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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
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!
It really has to hurry up to do that, 100 ps doesn't give you much time to do anything. Plus,with energy in greater energy out, you can't get a bigger explosion than the one you created to create the particles to begin with. In case the annihilation of two strange atoms should destroy earth, please give yourself a Noble price on the way out.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for 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. . . .
No.
Strange quarks behave just like down quarks (which are one of the two constituents of protons and neutrons). The only difference is that they have a higher mass.
Y'know how heavy water is just like light water, except one of the hydrogens is replaced with a deuterium atom? This stuff is similar, except one of the down quarks is swapped with a strange.
Unlike deuterium, though, these lambda baryons are unstable, because the strange quark is unstable. They can decay by the weak interaction (the same thing responsible for beta decay) into an up quark and a couple of leptons (electrons and neutrinos). The amount of time that weak decays take is very long compared to the time-scales involved in quark physics, but it's still very short compared to a second.
As I'm on my way out, my last words will be "It's spelled Nobel..."
Thanks. I wanted to say something meaningful! :(
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
No, seriously, I'm asking.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
That's all good, but the major discovery here is actually anti-hypernucleons made with anti-strange quarks. So yeah, they will annihilate on contact with normal matter just like non-strange anti-matter.
The enemies of Democracy are
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".
Except for the anti-strange quark. Since regular matter doesn't contain strange quarks, the anti-strange quark will probably not find a partner to annihilate with, therefore it will live on until it decays into an anti-up, which then can annihilate with an up quark from ordinary matter.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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!
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
Is anti-matter matter? Could we build stuff out of it?
Consider:
The theoretical macroscopic properties of antimatter are the same as matter. Interaction with light, gravity, the fundamental forces, entropy would be all the same.
If you had a world made of anti matter, everything should work the same.
All electrical charges would be reversed - anti electrons (positrons) are positive charge.
Anti Protons are negative charge.
From a distance you would not know that world was made of antimatter, since properties would be the same. Electromagnetic wavelengths absorbed / emitted would be the same. Anti-Sodium would have the same yellow emission line as Sodium.
However we have not observed antimatter besides as particles. Besides anti-hydrogen, no other anti-atoms (let alone anti-molecules) have been produced or discovered.
Now building something made of antimatter in a matter world would be quite difficult - close proximity of a positron to an electron and you have neither particle, just a very energetic photons flying away. Any particle coming into proximity of its anti-particle results in annihilation (complete conversion of the masses of the particles to energy).
Now if Fred meets anti-Fred (ignoring air) they explode not because macroscopic Fred sees his anti-self (no matter how many time you watch that Star Trek episode, it's not true) - it is because Fred is made up or protons, neutrons and electrons and anti-Fred is made up of positrons, anti-protons and anti-neutrons and those little guys go boom.
How to handle such material that you cannot even get near - and "building" something means manipulating atoms, molecules - uncharged?
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.