Posted on 09/20/2021 6:42:52 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Accelerators like RHIC and LHC routinely turn energy into matter by accelerating pieces of atoms near the speed of light and smashing them into one another. The 2012 discovery of the Higgs particle at the LHC is a notable example. At the time, the Higgs was the final unobserved particle in the Standard Model, a theory that describes the fundamental forces and building blocks of atoms.
Impressive as it is, physicists know the Standard Model explains only about 4% of the matter and energy in the universe.
The ions are nuclei of massive elements like gold or lead, and ion accelerators are particularly useful for studying the strong force, which binds fundamental building blocks called quarks in the neutrons and protons of atomic nuclei. Physicists have used heavy ion collisions to overcome those interactions and observe both quarks and gluons, the particles quarks exchange when they interact via the strong force.
But nuclei aren't the only things that collide in heavy ion accelerators. Ion beams also produce electric and magnetic fields that shroud each nuclei in the beam with its own cloud of light. These clouds move with the nuclei, and when clouds from opposing beams meet, individual particles of light called photons can meet head-on.
Each ultraperipheral photon-photon collision produces a pair of particles called muons that typically fly from the collision in opposite directions. As predicted by theory, Yang, Li and colleagues found that quantum interference distorted the departure angle of the muons. And the shorter the distance between the near-miss ions, the greater the distortion.
Li said the effect arises from the motion of the colliding photons. Although each is moving in the direction of the beam with its host ion, photons can also move away from their hosts.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
“Explains only about 4% of the matter and energy in the universe”
The other 96% is creamed corn.
Here’s an article related to this interesting subject.
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-physics-anomaly-no-one-talks-about.html
There seems to be some information missing in this article. The photon collisions have enough energy to produce muons but muons have charges so the collision has to produce a muon (negative) and anti-muon (positive) pair to maintain charge conservation.
Because of this charge the muons would have different trajectories in the vicinity of a positively charged ion nucleus. The article did not explain how this angular deviation was accounted for to calculate the residual angular deviation that was reported as novel. This is always a hazard when scientific papers are simplified to make them readable to a general audience.
Could be my excerpting.
Not sure I would use the term “collision” for photons, as the superposition principle still applies.
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