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Experiments Create Particles Out of a Vacuum Using Neutrinos

Posted by Soulskill on from the now-you're-cooking-with-neutrinos dept.

BarbaraHudson writes: In a new series of experiments, scientists report (abstract) that neutrinos, notable for how infrequently they interact with matter, can strike a glancing blow on an atom's nucleus, and the side effect is the generation of a new particle out of a vacuum. Professor Kevin McFarland says the creation of the new particle is what shields the nucleus from being blown apart by the collision. "Producing an entirely new particle – in this case a charged pion – requires much more energy than it would take to blast the nucleus apart – which is why the physicists are always surprised that the reaction happens as often as it does. McFarland adds that even painstakingly detailed theoretical calculations for this reaction 'have been all over the map.'"

5 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Re:New ways to generate... gravity? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    A quick look at wiki shows that gravitons are still unproven.

    Pions are appareantly mesons (they have a quark and an antiquark) and decay to muons or gamma rays.

    I'm not sure if there's any proposed relationship between pions and gravitons, though for that matter I'm not quite sure what a pion or a graviton is.

    I will say that conversion of enery to matter and vice-veresa, in and of itself, seems to be old news.

  2. Re:Getting something from nothing? by Tough+Love · · Score: 3, Informative

    Where did you get the idea that vaccum is nothing? Actually, vacuum is a very busy place

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  3. Non-paywalled version by amaurea · · Score: 4, Informative

    As usual for physics articles, a non-paywalled version is available on arXiv, and has been so for more than a month before it appeared behind the paywall. Why do people who submit physics stories to slashdot aloways link to the useless paywalled version?

    1. Re:Non-paywalled version by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 4, Informative

      The GP is wrong. The article I linked to is NOT pay-walled, and contains the link to the arXiv.org paper. Either they didn't read the article (so they didn't know that there was already a link to arXiv) or they're just trying to make something out of nothing - kind of like this experiment did :-)

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  4. Re:New ways to generate... gravity? by lkcl · · Score: 5, Informative

    pions are basically made up of quarks just like the neutron and the proton: there's nothing magical about it, and has absolutely nothing to do with gravitons (if such even exist except as a mathematical concept). the difference is that pions only contain two quarks (rather than three) and so they're not stable. imagine throwing two magnets into the air very very carefully and having them spin around each other for a very brief period of time. if they fly apart, splat no more particle: if they touch, splat no more particle. but for that incredibly short duration where the two quarks successfully spin around each other in close orbit, there you have a "pion".