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Fermilab Scientists Discover New Particle
An anonymous reader writes "Fermilab today announced that scientists working at the CDF (Collision Detector at Fermilab) experiment confirmed the observation of a new particle, the Xi-sub-b. The Xi-sub-b is categorized as a baryon, which are formed of three quarks. Commonly known baryons include the proton as well as the neutron."
My guess is they've discovered an old particle.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
Favorite quotes from TFA:
"existence of the Xi-sub-b has been predicted for some time"
"the Xi-sub-b was observed in 25 instances among almost 500 trillion proton-antiproton collisions"
Something felt totally different today :)
Privacy is terrorism.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.3753
If you'd prefer a link to the actual release instead ofconceivablytech's take on it:
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2011/CDF-Xi-sub-b-observation-20110720.html
does anyone have the arXiv link to the actual paper, not the PR fluff?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
They haven't discovered a new fundamental particle. All they've done is to arrange some quarks into an arrangement we've already known about.
This is an engineering accomplishment -- sticking together an up, a strange, and a bottom quark to make a bound state. It doesn't represent any great discovery in physics; people have known for a long while that such a particle exists, simply from the properties of quarks. In fact, lattice QCD has been able to simulate such things for a while now, and (although I have not seen such a result) could calculate its mass.
Making a big deal about this could be a political move, since the Tevatron (the particle accelerator that the CDF is attached to) is due to shut down soon.
The Xi-sub-b is categorized as are baryon, which are formed of three quarks.
'Are' baryon... Really?
Then again, quoting further:
...the Tevatron is not a dedicated bottom quark “factpory.”
Sigh...
No, it's *not* another new particle. It's a new arrangement of particles we have known about since the 1970's, when such a re-write happened and the quark model was introduced.
I've always wanted a particle named after me and feel entitled to it.
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
Or is it VI, only Khan knows.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
With no disrespect, does the observation of this very short-lived particle take us anywhere useful?
Since they hypothesized its existence prior to experimental evidence and discovery, it helps confirm developed notions and theories inherent in the standard model. Useful to who: particle physicist and folks needing some publicity to keep those kinds of programs alive in these days of spending cuts, not so useful for the general public in the short term. Long term, who knows, and for me it is more motivation for me to not drop out of my BS Physics program knowing that we don't know it all.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I read "Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time" recently. Great read, almost too technical for this layman. I find it amazing that the long-scrutinized theories in the book are being proven(disproved) right now as I type. Amazing times we live in.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
I think it's more like tossing a huge oak tree into a shredder to see if among the remains you might find a brand new shape of wood chip.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
You're thinking of engineering or applied science at best. You won't know the benefits of fundamental research until later. You know, little things like electricity and semiconductors.
Yes. Based on our understanding of how the universe works we predicted this particle existed. We have now proven that it does exist. Thus we have additional evidence that things work the way we think they do at very, very low levels.
Could someone more knowledgeable clarify the following to me?
Was this particle made "by chance" (i.e. collisioning two particles and hoping something "new" will be made) or is was this made on purpose (i.e. We are trying to create the Xi_sub_b by colliding this stuff this and this way.. success! And this process would be repeatable)
Pardon my ignorance, but what would be the big deal about discovering that particles that could exist in theory have been artificially created, maybe for a very short amount of time?
It's a step forward in the race against human ignorance.
Also, the Fermilab is cheap. Their annual budget is equivalent to one day of war in Afganistan.
Number theory was known as the most useless of all branches of mathematics, yet now you couldn't pay your bills online without the public key cryptography it has made possible. By your standard of what should be investigated, we would still be banging big rocks together. Now we are banging tiny, tiny atoms together. That's progress.
In this case, it's more like tossing a couple of built Lego models together to see if you get a new Lego model out.
Or Capcella, Construx, Robotix, Rokenbok, Tinker Toy, Lincoln Logs, dirt, etc...
Yes. Speaker cables.
We haven't decided whether Xi-sub-b free cables or cables with a surplus of Xi-sub-b will sell better. But we'll be ready when marketing figures it out.
Have gnu, will travel.
considering the nice letters and abbreviations they use, you can also produce other interesting acronyms : ...
CCD, BUT, TSS
I guess thats why the cell phone company keeps sending me 'free upgrade' offers. (I am happy with my existing phone thankyou.
Does anyone know if you can make stuff with this new particle? Protons and neutrons make up the nuclei of atoms...
(What is the charge of this new particle? I don't really care about the spin, I will leave that to Fox news.
more motivation for me to not drop out of my BS Physics program knowing that we don't know it all.
Um, but doesn't "we discovered a particle predicted by existing theory" rather suggest that we do know it all and there's nothing useful left to be done in particle physics?
I hope that's not true, of course, but this seems the "yawn, next" kind of discovery rather than the "hmmmm, what the?" kind.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I'm not sure we funded it on purpose.
It's something that was found in data taken by the Tevatron, which we funded on purpose because it could tell us a lot of things.
Given the enormous ratio of attempts to successes, it's likely that they never even did one run trying to cause these to appear. They were probably tiny gaps in tracks taken for other purposes, data-mined and correlated to the theoretical model.
So we probably got it for free.
Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics. We most definitely do not know it all, we know much, but there remain many unresolved questions that have real world implications outside of research labs. Even if we find out that all the particles in the standard model exist and behave as theories show they should, that still doesn't reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Even longer than that. The Greeks invented a steam engine in the 1st century, but couldn't think of any uses for it and so it remained a curiosity.
The enemies of Democracy are
the Tevatron, which we funded on purpose because it could tell us a lot of things.
And did the Tevatron, in fact, tell us those other things it was funded to find out? Or do they continue to be things that it could have told us but didn't?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Number theory was known as the most useless of all branches of mathematics, yet now you couldn't pay your bills online without the public key cryptography it has made possible. By your standard of what should be investigated, we would still be banging big rocks together. Now we are banging tiny, tiny atoms together. That's progress.
Public key cryptography for paying your bills online might not be the best example. Nearly all data encryption today is symmetric instead of PKC (other than session key). Session keys could have been created/distributed w/o PKC, but it's more problematic (might require tokens like RSA-secure ID or pads to validate identities instead of RNG+certificates), but PKC seems like a convenient way to do it for now (until we discover that factoring or discrete log problems aren't as secure as we think they are or we eventually lose faith in certificate authorities which seem to be the weak link these days, but I digress). People seem to think it's the crypto that they are trusting, but it's really the infrastructure they are trusting, just like it has been in past banking schemes dating back to the early tally marks on cave walls and collections of special rocks...
Now, the use of group theory in the development of error correcting codes to make fast, error free digital transmission affordable... That might be actually something that makes paying bills online possible...
The Xi-sub-b is categorized as are baryon, which are formed of three quarks. Commonly known baryons include the proton ( two up quarks and one down quark) as well as the neutron (two down quarks and one up quark). The existence of the Xi-sub-b has been predicted for some time, but it has been observed for the very first time just recently. It is described as a heavy relative of the neutron and is six times heavier than the proton or neutron. Conclusively, it is a member of the bottom baryons.
Fat bottom baryons they make the rockin' world go round.
Tommaso has a short piece up on this result and will be adding more. He is a member of CDF as well.
Does it matter? It finds out lots of things that are hella cool.
Um, RSA SecureID or other multi-factor authentication does not solve the private key distribution problem nor does it try to. It still requires PKC to obtain a private session key, unless you have already exchanged keys off-line.
It is true that it's more about trusting the infrastructure, but there'd be no infrastructure to trust without a way to solve the key distribution problem. PKC is the only method today to do it on the same untrusted network that you will be communicating over.
The enemies of Democracy are