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First Creation of Anti-Strange Hypernuclei
runagate writes "Brookhaven National Laboratory has created a heretofore unknown form of matter. The matter we normally encounter, and are composed of, has nuclei of protons and neutrons that contain no strange quarks. It was known that anti-strange matter could exist, and using the Solenoidal Tracker at Brookhaven's RHIC, scientists detected a couple of dozen instances of antihypernuclei. The 'Z' axis of the Periodic Table has already been extended in the positive direction by the discovery of hypernuclei, but this new discovery extends it in the negative direction for this new type of 'strange' antimatter — which may exist in the core of collapsed stars and may provide insight into why our universe appears to be made almost solely of matter and not antimatter." The Register's coverage reproduces a helpful diagram.
I can follow stuff like this, but every time I hear it, Treknobabble comes to mind. Strange quarks, you say!
Living With a Nerd
Quote: "Hypernuclei bring a third dimension into play, based on the strangeness quantum number of the nucleus, thus allowing the territory of antinuclei with nonzero strangeness." ... Just when I thought I was starting to get it ... :-\
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
"Atomsmash boffins' reverse alchemy bizarro-stuff triumph"
"Sometimes there is more strangeness than none at all. Or less."
the article is complete with a "Bootnote"
so i'm under the impression of having advanced quantum physics described to me by a drunk with a cockney accent. i guess that's helpful...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
when this new form of matter comes in contact with the normal matter that the rest of the universe is made of? Do we get a gigantic explosion (as we would with matter and anti-matter), of do the particles just avoid each other like the plague?
The linked article at the register, with the helpful diagram, kinda makes that sentence make sense. It also has gems like '“The strangeness value could be non-zero" [in such places] says Chen, a statement with which no doubt most would agree.'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/05/negative_strangeness/
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I have, of course, discovered and documented both at work. prior art does exist.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
"Essentially, according to their explanation, you've got your regular old Periodic Table of elements, which no doubt we all recall at least dimly from skool, which is based on the number of protons (Z) in an atom's nucleus."
lol "skool"
in any other publication, this is an embarassing typo. in the register, its simply a sly joke about education
carry on, uh, topflight british word-scurvy boffins!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm guessing that with a name like "negatively strange antihypernucleic antimatter", Star Trek et al. will be all over this. Countdown until the term appears in sci-fi shows...
Probably... But what I'm really hoping is that scientists -- and by extension sci-fi shows -- adopt El Reg's proposed term for negative strangeness "hypermundanity".
Just imagine Data saying that. "Captain, the gaseous anomaly we've entered contains high levels of hypermundanity."
"*yawn* Tell me about it, Commander."
The enemies of Democracy are
I like The Register, but it seems all their article (sub)titles are generated in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven as well...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
...why is it called a "strange" quark anyways?
This is slightly off-topic, but from all the names they could have given the damn thing, why give it a bizarre name like that? As if particle physics weren't confusing already...
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
Tell me something - if you're driving you car near the speed of light, and you turn the headlights on, will they do anything?
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
We've known for quite a while that this sort of thing is possible. All quarks have the exact same strong interactions, after all. This is like strontium displacing calcium in bones -- it's got the same valence structure, it has similar properties, and it's no surprise that it happens.
RHIC is a nifty machine for a lot of reasons. It provides an experimental counterpart to lattice QCD calculations of the equation of state of the quark-gluon plasma, which is the natural state of the universe at very high temperatures. But "OMG! An antistrange wound up in a bound state!" isn't why this machine is worthwhile, even if it does give El Reg something funny to write about.
No, seriously, I'm asking.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
from scratch? this might take a while.
welcome our new Anti-Strange Hypernucleic over... er, I mean under... I mean inside-out .... Um. Let me get back to you on that one.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Preferably while tripping.
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This story is really a marketing gimmick for the new Alice in Wonderland movie that opened today, isn't it?
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I swear to god I'm going to write a script for my browser that blocks loading any page with the word "boffin" in it.
Anywhere I can get a SERIOUS interpretation of this event that isn't busy self-fellating over how gigglingly clever it's own writers are?
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
if you're driving you car near the speed of light
Hypothetically you've already crashed, so the headlights wont help.
is how not having strange quarks is the strange issue...
Hum.. strange
how long until
Hypernuclei with negative strangeness haven't been "created for the first time". They've been produced in RHIC collisions for as long as they've been running (with sufficient energy), and it's only now that we've been able to see them.
That, however, is quite the accomplishment, as relativistic heavy ions collisions are so complex that we're hardly begun to understand what happens in them. Think a two-hundred-truck collision at 1,000 mph, and you're interested in what screw came from which truck and how the drivers' shoes were tied.
[No truck drivers were hurt in the writing of this comment!]
simply judging by the hyper-british name of "nigel molesworth" (is there possibly a more british name?), i have to accept that i am way over my head here in terms of obscure british esoterica
anyway, the joke works across the pond, if for completely different reasons
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Wouldn't an Anti-Strange Hypernuclei just be a Normal Hypernuclei?
No.
"Strange", in this context, means "having the attribute of positive strangeness", which means that these hypernuclei are composed of at least one nucleon which, in turn, is composed of at least one strange quark (as opoosed to "ordinary" up and down quarks).
Thus, "anti-strange" means "having the attribute of negative strangeness", which stands for all the ablove blah-blah, but with "strange anti-quark" inserted instead of "strange quark".
Particle physicists have basically been fucking with us for years, haven't they?
sic transit gloria mundi
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/100304_antimatter.htm Mind boggling stuff. I still don't understand why this accounts for where the 'missing' mass of the universe is. Am I right in saying that the likelihood of this 'Anti-stuff' existing in the quark-gluon plasma in the ultra high pressures of quasars etc is as likley as 'normal' matter and thats where the lost mass is?
If you can read this, it's already too late.
Is anti-matter matter? Could we build stuff out of it?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Never mind its nuclear differences its:
Heavier
Different hydrogen bond strength (which causes toxicity in biological systems in large doses)
Completely transparent to visible light spectrum - light water is slightly blue due to red end absorbtion
Different melting/freezing points
Heavy water ice will sink if put in normal water
It is worthwhile research. For instance: the neutron is stable in the nucleus, but not outside (its lifetime as a free particle is ~15 minutes). Now you put a Lambda into the nucleus. A free lambda has a lifetimetime of ~10^-10 seconds. Will it be stable inside the nucleus or not? Will it's lifetime be significantly altered? That's something you don't know without experiment. Even if you have a theory, without experiment you don't know if it's right.
Didn't they do that once? Or was that the cement mixed one?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugLwXlpJi6o
Probably thats why is a new kind of matter: don't matter.
To you, the headlights will behave exactly as they would were your car "stationary" they will emit light photons which separate from your car at the speed of light -- more on that in a second. To the observer watching your car approach at near the speed of light, your headlights will emit light photons which approach the observer at the speed of light in his reference frame, that fact that you are moving doesn't change that; the velocity of your car and the light emitted doesn't add together -- the light he sees from your headlights will, however, be blueshifted by your approach speed. The reason I put "stationary" in parentheses above is because in your reference frame you and your car are stationary and it is the things you are passing which are moving at near the speed of light. Kind of a poor explanation of Special Relativity in what I wrote -- consult a more authoritative description for a better one.
I mean how will the Sorcerer Supreme combat such a thing?
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I see what you did there.
Any particle physicists out there patient enough to answer what is probably an ignorant question? As I remember, Strange are second generation quarks. Can third generation Bottom quarks can do the same thing? Are Bottom/Anti-Bottom Hypernuclei theoretically possible or are the energies involved just to high to allow it?
Actually, D2O is not generally toxic to biological systems. Multicellular organisms don't exactly like it, but it is possible to grow bacteria and yeasts in heavily deuterated media. It is generally used to produce deuterated proteins for various analytical methods. Bacteria do tolerate 12C and 15N diets rather well, too - of course, the isotopic effect is lower there than for hydrogen. I am not exactly sure where the difference between unicellular and multicellular organisms comes from in that regard.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Yes!
The light from your headlights will be, as far as you're concerned, travelling at the speed of light. As in, the light coming out of your headlights will go zipping out in front of you in the blink of an eye, not crawling in front of you as if they can barely keep up.
Yet, a 'stationary' observer would see the light travelling at the exact same speed. If they had a device that could measure how fast the light was travelling, and you had a similar device, and measured the same light coming out of your headlights, both devices would read the exact same speed.
Mindbending, innit?
That's Relativity for you.
IANAP, but I'm guessing it has something to do with the fact that the temperatures and pressures inside a collapsed star are far beyond the environment in normal nature, so weird things are bound to happen there, just like weird things happen when we accelerate particles to high velocities in particle colliders and smash them into each other. There aren't very many other places in the universe that we know off offhand where such extreme conditions exist, except for black holes.
Someone please mod that AC's informative and interesting comment up. And if my "no karma bonus" checkbox didn't work, please mod me down.
Free Martian Whores!
It's simple, really: We know about most of the matter that is common around here, which is matter that exists under the conditions that we have here.
Now, when we go ahead and try to create hitherto unknown forms of matter, we create extreme conditions not normally encountered around us. A way to do this that we understand fairly well is to create extreme pressures and extreme temperatures, as in RHIC collisions.
As it happens, those are the conditions inside collapsed stars, so when we discover new forms of matter this way, it's likely that it exist there, as well.
Your friendly neighborhood hopefully-soon-to-be astrophysicist
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The difference in hydrogen bond strength affects cell division but also messes about with enzyme and protein operation.
Summary fucked the pooch
I'll create a GUI interface in Visual Basic and see if I can track these strange particles.
But international boffins analysing the RHIC gold-buster results have now discovered a an anti-deuterium nucleus containing an antiproton, an antineutron - and, gobsmackingly - an "anti-strange" quark.
The quark is not in addition to the antiproton & antineutron - it replaces an up or down quark in the antiproton or antineutron.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
Actually, that would be DHO not D2O, as only one Hydrogen is deuterated.
Just doing my duty, keeping Slashdot pedanticism alive.
I am amazed at how The Register is basically a /. with British tongue-in-cheek humoUr added. Almost every paragraph of the Register article manages to mention "boffinry" or "boffin". As is their wont. Congrats, Register.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
They're still one up on Steven Wright's would-be boss however. (See OP.)
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Amen, bro. Or sis, for that matter.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
If the events (being at such a speed) could be observed by someone standing on the curb, it would appear to them that you were trailing just barely behind the light beam.
Sigh.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
D2O is harmful in moderate quantities. You don't want to just drink the stuff.
Essentially, after you get by all the silly nomenclature, (negative strangeness hypernuclei? are you serious?), all it is is confirming what we already knew. For any matter particle, there is a corresponding antimatter particle.
All the funding goes towards supporting quantum physics and other derivatives of round earth theories! The Roundies are corrupting the government and controlling your mind! I can find dozens of economists, statisticians and marine biologiests who'll support me on this!
I have no fucking clue what all of this means, but I still find it fascinating! Ohhh, uber-cool particle thingies! Shiniiieee!
Of course, that neglects the fact that, if you were actually travelling at c, you would experience no time whatsoever.
As in, the beginning and the end of the universe (or at least your emission and absorption, if you're a photon) are instantaneous to you.
So to answer the question, no you wouldn't see your hi-beams come on, because there's NO TIME in your reference frame. But theoretically... [sigh]-sure. You would see your hi-beams come on just fine. But it's kind of a non-question, since it presupposes that time (and hence, change) exists at light speed; as in, it doesn't even make sense as a question.
And, as already stated, an outside observer would measure both you and your "emitted" photons traveling at c in their reference frame; partially or completely because you are in a completely timeless "freeze frame" state relative to any non-lightspeed observer.
That's the easy stuff. You really want to cause brainhurt? Look up the "ladder and barn" paradox. It notes that objects shorten as they approach lightspeed; so let's say that you're carrying a ladder going so near to c that your length is cut in half to an outside observer. Thing is, you're still your "normal" length in your own reference frame... Now let's imagine that the barn is only as deep as 2/3 the length of your ladder. An outside observer would see you get all the way into the barn before you struck the back wall (relativistic explosion notwithstanding). You, however, in your own reference frame should see yourself only get partway in before you strike the back wall.
So which happened? Both? Neither? In the universe we know, only one should have happened; you either got all the way in, or you didn't. Now cue a LOT of handwaving by physicists that both A)ties your brain up in knots, and B)basically says "We dunno.". It's a NASTY one, and probably means that we don't understand the relativistic universe as well as we thought. My theory is that the universe "flattens out" relative to a lightspeed observer, so they both see the same thing happen (it fits) in the same way that time "flattens" to nothing at you approach c, but I'm not a physicist- though it does solve the problem, and kind of makes sense inside of the framework.