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Fermilab Detects "Doubly Strange" Particle
DynaSoar writes "While its cousin/competitor site, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, remains offline, Fermilab's Digital Hadron Calorimeter continues to produce significant results. Recently Fermilab announced discovery of the Omega-sub-b baryon, a 'doubly-strange' particle. This baryon, containing two strange quarks and one bottom quark, has six times the mass of a proton. 'The Omega-sub-b is the latest entry in the "periodic table of baryons." Baryons are particles formed of three quarks, the most common examples being the proton and neutron. ... The observation of this "doubly strange" particle, predicted by the Standard Model, is significant because it strengthens physicists' confidence in their understanding of how quarks form matter. In addition, it conflicts with a 2008 result announced by CDF's sister experiment, DZero. In August 2008, the DZero experiment announced its own observation of the Omega-sub-b based on a smaller sample of Tevatron data. This result contradicted some predictions of the Standard Model, suggesting a "new physics." The new result leads to the possibility that the prior results are not accurate.'"
DZero and CDF are two different detectors running on the same ring. Both results came from Fermilab.
This is only tangentially related, but I find it interesting.
Anyway, most people tend to focus on competition between CERN and Fermilab, but the reality is that there is very little competition between the labs. The real competition is between the detector experiments (D0 vs CDF on the Tevatron and CMS vs ATLAS on the LHC)
Fermilab has invested tons of resources into the LHC, and CERN has invested tons of resources into the Tevatron. In fact, the LHC is a replacement for the Tevatron, which will shut down once the LHC starts running (we're expecting to run until 2010 or 2011). So what's next? One of the main advantages of the Tevatron was that it was able to reach unprecedented levels of luminosity, so this allows us to explore very rare events, which are usually indicative of processes mediated by very heavy particles. The mass of these particles far exceed the energies the LHC is capable of producing directly, so Fermilab's next generation of experiments will focus on rare processes prohibited by the Standard model, but predicted by many flavors of super-symmetry.
For example, Mu2e is an experiment proposed to run at Fermilab ~2016, which will seek to observe the neutrino-less decay of a muon into an electron. From what I recall, this process occurs with a chance of 10^-54 under the standard model and ~10^-16 under SUSY. Basically, you need a heck of a lot of muons (and very little of everything else) to be able to run this experiment effectively.
One of the factors pushing string theory is experiments that suggest 'something' is wrong with the standard model, without really pointing to a particular flaw. A result that supports the standard model is a result that makes various string theories less attractive. There are still some string theory variants that look interesting in the light of astrophysics (a few because of dark matter related data, but especially a lot from dark energy related data). This is one less reason to focus on string theory because of sub-atomic physics experiments.
Also, this experiment has a longer run and more 'robust' data collection than the one it conflicts with. There are real reasons to think this one is the more meaningful result, which is why it's being suggested the earlier one may have errors. If you are looking at a tiny disagreement with the standard model, say 0.001%, and your experimental error is possibly as big as the disagreement, that's not very helpful. If your experimental error is a full order of magnitude better, whatever you provided proof for becomes meaningful. Much beyond that, the results are 'very significant', all work in related areas has to take them into account, and the people who produced them are possible Nobel recipients.
Who is John Cabal?