Slashdot Mirror
Antihelium Discovered By STAR
Medevilae writes with this excerpt from ScienceBlog:
"Eighteen examples of the heaviest antiparticle ever found, the nucleus of antihelium-4, have been made in the STAR experiment at RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. ... Ordinary nuclei of helium atoms consist of two protons and two neutrons. Called alpha particles when emitted in radioactive decays, they were found in this form by Ernest Rutherford well over a century ago. The nucleus of antihelium-4 (the anti-alpha) contains two antiprotons bound with two antineutrons. ... 'It’s likely that antihelium will be the heaviest antiparticle seen in an accelerator for some time to come,' says STAR Collaboration member Xiangming Sun of Berkeley Lab’s NSD. 'After antihelium the next stable antimatter nucleus would be antilithium, and the production rate for antilithium in an accelerator is expected to be well over two million times less than for antihelium.'"
Need di-lithium soon, hurry up and make it so I can get out of this god-forsaken solar system and find somewhere less corrupt!!!
We're that much closer to mastering alchemy, because someday we'll be able to produce anti-antimony, i.e. mon(e)y.
:wq
Is this the product of the Stars attack?
I guess Slashdot is expanding its scope to include stuff that anti-matters as well! And now it seem they are trying to up their anti- by trying to produce larger and more complex stable anti-atoms?
considering our dwindling supplies of helium!
Too late baby.
Without positrons (anti-electrons) orbiting the nucleus, these are just high energy anti-particles. Technically anti-matter, but not really available for interesting study. What would be much more interesting would be molecular anti-hydrogen, complete with positron bonding. Then you could test many properties of anti-matter. But cooling and storing is still a major problem. This is an interesting discovery, but we're no closer to really understanding anti-matter because of it (or, for that matter, having warp drive.)
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
when you inhale it?
I already prepping my Barry White impersonation.
Foot placed squarely in mouth since 1983.
Thats called Sulfur Hexafluoride.
he cried as he dragged the heavy weight behind him
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
ummmm .... no?
Anti-helium has a mass exactly equal (well, if CPT is a good symmetry) to helium. The mass of helium is roughly 4 amu, which is ~4 GeV. The mass of the top quark is *significantly* more than that. The mass of the top (and antitop) is 172 GeV.
How anticlimactic.
'After antihelium the next stable antimatter nucleus would be antilithium'
Then we can have deep voices and even worse mood swings.
An electron's antiparticle is a positron, which is just like an electron except for having a positive charge. Check.
Anti-hydrogen is an atom composed of a negatron orbited by a positron, and is antimatter. Check.
What the frell is an anti-neutron? A neutron with a lack of a lack of charge? (Okay, I get it - it's a neutron composed of antiquarks instead of quarks . . . but why would anti-helium require a nucleus composed of two negatrons and two anti-neutrons? Wouldn't it be two negatrons and two neutrons?) I'm confussed.
That is the first time I've heard of a virus making a scientific discovery. I just hope the Iranians don't find a way to weaponize it.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
"times less than"? WTF?
Apparently, the periodic table has changed quite a bit since I took high school chemistry.
I thought anti-helium was sulphur hexafluoride
no. after antihydrogen the next stable antimatter nucleus is antihelium which TFA is about. After antihelium the next stable antimatter nucleus would be antilithium.
When we run out of helium, we can manufacture anti-helium to replace it! ;)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
The next, higher one than helium is going to be lithium? I'm gonna go out on a limb here and predict the next one after that will be beryllium.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
From the beginning, the 10 radical isotopes are: Tucharium, -5; Dongor, -17; Lu, -31; Kartex, -79; Sharbar, -101; Ulanium, -127; Hyduron, -173; Simonsium, -211; Metite, -239; Krasnov, -307; These are the ten radical isotopes, from the beginning.
Does it make you sound like Paul Robeson/James Earl Jones?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Does anyone know if there is any possibility if antimatter might repel regular matter gravitationally? That is an experiment I would like to see. It's an assumption that the stars we see are ordinary matter. There really is no way of knowing from a distance. We don't get hit by antimatter meteors so we can tell matter and antimatter don't occur in close proximity to each other. So I total which of the following are true:
-Antimatter is extremely rare in the universe maybe none exists today.
-Antimatter is repelled by reacting with ordinary matter imparting momentum from the explosion segregating it from ordinary matter in the universe. Probably this happened in the earliest times.
-Antimatter is repelled by gravity with ordinary matter segregating it from ordinary matter in the universe. Maybe it accounts for dark energy observation.
check out optical manipulation/binding. there is a gradient force. also recent work by Jack Ng et al, has shown that radiation pressure can be negative for spheres making a tractor beam possible. all of this is on net neutral matter.