Slashdot Mirror
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?
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. . . .
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!
Preferably while tripping.
Best Slashdot Co
...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...
From Wikipedia:
The quark flavors were given their names for a number of reasons. The up and down quarks are named after the up and down components of isospin, which they carry.[48] Strange quarks were given their name because they were discovered to be components of the strange particles discovered in cosmic rays years before the quark model was proposed; these particles were deemed "strange" because they had unusually long lifetimes.[49] Glashow, who coproposed charm quark with Bjorken, is quoted as saying, "We called our construct the 'charmed quark', for we were fascinated and pleased by the symmetry it brought to the subnuclear world."[50] The names "top" and "bottom", coined by Harari, were chosen because they are "logical partners for up and down quarks".[36][37][49] In the past, top and bottom quarks were sometimes referred to as "truth" and "beauty" respectively, but these names have mostly fallen out of use.[51]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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"
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!]
I've always wondered but I never bothered to check Wikipedia... I think I spend too much time in meatspace.
Thanks a lot!
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
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
It's curiouser and curiouser.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
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
Probably by ending the series in a fluffy feel-good piece of facile crap.
No I'm not bitter.
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.
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.
The difference in hydrogen bond strength affects cell division but also messes about with enzyme and protein operation.
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.