a new particle and a new force in physics discovered

[Chris]

A particle accelerator in the US has shown compelling hints of a never-before-seen particle, researchers say.

The find must be more fully confirmed, but researchers at the Tevatron are racing to work through existing data.

If proved, it will be a completely new, unanticipated particle; researchers say it cannot be the much sought-after Higgs boson.

It could also signal a new fundamental force of nature, and the most radical change in physics for decades.

BBC News - Tevatron accelerator yields hints of new particle

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Wrong.

The scientist say that this might possibly be either a new particle or a new force, not both. On top of that it is most likely that they just do not understand something properly and that this will be easily explained. It is extremely interesting, but light years away from what you claim it is.

 

[Chris]

If it is in fact true, Dr Hooper believes that the mystery particle represents an undiscovered "fundamental force".

"We'd essentially be saying there's a new force of nature being communicated by the particle. We know that there's four forces: electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. This would be the fifth; every freshman physics class would have to change their textbooks."

BBC News - Tevatron accelerator yields hints of new particle

 

[Chris]

If the findings hold up, they likely indicate the production of a new, unknown particle that is not predicted by the Standard Model, the current gold standard theory of the fundamental laws of physics. A completely new type of force, or interaction, is also likely to be involved. Interestingly, several models proposed in recent years that postulate the existence of new fundamental interactions beyond those known today would create an excess similar to the one seen in the new data.

Physics community buzzing over possible new particle

 

[Chris]

Assuming the effect is real, the directional preference suggests the existence of a new elementary particle, not predicted by the standard model. The particle could be the messenger of a new type of force that interacts with top quarks — along with their antiparticles — in such a way as to cause the asymmetry.

Researchers are truly abuzz about the possibility that the proposed particle could be within the grasp of the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva. If the asymmetry arises from some new type of particle just slightly too massive for the Tevatron to produce, the LHC could produce the particles directly, possibly by the end of 2011, says Markus Schulze of Johns Hopkins University.

Finding such a particle, Schulze says, “would be a beautiful and delicate signal of physics beyond the standard model.”

LHC Locking In on New Elementary Particle | Wired Science | Wired.com

 

[rdean]

Liberals. Always "discovering" stuff. Conservatives don't like science. They have the occult.

 

[Chris]

Liberals. Always "discovering" stuff. Conservatives don't like science. They have the occult.

No, conservatives have mythology.

Only 9% of scientists are Republicans.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

If it is in fact true, Dr Hooper believes that the mystery particle represents an undiscovered "fundamental force".

"We'd essentially be saying there's a new force of nature being communicated by the particle. We know that there's four forces: electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. This would be the fifth; every freshman physics class would have to change their textbooks."

BBC News - Tevatron accelerator yields hints of new particle

It is in fact not true, but feel free getting your science news from people that think that the Earth is flat if you want to.

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature.
The results, if they hold up, could be a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab’s Tevatron, once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it.
“Nobody knows what this is,” said Christopher Hill, a theorist at Fermilab who was not part of the team. “If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.”

“If it holds up, it’s very big,” said Neal Weiner, a theoretical physicist at New York University. Lisa Randall, a theorist at Harvard, said the same thing: “It is definitely interesting, if real.”
But Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., said he did not find the bump convincing, saying it could be an artifact of how the data was sliced and diced.
The important thing, he said, was that if this and other anomalies recently reported at the Tevatron are real, then the Large Hadron Collider, a rival machine run by CERN, “will see dramatic evidence in not too long — that’s certainly what I’m waiting for.”
The key phrase, everyone agrees, is “if it holds up.” The experimenters estimate that there is a less than a quarter of 1 percent chance their bump is a statistical fluctuation, making it what physicists call a three-sigma result, enough to attract attention but not enough to claim an actual discovery. Three-sigma bumps, as every physicist knows, can come and go.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/science/06particle.html?_r=1

"If it holds up" is a order of magnitude away from the shit you are posting.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Liberals. Always "discovering" stuff. Conservatives don't like science. They have the occult.

No, conservatives have mythology.

Only 9% of scientists are Republicans.

Why didn't either of you science lovers comment about the political attacks on science I started threads about? Is it because you actually hate science, and only like lefty politics?

 

[eots]

Liberals. Always "discovering" stuff. Conservatives don't like science. They have the occult.

you mean the science of the occult

 

[eots]

Liberals. Always "discovering" stuff. Conservatives don't like science. They have the occult.

No, conservatives have mythology.

Only 9% of scientists are Republicans.

they do not need to be scientist they can just hire the ninnys as need be

 

[Toronado3800]

Quantum, are you ok? This seemed like a relatively innocent thread about new science. Hell, it could all turn out to be nothing but thank you Chris that was good reading.

 

[Chris]

Quantum, are you ok? This seemed like a relatively innocent thread about new science. Hell, it could all turn out to be nothing but thank you Chris that was good reading.

You are welcome.

It could be the biggest discovery in decades.

 

[Sheldon]

Wrong.

The scientist say that this might possibly be either a new particle or a new force, not both. On top of that it is most likely that they just do not understand something properly and that this will be easily explained. It is extremely interesting, but light years away from what you claim it is.

Jesus. Chill out. Take some metamucil or something.

"has shown compelling hints"

"must be more fully confirmed"

"If proved"

"It could"

"If it holds up" is a order of magnitude away from the shit you are posting.

Really?

 

[Old Rocks]

It is good that the scientists are giving us early info about their investigations of matter and the universe. Of course they state all kinds of caveats when the see something new that they don't understand. And they should. That in no way reduces the fact that there is a lot more to find out about this universe that we live in. And finding it out, even when we go up blind alleys, is a real adventure.

Thank you, Chris.

 

[waltky]

LHC to take over Tevatron search...

At FermiLab, end of Search for 'God Particle' Nears
May 05, 2011 - A twenty-five year search for one of the keys to understanding the structure of the universe is coming to an end at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab in suburban Chicago. The Tevatron Accelerator, a sub-atomic particle collider, is scheduled to go offline later this year. When that happens, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, in Geneva, Switzerland, will fully take over the search for the so-called "God Particle." But, the Tevatron is not going quietly into retirement.

For more than 15 years, scientist Robert Roser has searched for the elusive "Higgs Boson." "The Higgs Boson is a hypothetical particle that we believe exists to fix a flaw in the standard mode," said Robert Roser. "The standard model, to us, is our mathematical description of how the universe works. The significant flaw in that model is that it doesn’t explain mass." The discovery of the Higgs Boson - known to many as the "God Particle" - could give scientists the answers they seek to many of the biggest questions known to man. "We’re asking the question of how the universe works, and why is it built the way it is built?"

To find the Higgs Boson at Fermilab, scientists use the Tevatron Accelerator to slam protons and anti-protons together. In the stream of data that follows, scientists look for clues that the Higgs Boson exists. So far, they haven’t found any such clues. But Roser says they may have found something else. "As we look at these huge data sets that we’ve acquired over the 10 years, we’re now putting out things that we’ve learned about that data," he said. "And so what you’re seeing here is evidence for perhaps a new particle and there will be other things that will come out over the coming months that will be just as interesting as this." The discovery of what could be a previously unknown sub-atomic particle could also be the last major accomplishment of the Tevatron.

"All good things will come to an end, and this will be the end for the Tevatron. It's had a glorious career, 25 years, which is very long in the accelerator field," said Pier Oddone. Pier Oddone is the Director of Fermilab. He says the funding needed to continue the research necessary to find the Higgs Boson, if it exists at all, exceeds Fermilab’s $400 million annual budget. "It is one third the budget of the laboratory in Geneva Switzerland," he said.

The CERN laboratory in Geneva is home to the Large Hadron Collider. Built in collaboration with Fermilab, it is a more powerful device than the Tevatron Accelerator. When the Tevatron goes offline later this year, the focus in this area of physics will finally move from the United States to Europe. "In this last two decades that has shifted where the facility in Geneva went ahead and built this formidable machine, which we were trying to build in Texas called the Superconducting Supercollider," said Oddone. "We closed ours but the Europeans went ahead with theirs, and that is what has led to this differentiation now in the funding of laboratories."

MORE

 

[waltky]

Mebbe its the stem cell of the physics world...

Neutrino particle 'flips to all flavours'
15 June 2011 - The detector works by looking for flashes of light from particles that exceed the speed of light in the water

An important breakthrough may be imminent in the study of neutrinos. The multinational T2K project in Japan says it has seen indications in its data that these elementary particles can flip to any of their three types. The results are provisional because experiments had to be suspended in the wake of the Tohoku earthquake in March. But if confirmed, they would open the door to further research on where the matter in the Universe came from.

Specifically, such studies would ask why the cosmos is composed of normal matter rather than its opposite - antimatter - which theorists say must have been created in equal amounts at the Big Bang. "It's a step on the road," explained Professor Dave Wark, of Imperial College London and the STFC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which leads the UK involvement in T2K. "We want to address this asymmetry, but first we have to show that the different 'flavours' of neutrinos can spontaneously change into each other - something we call 'neutrino oscillation'. So far, our experiments have been very positive," he told BBC News.

Detecting 'ghosts'

Neutrinos are among the fundamental building blocks of matter. They swarm all about us. The Sun, for example, releases them in huge quantities when it fuses hydrogen to make helium - the raw nuclear process at its core. They are, however, very difficult to study because they interact so weakly with normal matter. Hence, their nickname - "ghost particles".

Nonetheless, scientists have been able to discern three flavours - electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos. Previous research has characterised two forms of oscillations. The T2K experiment has now seen hints for a third transformation - that of a muon neutrino turning into an electron neutrino.

Side to side

 

[waltky]

What's a matter?...

Antimatter Tevatron mystery gains ground
1 July 2011 - The Dzero team is also part of a mystery about a potential new particle

US particle physicists are inching closer to determining why the Universe exists in its current form, made overwhelmingly of matter. Physics suggests equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been made in the Big Bang. In 2010, researchers at the Tevatron accelerator claimed preliminary results showing a small excess of matter over antimatter as particles decayed. The team has submitted a paper showing those results are on a firmer footing.

Each of the fundamental particles known has an antimatter cousin, with identical properties but opposite electric charge. When a particle encounters its antiparticle, they "annihilate" each other, disappearing in a high-energy flash of light. The question remains: why did this not occur in the early Universe with the equal amounts of matter and antimatter, resulting in a Universe devoid of both?

New physics?

The Tevatron results come from a shower of particles produced at the facility when smashing protons into their antimatter counterparts, antiprotons. The proton-antiproton collisions in turn create a number of different particles, and the team operating the Tevatron's DZero detector first noticed a discrepancy in the decay of particles called B mesons.

More BBC News - Antimatter Tevatron mystery gains ground

 

[flacaltenn]

Call me cynical.. Call me a skeptic... BUT:

The discovery of what could be a previously unknown sub-atomic particle could also be the last major accomplishment of the Tevatron.

"All good things will come to an end, and this will be the end for the Tevatron.

It's awfully hard for particle physicists to find work right now.. And EWWW -- they might have to teach.. MAYBE -- if the Tevatron could get just ONE MORE YEAR of funding, we might win the Nobel Prize..

Thus all the careful qualifiers like "if this holds up".... "might be".. etc.

 

[flacaltenn]

Liberals. Always "discovering" stuff. Conservatives don't like science. They have the occult.

No, conservatives have mythology.

Only 9% of scientists are Republicans.

As much as I hate public opinion polls and try to avoid them -- We should do this one in another thread. Because even the meager biased and flawed polls I've seen don't support this lowball screwy number. One that was posted on USMB was taken only of AAAS - an org that spouts off about social rights and whose unvetted membership is highly slanted to academics and teachers and students and comes with a subscription to Science Magazine.

Certainly not true of the engineering profession where the only political significance is the abnormally high number of party "unaffiliated" members.