Posted on 09/01/2009 11:08:54 AM PDT by neverdem
Report hints at the existence of a new and massive elementary particle
In a weak moment, researchers have found an unexpected asymmetry in particle production that could hint at exotic physics. The tentative evidence, announced August 21, could be the fingerprint of a massive elementary particle that would help unify three of the four known forces in nature.
The physicists collected data for nearly a decade at the Belle particle accelerator experiment in Tsukuba, Japan. In the experiment, known as a B factory, beams of electrons and positrons collide to produce millions of pairs of B mesons and anti-B mesons. Such particles live brief but eventful lives, decaying through the weak nuclear force — the same force that powers some radioactivity and helps keep the sun burning.
In a mere 1.5 trillionths of a second, B mesons and their antiparticles disintegrate in any of hundreds of ways. In one of the more unusual decay paths — so rare it happens only about once in every million decays — a B meson turns into a particle called a K* meson and a particle-antiparticle pair. This pair can include an electron and its positively charged partner, the positron, or a heavier cousin to an electron, the muon, and its positively charged partner, the anti-muon.
The Belle team found that the number of positrons or anti-muons released in one direction, the direction of travel of the K* meson, doesn’t equal the number released in the opposite direction. The standard model of particle physics predicts such an asymmetry because the weak interaction picks a preferred direction in space. Physicists several decades ago traced this preference to massive messenger particles that mediate the interaction. As a result, the mirror image of a physical process involving the weak interaction doesn’t look the same as the original...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
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M.E.G.O.
My Eyes Glaze Over.
Obama is “ the anti-muon.”
I knew it!
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bump
Which is code for:
"We need more and bigger research grants, and a better pension plan, a company car, 30 minute coffee breaks and a hour and a half for lunch because traffic is getting bad and we can't go watch a stripper, eat a double cheese and fries, scarf down a couple beers and make it back to the lab to snooze.. er watch particles collide in an hour."
“In a mere 1.5 trillionths of a second, B mesons and their antiparticles disintegrate in any of hundreds of ways. In one of the more unusual decay paths — so rare it happens only about once in every million decays — a B meson turns into a particle called a K* meson and a particle-antiparticle pair.”
Ok, got it.
I just looked for the paper, but have not yet found it.
Typically, in this field, the science is well done, the reviewers are world-wide and thorough, and the error bars are quite well estimated and reported. Usually if something is “found”, it turns out to be “true”, though the masses and such are often later found to lie outside the errors.
At these laboratories, 230 events is VERY large compared to the number of observations that many discoveries have been first announced. I think that the first announcement of the “top” quark was based on at most 25 events(possibly as low as 8). Without seeing the paper, my inclination is to say that it is likely that this will be confirmed in the future, and that means there is a “larger” particle which briefly existed.
I’ll continue to search for more about this from time to time.
I think I saw two of my cats chasing one of these around last night....
I just looked to verify my memory. The first few top quark papers were base on low two-digit numbers of events and error bars were on the order of +/-10% ... though their “certainty that this was not random” was near one-in-a-million by the time of the “solid” dual announcements by CDF and D0, the two FermiLab collaborations in 1995.
Still looking for the paper here.
Houses of cards in our locality.
In my experience, the scientists and technicians that work at these national labs put in full work days, and at least 90% of the staff are very hard working. The office and support staff do their jobs and do it efficiently and well. Hourly workers put in full work days. Technical staff are tops in their field, and usually underpaid. Scientists and engineers work well over 60 hours a week on average, and many put themselves on call 24hrs a day for troubleshooting purposes.
With the exception of the support staff, excellence is hyper-emphasized since a single technical error for example: the grease from a fingerprint on a high vacuum part; a cold-solder joint in electronics; a failure in a pipe fitting due to over-tightening or lousy soldering,, will bring the experiment to a screeching halt and repairs have an opportunity cost of $10,000-$100,000 per hour of expermentation. No one wants to be responsible for such an occurrence, so all hands really try to do top quality work.
In fact, all the staff is usually underpaid compared to their counterparts in business and remain there because we are in love with doing the research and contributing to the advancement of humanity’s understanding of God’s universe.
The employees at national laboratories are NOT your typical “government drone”
I understand, but unlike the climate models, the particle physics computer models are very well tuned and understood. They are by nature much simpler. Because of this, it is possible to do “Monte Carlo” experiments on the computer to quite accurately predict the likelihood of an experimental result being random given the data set available. I’ve seen results presented as being “good”, not random, which involved sorting out only 4 observed events out of hundreds of billions- though the error bars on such events are very large, the probability that it’s statistically significant can be stated as much better than 99%. Later observations with more data have confirmed all such results I have seen.
Particle physics is a field that can accurately push statistics further than I believe any other field can. The scientists are very quick to throw out “dirty” events - the experiments require so much working perfectly, and everyone realizes that, so if something was a bit off the data is not relied on. Since so many people are involved in obtaining any experimental result, no one seems to have a big “personal ego” investment, and objectivity is maintained much more easily, I think.
You would probably be astonished at the amount of internal criticism among the scientists that goes on in the process of analyzing and publishing experimental results. It takes a heroic effort for results to gain a wealth of cheerleaders, and what ends up being published is usually very conservative.
Are you implying that I am denigrating your excess verbiage?
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