Slashdot Mirror
Large Hadron Collider May Have Produced New Matter
Covalent writes "The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator and the 'Big Bang machine' that was used to discover what appears to be the long-sought Higgs boson particle (as announced July 4), may have another surprise up its sleeve this year: The LHC looks to have produced a new type of matter, according to a new analysis of particle collision data by scientists at MIT and Rice University. The new type of matter, which has yet to be verified, is theorized to be one of two possible forms: Either 'color-glass condensate' — a flattened nucleus transformed into a 'wall' of gluons, which are smaller binding subatomic particles, or it could be 'quark-gluon plasma,' a dense, soup or liquid-like collection of individual particles."
that matters.
No comments, as no one here actually knows anything on the subject. Soon to be FULL of comments, by people passing themselves off as actually being subject matter experts on the topic.
The matter is that stuff that comes right after Ununoctium - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ununoctium - and is usually only found dowsing.
Or the stuff that makes makes homoeopathy work. And where aura's are made up from.
Finally proof!
Ha, I bet you wont find any disbelievers any more now!
Now I think of it.... Blast! I always claimed that the paranormal cant be measured with 'conventional' physics... Now I am truly confused what exactly to believe...
I'll be off to my tarot cards to see what I shall make of this news!
G'bye all!
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Nobody expects quark gluon plasma effects!
I know its just the heading, but the whole "new matter" vs "new TYPE of matter" is kind of an important distinction.
For everyone who got bored with the old one.
But seriously. So what exactly is that "new matter". And, more important, why didn't it exist before? I mean, let's be blunt here, the universe is friggin' huge and I kinda doubt the conditions in the LHC are universally unique. And yet we never observed that kind of matter before?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not really. The current known elementary particles are all neatly arranged into the Standard Model. The one gap (Higgs boson) was recently filled. What we now need is to discover some process which shows the SM to be incomplete.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
or the Spanish Inquisition?
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
3/10
Try harder next time
now I can fix my really old stuff
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Oh, is that where the GP got that from? I had no idea.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Just when NASA was needing some exotic matter, new ones are discovered.
At least, until we are used to see them, this new ones will be pretty exotic.
Obviously they lived long enough to report on it, so I say all systems are green. Unfortunately this may not have been the first time someone created new matter, it just never made it to Sashdot.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Does anyone even know?
Nope. But you can keep an eye on things here!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Mendeleev didn't have Slashdot to waste free time that you could... er, *ahem*, HE DID use to make the table.
Our chief weapon is Quarks! And Gluons! Our two chief weapons are Quarks and Gluons! And Plasma! ...
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Yes, yes, yes, no.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
At least the quark gluon plasma at RHIC in the US: story
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
... whatever
Clearly they should have started a campaign on Kickstarter
More Twoson than Cupertino
Why are physicists so eager to show the standard model to be lacking? Every few months now we see articles telling how better experiments are confirming the standard model and eliminating some of the alternatives. Just because the standard model isn't new or built on a spiffy new foundation like "string theory" doesn't mean we should want to kill it. In fact, some of those things probably don't deserve use of the term "theory" since they are more complex and haven't been experimentally confirmed in any way (except to the extent they match the simpler "standard model").
We know quite certainly that the standard model is incomplete both from quantum theory and cosmology: If one rejects fine tuning, something has to keep the Higgs mass from diverging due to Top loops. Above a few TeV, something has to keep vector boson scattering cross sections sane. Dark matter and dark energy have to be made of something.
Unfortunately, that it is incomplete is about all the hell we've got at this point. The LHC has basically been ruling proposed SUSY models out unceasingly, and if we're unlucky and New Physics lies past 14TeV, it will likely be a damn long time until we discover it because the LHC took up the theoretical physics budgets of nearly every nation that does theoretical physics for the better part of a decade to build, and they already had the tunnel. To make significant advances with a successor hadron accelerator we'd be talking about building something at least several times larger and the obstacles are enormous... Staggering costs, the irradiation of the inner detectors, data processing, construction times stretching into multiple decades. Not to mention that the LHC consumed most of the world's supply of helium for years on end.
In the worst-case scenario, there's nothing significantly new until one reaches strong-force unification, and that lies a trillion times beyond the LHC,
But i'm very happy with findings like these, if this gets us any closer to understanding the soup, maybe we can figure out
the math for what happens inside the event horizon of a black hole. That will be a revolution. (har)
So have you missed the 6-sigma confirmation news a couple of weeks after the initial (still un-confirmed) news?
Or did you choose to ignore them?
Tell you what, go have yourself dropped of with nothing whatsoever on a remote South Pacific island for 3 years. If you're still alive when we come back, then and only then will I be willing to entertain your feeble "Waah, I hate taxes, I don't owe anything to anyone" tantrum with more than a momentary derisive smirk.
So what we now need on /. is a filter that automatically hides the first (several) post(s)? :)
Hey, I found his 'caught with his pants down' 1st post amusing, but still contemplating whether the internal chuckle it raised is worthy of wasting a Funny mod point.
That can be handy
Maybe we need a new way to look at the table:
http://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/1373923/Rebuilding_the_Periodic_Debate__Philip_Stewart.html
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
It was a confirmation of a particle with a mass similar and decayments to what is expected for the Higgs. It's not confirmation of the Higgs.
There are still a lot of properties that must be measured before we call the Higgs "confirmed".
Rethinking email
Elements are distinguished by the number of protons in the nucleus. The more protons, the bigger the nucleus, and the strong nuclear force holding these protons together gets weaker as the nucleus gets bigger than, say, that of lead.
It's called Darwinwite, after the award the Earth will win on Dec. 21 when LHC ramps up the voltage to study it further.
Table-ized A.I.
Of course it explodes. The LHC can only detect the explosion derbris.
Rethinking email
We can create as many as we want. But they are not stable.
Rethinking email
I think it's been 'tentatively observed' & the scientific jury is still out. And 6-sigma, which only requires accuracy to within 0.000002% defects, is a far cry from proving anything about a particle that only exists for 10x22secs! I didn't know that the scientific method was now using manufacturing/business principles to prove anything btw ;-p.
Seriously. What could the matter be?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Just to add to that, wasn't there another boson that came onto the scene, which looked a lot like Pete's but wasn't the same one in fact? I would have thought that would be enough to muddy the waters from any proofs to date.
This happens, more or less, because if you get one outgoing particle with very high energy, but it is an unstable particle, its decay products will tend to be moving in roughly the same direction
Not really - the particles (quarks or gluons in this case) can be perfectly stable. The problem is that the colour field that surrounds them acts like a really, really strong electric field. So strong that as the quark is blasted away from its opposite charged partner the energy in the field becomes so large that it is energetically favourable to create quark/anti-quark pairs and shrink the size of the field. This is why even up and down quarks produce jets despite being stable.
This is unexpected, and unexpected results == SCIENCE!
To make significant advances with a successor hadron accelerator we'd be talking about building something at least several times larger and the obstacles are enormous... Staggering costs, the irradiation of the inner detectors, data processing, construction times stretching into multiple decades. Not to mention that the LHC consumed most of the world's supply of helium for years on end.
Well we'd best get started then. I can contribute $100 or so and will pick up some helium balloons from the party store. Anyone else in?
Yeah, it's probably really 11 or 13 dimensional, as opposed to the 2-dim hack job Mendeleev did.
I know its just the heading, but the whole "new matter" vs "new TYPE of matter" is kind of an important distinction.
It depends on what the result is due to. Quark-gluon-plasma is really a phase of matter and, in fact, not really that new since it was discovered in jet-quench events at the LHC several years ago. If it is a colour-glass condensate then you could argue that this is a new type of matter since it is essentially something constructed out of gluons.
..and he wants his Ironman 2 scene back.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
"I MAY be writing this comment from the space station"
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Physicist: We're only 99.9997% sure that it did cross the road.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The conditions that the LHC can recreate are unique in that they are thought to have been present only during the Big Bang.
Actually really high energy cosmic rays recreate LHC collision energies everytime they hit a planet, star or any other material object. There are not very many of them but they can actually exceed LHC energies by quite a few orders of magnitude. Some large scale cosmic ray detectors get to study these but in nowhere near as much detail as we get to at the LHC but they do have some really cool detectors to play with such as a cubic kilometre of ice several kilometres under the south pole.
So to answer the OP the universe almost certainly does create this type of matter but on Earth only high up in the atmosphere perhaps only a few times per year per square kilometre which makes it impossible to find.
Because the larger the atoms get, the less stable they become. All of the new atoms we've every created have decayed almost instantly.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I was expecting something that really mattered, like... the end of all matter, according to Time magazine (and others) in 2008. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1838947,00.html
Gently reply
Nah, Omega eats Element Zeroes for breakfast! ;)
You do realize that the use of force is not the only means of human cooperation, right?
Actually, it is. Because those who are willing to be violent will obliterate those who are unwilling. That has nothing to do with human morals and everything to do with the laws of physics ("bullet through the brain causes a splattering of gray matter everywhere").
Until you find a way for the "cooperators" to control the "violence users" in a way that doesn't involve violence, you're just wrong.
your mother's a gluon.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
It has discovered just how little you can get for your 7.5 billion Euros these days! >8^D
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Physicist: We're only 99.9997% sure that it did cross the road.
And that's assuming spherical chicken in a vacuum.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Not to mention that the LHC consumed most of the world's supply of helium for years on end.
Admittedly that was just for the after-hours office parties. But if you put 10,000 physicists in a room, how else are you going to keep them entertained?
(You really don't want to see the Silly Putty and Slinkie budget.)
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
One of the smaller nuclear power plants for a sub might actually be quite efficient for a very large locomotive running on a much larger-than-standard track. At speed with radiator cooling you might manage some good efficiency. Tanker cars for coolant. Green as hell as as far as CO2 is concerned. You could move heavy freight. I bet in the fifties or sixties some serious thought went into big nuclear trains. Not feasible then with the reactors they had, but some of the N power plants in our ships are very compact now I believe. Albeit highly classified. What a poor analogy the poster made in his tirade against the sci fi fan.. Because, obvious security and political disadvantages aside, using a nuclear power plant in a big-ass steam locomotive may not be a half bad idea. Especially these days.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
'quark-gluon plasma,' a dense, soup or liquid-like collection of individual particles.
Maybe this is what Star Trek is referring to with its "warp plasma".
Dark matter and dark energy have to be made of something.
Dark energy isn't made of anything. It's the shape of space. Although it is worth noting that curvature isn't one of those things treated by the Standard Model.
As to dark matter, it's always possible that dark matter is some sort of particle we already have, maybe, for example, a huge number of extremely low energy neutrinos.
Unfortunately, that it is incomplete is about all the hell we've got at this point. The LHC has basically been ruling proposed SUSY models out unceasingly, and if we're unlucky and New Physics lies past 14TeV, it will likely be a damn long time until we discover it because the LHC took up the theoretical physics budgets of nearly every nation that does theoretical physics for the better part of a decade to build, and they already had the tunnel. To make significant advances with a successor hadron accelerator we'd be talking about building something at least several times larger and the obstacles are enormous... Staggering costs, the irradiation of the inner detectors, data processing, construction times stretching into multiple decades. Not to mention that the LHC consumed most of the world's supply of helium for years on end.
I guess we'll just have to figure out how to do the next generation collider cheaper then.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow.
There's always a boom tomorrow.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Is that a large hadron, or are you just happy to see me?
True, there's a peak in stability around iron (26 protons), but all but two of the elements up through lead (82 protons) still have a stable isotope. Bismuth (83 protons) is just barely unstable, with a half-life in the quintillions of years. Polonium (84 protons) and the rest have no stable isotope.
This new matter is actually better than gold as a standard for money exchange. Hell it is even better than bitcoin, since only the LHC can produce it.
~ Best man at your service.
How interesting. Well, no one can ever fault Russian engineers for a lack of vision. Execution is sometimes problematic. A nuclear Siberian express. Let's roll, comrades!
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
There was no need to build a particle accelerator to get new matter. I can go down to the store and get new matter. Actually, all I need to do is step outside. I take a jar with me, open it up, collect new matter and come back. OK, well, technically it's not new; but it's new to me and that's what matters. Pun intended.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
There was a huge stink about this when the RHIC was brought on line (stranglets will eat Long Island !!!). This report covers the basics.
it sounds like it was not a discovery as, unless it exposed some sort of fundamental new behaviour of the basic forces or a new elementary particle. given knowledges of the principle forces and the elementary particles, one can predict any sort of matter that can occur or exist and that could be produced under any situation. so in this case, this discovery just verifies what could have already been predicted in a computer model.
A large hardon collider created "glue plasma" matter that is soup/liquid-like collection of particles?
I think I've seen that porn before
Element Zero (as in atomic number zero) is easy: neutron stars are made of them.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Am I the only one that occasionally worries that we might stumble across some edge case that breaks whatever is simulating our "universe", and the whole thing has to be shut down and started over? Not that I'm convinced of it, mind you, but the possibility is a nagging one.
You're going to waste helium on balloons? It's much more valuable as a coolant for the collider.
I was gob smacked to see from Nitehawk214's post that Rosatom and the Russian Railroad were actually considering such a thing. When I raised the issue hypothetically it was to point out that technically such a thing was, perhaps, feasible. By no means was I meaning to suggest that it would or could be practical or desirable (Save CO2 green, which advantage you pointed out was negligible. And I agree.) Although... admit it. A monster nuclear locomotive roaring across the tundra at 350 MPH would be cooler than bees on roller skates. In a pave-the-earth kind of way, that is.
Your other point that there are no civilian nuclear ships is really interesting upon consideration. Thanks.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
It's more likely they made a new element, rather than a new type of matter.
Pretty sure there would have been some pretty big explosions and readjustment to physics while matter, and anti-matter scoot aside for the new-comer.
Just sayin. :)
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
I was going for funny. Thx!
Buanzo Consulting - 15 Years of GNU/Linux experience, for you.