surely
be inter
upt
te
d
.
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.
Or name it Y4w36
hmm, maybe that wont work so well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You Federation types are so smug.
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!
I dunno. It might cause a reunion of The Village People, if they can figure out a way to handle the extra syllable.
"Y (Gross times Ten)"
Where's the extra syllable?
I am anarch of all I survey.
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.