LHC reports discovery of its first new particle!!

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Franco-Swiss border has made its first clear observation of a new particle since opening in 2009.

This is pretty cool.

It is called Chi-b (3P) and will help scientists understand better the forces that hold matter together. The as-yet unpublished discovery is reported on the Arxiv pre-print server. The LHC is exploring some of the fundamental questions in "big physics" by colliding proton particles together in a huge underground facility. Detail in the sub-atomic wreckage from these impacts is expected to yield new information about the way the Universe is constructed. The Chi-b (3P) is a more excited state of Chi particles already seen in previous collision experiments, explained Prof Roger Jones, who works on the Atlas detector at the LHC. "The new particle is made up of a 'beauty quark' and a 'beauty anti-quark', which are then bound together," he told BBC News. "People have thought this more excited state should exist for years but nobody has managed to see it until now

even though I have never heard of this particle, still pretty exciting!

Source

reply to post by definity


Thanks for posting this... Love reading about LHC

reply to post by definity


Thanks for posting this OP.
Problem is most of these articles can only be fully understand by a very few people.
For the rest of us, including me, it always stays "strange"

reply to post by Pokoia

Problem is most of these articles can only be fully understand by a very few people.

Actually if you talk to any particle or theoretical physicist about quantum mechanics they will tell you, no one understands it fully, and anyone who thinks they do are fooling themselves.

We're in entirely uncharted waters here folks and it's getting fascinating. We are so close to solving the riddle of reality, or possibly uncovering yet another layer of it!

A little off topic but, has anyone seen the devices they use to actually see the particles after the collision? It's pretty neat, the images produced showing the paths of the particles are, to put it lightly, beautiful, amazing, almost fractal like with their spirals and such.

I'd really wish they'd sell prints of them.

reply to post by phishyblankwaters


Could you please direct me to the images of these impacts? That sounds awesome!

I still think the LHC could be what ends our world as like you said: Even the scientist don't really know what there dealing with.

Im sure that as they ramp up their tests there will be many surprises they encounter which will for sure reshape to some degree the thinking within the greatest minds of our time. There are I am sure dangers that the scientists are vaguely aware of and some they aint! So lets hope that they dont cook up a black whole or we will all end up in it!!

What I am interested in is if they discover anything that is dimentional in nature during their tests!

We will all have to watch the space.

Fascinating times to live in!

reply to post by kbriggss


No clue if you can even get them, I've only ever seen them in documentaries showing Fermilab but CERN has the same stuff on a larger scale.


Here's one from google image search, but some of the ones I've seen in TV shows are much nicer. Each one of those colored lines would be a particle and it's trajectory, I believe.




here's one closer to what i was talking about

reply to post by kbriggss

I still think the LHC could be what ends our world as like you said: Even the scientist don't really know what there dealing with.

i wouldn't be too worried about the end of the world....

Now, the scientists do have an understanding of what they are dealing with, the mystery revolves around why, quantum mechanics is strange and things just don't make sense.

Like entanglement.

With quantum entanglement you have 2 particles that are "entangled" meaning if you interact with particle A, particle B responds (I think it's the anti particle so it would be an opposite response?)

And here's where it gets weird. time and space have no effect on this, the particles can be lightyears away, yet react INSTANTLY, as if they are sending information to the other particle faster than light. This is a real thing and is completely confusing, but they can still make predictions and test them based on their limited understanding.

Take gravity. We know it's real, we can measure it's effects, and do all sorts of things, letting us understand that mass distorts space time which creates the gravity effect.

But we actually have zero understanding of WHY things have mass, and also the mechanics of how gravity works.

On earth, if you hold a ball out and release it, it drops because of gravity. But WHY? What mechanical process allows this to happen?

Isn't that the kicker? With LHC looking for the Higgs, we might finally understand how gravity actually works, one of the first physical laws discovered, yet we know little about it.

Way back when, the atom was the smallest particle. Then we split it and low and behold, you've got a nucleus, protons, electrons, etc. So then electrons became the smallest.

until we built a machine to smash them together, and once we did, we found tons of new particles.

I'm honestly hoping the search for the Higgs reveals a new layer, more things to discover, more physics! finding the last piece in the puzzle means there's not much left to learn.

Yet more fairy tales from the LHC. They have to pretend they have some results. Nothing more than a superbunker

reply to post by Pokoia


They discovered a new particle. It's just that simple.

It's not nearly as exciting as it could be, though. It's not a new fundamental particle, like an electron, quark, or neutrino. It's a composite particle, made of bottom quarks, and it's just a different form of other composite particles already known to exist. It's actually kinda boring.

reply to post by CLPrime


I'm not convinced they have though, as since when has an anti-particle of anything combined with its opposite to produce anything – this runs contrary to what we're told about matter/anti-matter combinations. Also, its at such a highly energized state that what they saw probably disappeared in a wink.

reply to post by chocise


There are plenty such composite particles. They're called mesons. There are about 140 known mesons, so this is nothing special.

reply to post by CLPrime


I don't believe any of it I'm afraid. I think they've got it spectacularly wrong since de Broglie and Maxwell. I'm a wave/matter theorist and don't believe they'll even find the 'particle' they're searching for: the Higgs-Boson. The Standard Model is a hideous theory, arguably the worst ever postulated. Here's what the guy behind super string theory, Michio Kaku, has to say about it:

the Standard Model is thought to be one of the ugliest theories to be proposed in all of modern physics. It has over 19 free parameters, 3 sets of redundant particles, 36 different types of quarks and anti-quarks, and a motley collection of gluons, leptons, Higgs, Yang-Mills particles, etc. To me, it is like taking Scotch tape, and wrapping up an aardvark, platypus, and a whale, and calling this natures finest evolutionary achievement.

reply to post by chocise


So, you reject the observation of many of these particles?
There are only 10 known fundamental particles:

Bosons:
- gluons (responsible for the strong nuclear force)
- photons (responsible for the electromagnetic force)
- W+,W-, and Z0 bosons (responsible for the weak nuclear force)

Fermions:
- electrons
- muons
- taus
- neutrinos
- quarks

There are 3 types of neutrinos:
- electron neutrinos
- muon neutrinos
- tau neutrinos

There are 6 types of quarks:
- up quarks
- down quarks
- charm quarks
- strange quarks
- top quarks
- bottom quarks

That's 17 fundamental particles.
Plus their antiparticles, which brings the total to 29.

Beyond that, some of these particles can combine to form composite particles, such as this new χb(3P) meson, which is a bottom quark and an antibottom quark. If this weren't the case, familiar macroscopic structures wouldn't exist. Quarks combine to form protons and neutrons, which combine with electrons to form atoms, which combine to form molecules, which combine to form compounds, which combine to form more complex structures like cells, tissues, and, on larger scales, plants, animals, planets, and galaxies.

It's not messy...it's a little something called 'hierarchy'. If the initial 10 fundamental particles, and their various 'flavours' and 'colours', didn't exist, the world as we know it wouldn't exist.

And by the way: superstring theory doesn't override the Standard Model so much as explain it by saying that this "mess" of particles results from vibrations of open and closed, multidimensional strings. Also, Michio Kaku is not behind superstring theory. He's behind string field theory.

reply to post by CLPrime


OK, he's a string theorist. Didn't mean to confuse, and I am aware it's an extension of the SM, it's still a very messy theory.

As a wave/matter theorist all we propose is that what you actually perceive as matter is actually the expression of a wave form.

Originally posted by chocise
reply to post by CLPrime

 

As a wave/matter theorist all we propose is that what you actually perceive as matter is actually the expression of a wave form.

Sounds like Quantum Mechanics.

Originally posted by CLPrime

Originally posted by chocise
reply to post by CLPrime

 

As a wave/matter theorist all we propose is that what you actually perceive as matter is actually the expression of a wave form.

Sounds like Quantum Mechanics.

without the duality.

Hey, have a look at this.... it was published a few hours ago

Blow for dark matter theory

'Dark matter' is a theoretical - and controversial - substance which is undetectable by telescopes on earth, but thought by some scientists to account for up to three quarters of the mass of the whole universe. That theory received another blow today, as scientists detected a very low mass, faint star in a star cluster for the first time. The result means that the overall mass of such 'globular clusters' could well be explained without having to resort to dark matter.

The clusters could simply be made up of faint stars we haven't detected yet.

Until now, the overall mass of globular clusters - measured by their gravitational effects on nearby galaxies - could not be explained other than with dark matter, which has not yet been proven to exist.

'A significant proportion of globular clusters can now be explained through the presence of previously undetected, faint stars,' says Jetzer.

Even the most powerful hi-tech telescopes are barely able to record remote low-mass and thus faint stars.

An astrophysicist from the University of Zurich has now detected a low-mass star in globular cluster M22 (pictured) for the first time.

The star was 'seen' using a strange gravitational effect called microlensing.

The result indicates that the overall mass of globular clusters might well be explained without enigmatic dark matter.

Until now, it was merely assumed that low-mass and therefore extremely faint stars must exist.

But even the most modern telescopes find them almost impossible to detect.

Together with a Polish-Chilean team of researchers, Swiss astrophysicist Philippe Jetzer from the University of Zurich has now detected the first low-mass star in the globular cluster M22 indirectly.

The dwarf star has less than a fifth of the mass of our Sun.

The measurements were carried out on the ESO VLT 8-meter telescope with adaptive optics at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.

Hints of the star were first detected by two Polish astronomers in 2000 - they noticed that the brightness of a nearby star increased for 20 days.

The astronomers thought that the effect might be due to a nearby, undetected star 'warping' light with its gravity field - an effect known as 'gravitational microlensing'.

The University of Zurich's Jetzer is a microlensing specialists - and his measurements confirmed that there was a tiny, faint star passing in front.

I'm far happier with this than the existing situation where all those billions of galaxies comprise only 5% of what's out there....

Discoveries are being made so rapidly now I can't but help believe we're at the point of some radical shifts in thinking and understanding on the true nature of our universe.

We can think we have it figured out all we want to - the universe really has no regard for our attempts to explain it.

That's my take on the recent back-and-forth.

Quantum Mechanics is incomplete, and perhaps a tad misguided in some respects. However, to create a "theory" that is, essentially, predicated on a series of stop-gap postulations in regards to another theory.... is just silly.

If you want my honest opinion, I think our current models focus far too much on the particle (which, ultimately, is a philosophy that will butt heads with Quantum Mechanics... which stipulate there is a defined quanta to the universe). Both the particle and wave are real and/or virtual, depending upon the angle of your experimental setups. To focus almost exclusively on detecting particles (many of which are indirect observations and difficult to distinguish between real and virtual) seems like only investigating half of the mechanics.

That said... doing the opposite is, also, not going to give you a very complete picture.

reply to post by definity


cool thanks for the 'particle article' heheh .. bu-bum ..smash!


what's so beautiful about this quark though...