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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.
It was just a bat clinging to the inside of the accelerator.
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
Uh... I authorized it. Problem?
(Signed) H.B.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
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!