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Matter-Antimatter Split Hints at Physics Breakdown
Scientific American ^ | 4/3/08 | JR Minkel

Posted on 04/05/2008 11:51:18 AM PDT by LibWhacker

What's the matter with antimatter? New data may hold the answer.

Nature may have handed scientists a new clue in a longstanding mystery: how matter beat out antimatter for dominance of the universe. Early data from twin experiments at the Tevatron, the world's reigning particle accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., suggest an unexpected chink in the hugely successful standard model of particle physics.

The twist comes from odd behavior in a particle called the BS (pronounced "B-sub-S"), which flips back and forth between its matter and antimatter forms three trillions times per second. Researchers believe that such a breakdown, known as CP violation, is required to explain why matter is so abundant.

Researchers say the finding is well worth following up to make sure it is not a random clump in the data, as frequently happens in particle physics experiments. "This is exciting, definitely," says physicist Jacobo Konigsberg of the University of Florida in Gainesville, cospokesperson for CDF, one of two detectors that may have glimpsed the effect.

Antimatter is well-known to science fiction fans as the stuff that explodes on contact with regular particles such as protons and electrons, which have the same mass as their antiparticles but the opposite charge. The hot, early universe contained equal parts matter and antimatter. Yet somehow, as the cosmos cooled, matter was not completely annihilated.

Researchers strongly suspect that the key to this riddle lies in the weak nuclear force, which governs radioactive decay, along with more exotic reactions created in particle accelerators. In nearly all cases, matter obeys something called CP symmetry, which states that a particle ought to behave identically to the mirror image of its antiparticle. Not so when acted on by the weak nuclear force.

The amount of CP violation observed in experiments (and enshrined in the standard model), however, is far too little to explain why matter should have prevailed in its ancient war with antimatter. To get a clean look at CP symmetry, DZero and its sibling detector, CDF, focus on the BS, which consists of a bottom quark and a strange antiquark. (Quarks are components of protons and neutrons.) Working independently, the two detectors both found an extra dose of CP violation beyond what the standard model predicts.

Neither result on its own was very convincing, so a team of Italian researchers combined the data, similar to the way medical researchers cull information from independent clinical trials, to look for rare side effects. Together, the data make it 99.7 percent likely that the discrepancy is real, not due to chance, says physicist Luca Silvestrini of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Rome, who took part in the study submitted to Physical Review Letters.

Such analyses require making judgment calls, but Silvestrini says he is confident in the finding. "Everything points in the same direction, and so I think it's rather unlikely this is a statistical fluke," he says. Konigsberg says that if it is a fluke, that should become clear by the end of the summer as the Fermilab teams analyze more data.

Whether the hypothetical CP violation would fully explain matter's dominance over antimatter depends on the new physics that gave rise to it. According to theoretical physicist Robert Fleischer of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland, the simplest explanation would be a massive, photonlike particle similar to known members of the standard model and capable of interacting directly with bottom quarks and strange antiquarks.

Another possibility is supersymmetry, a proposed standard model extension that gives each known particle a heavier doppelganger, or super-partner. In that case, the BS oscillations could feel indirect effects from different combinations of super-partners, Fleischer says.

He notes that if the effect is real, the Large Hadron Collider, set to become the world's top dog in particle smashers after it goes on line later this year near Geneva, should be able to quickly confirm it and then probe for the underlying particles. "By 2010," he says, "I'm sure we will know the final answer."


TOPICS: Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: antimatter; breakdown; cpsymmetry; physics
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To: AEMILIUS PAULUS

LMAO !!

true !.......Stay safe !


21 posted on 04/05/2008 12:19:19 PM PDT by Squantos (Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.©)
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To: Squantos

I could not think of a sentence using “LIQUID.”


22 posted on 04/05/2008 12:23:32 PM PDT by AEMILIUS PAULUS (It is a shame that when these people give a riot)
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To: AEMILIUS PAULUS

I was gonna blame it on global warming.....:o)

Stay safe !


23 posted on 04/05/2008 12:26:18 PM PDT by Squantos (Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.©)
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To: LibWhacker

I need about thirty pounds of antimatter.


24 posted on 04/05/2008 12:29:03 PM PDT by Rocky
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To: LibWhacker

Bush’s fault.


25 posted on 04/05/2008 12:29:51 PM PDT by sionnsar (trad-anglican.faithweb.com |Iran Azadi| 5yst3m 0wn3d - it's N0t Y0ur5 (SONY) | UN: Useless Nations)
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To: LibWhacker

Contemporary orthodox theoretical physics is an analog to the state of human knowledge in 13th century black plague Europe. I’m going to tell you one thing kid, Nikola Tesla.


26 posted on 04/05/2008 12:46:44 PM PDT by Yollopoliuhqui
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To: LibWhacker
Early data from twin experiments at the Tevatron, the world's reigning particle accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., suggest an unexpected chink in the hugely successful standard model of particle physics.

I guarantee you that somewhere there's some poor black kid with the name Tevatron.
27 posted on 04/05/2008 1:00:56 PM PDT by aruanan
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To: LibWhacker
Early data from twin experiments at the Tevatron, the world's reigning particle accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., suggest an unexpected chink in the...

RACISM!!!!

28 posted on 04/05/2008 1:02:11 PM PDT by B-Chan (Catholic. Monarchist. Texan. Any questions?)
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To: Rocky

If this is your weight loss program, be careful, because when 30 pounds of matter hits 30 pounds of anti-matter, it produces energy equivalent to approximately 60 million tons of TNT. You might want to warn your neighbors.


29 posted on 04/05/2008 1:03:16 PM PDT by AZLiberty (Wipe the national hard drive and reinstall the Constitution.)
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To: LibWhacker
The twist comes from odd behavior in a particle called the BS (pronounced "B-sub-S"), which flips back and forth between its matter and antimatter forms three trillion times per second.

I'd love to know how they know this.

30 posted on 04/05/2008 1:04:32 PM PDT by AZLiberty (Wipe the national hard drive and reinstall the Constitution.)
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To: LibWhacker
In that case, the BS oscillations could feel indirect effects from different combinations of super-partners, Fleischer says.

Sounds like the Democrat Party.
31 posted on 04/05/2008 1:06:02 PM PDT by aruanan
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To: AZLiberty

Shh! I’m writing a new diet book.


32 posted on 04/05/2008 1:06:57 PM PDT by Rocky
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To: LibWhacker

I can’t believe no one yet has called this a theory a lot of B-sub-S.


33 posted on 04/05/2008 1:19:58 PM PDT by wildandcrazyrussian
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To: LibWhacker

I thought Al Gore invented the BS particle.


34 posted on 04/05/2008 1:23:37 PM PDT by beethovenfan (If Islam is the solution, the "problem" must be freedom.)
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To: ElkGroveDan

I was kinda hoping they’d have invented a reflection-free screen by the 23d century.


35 posted on 04/05/2008 1:43:44 PM PDT by Hunton Peck (I'm supporting Michele Bachmann and James Sensebrenner this year. The presidency is just one office.)
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To: Hunton Peck
Soon to be designated "the John Kerry particle".

How apropos!

P.S. You owe me a new keyboard!

36 posted on 04/05/2008 1:44:24 PM PDT by sima_yi (Reporting live from the People's Republic of Boulder)
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To: LibWhacker

The really important question is “Does the B-sub-S particle support the Global Warming Theory?” If it does, we need to study it.


37 posted on 04/05/2008 1:55:11 PM PDT by Tallguy (Tagline is offline till something better comes along...)
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To: LibFreeOrDie

LOL! Perfect.


38 posted on 04/05/2008 2:43:57 PM PDT by saganite
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To: AZLiberty
Thanks for asking that question! I'm no physicist and I can't answer it for you, but I did find this: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/CDF_meson.html. (I hope after reading it a few times, I'll have a better understanding.) Cheers!
39 posted on 04/05/2008 3:28:24 PM PDT by LibWhacker
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To: LibWhacker
Thanks for the very interesting article, but they don't say much about the analysis. They show a graph that's kind of Fourier analysis of the spectrum of the oscillation, with a peak at 2.8 trillion/sec, but they don't say what kind of experiments they did to probe the frequency.

I couldn't find anything on Google Scholar.

40 posted on 04/05/2008 4:15:12 PM PDT by AZLiberty (Wipe the national hard drive and reinstall the Constitution.)
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