Large Hadron Collider D-meson study wraps up antimatter ‘flip’ story
Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have witnessed particles called D-mesons flipping from matter into antimatter and back.
Antimatter is identical to matter, but with opposite electric charge.
Such “oscillations” are well known among three other particle types, but this is the first time D-mesons have been seen doing it in a single study.
The team behind the collider’s LHCb detector have put their results on the Arxiv repository.
The manuscript will be published in Physical Review Letters.
In the complicated zoo of subatomic physics, particles routinely decay into other particles, or spontaneously change from a matter type to their antimatter counterparts.
This “oscillation” forms an important part of the theory that attempts to tame the zoo – the Standard Model.
Mesons are part of a large family of particles made up of the fundamental particles known as quarks. This is a nice moment, it’s a sort of completeness Chris Parkes University of Manchester
The protons and neutrons at the centres of the atoms of matter we know well are each made up of three such quarks.
Mesons, on the other hand, are made of just two – specifically one quark and one antimatter quark.
Theory holds that four members of the meson family can undergo the matter-antimatter oscillation – the matter and antimatter quarks both flip to their opposites.
Three particle types – K-mesons and two types of B-mesons had been caught in the act before.
LHCb has already been intimately involved in refining those prior measurements; in March 2012, the team confirmed earlier oscillation observations of a meson called Bs, and published the result in Physics Letters B.
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New type of matter possibly produced by the Large Hadron Collider
Washington:Collisions at the Large Hadron Collider may have created a new type of matter known as colour-glass condensate, scientists believe.
Collisions between protons and lead ions at the LHC near Geneva, Switzerland have resulted in surprising behaviour in some of the particles created by the collisions, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) news reported.
When beams of particles crash into each other at high speeds, the collisions yield hundreds of new particles, most of which fly away from the collision point at close to the speed of light.
However, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) team at the LHC found that in a sample of 2 million lead-proton collisions, some pairs of particles flew away from each other with their respective directions correlated.
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Scientist backing Higgs boson find
Scientist backing Higgs boson find
Professor Rolf Heuer, director general of Cern, believes it is ‘beyond any doubt’ that the ‘God particle’ has been discovered
Scientist backing Higgs boson find by PressAssociation
Higgs boson particle discovery found at LHC
Cern scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.
The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt to explain how matter attains its mass.
Both of the Higgs boson-hunting experiments at the LHC see a level of certainty in their data worthy of a “discovery”.
More work will be needed to be certain that what they see is a Higgs, however.
Prof Stephen Hawking tells the BBC’s Pallab Ghosh the discovery has cost him $100
The results announced at Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research), home of the LHC in Geneva, were met with loud applause and cheering.
Prof Peter Higgs, after whom the particle is named, wiped a tear from his eye as the teams finished their presentations in the Cern auditorium.
“I would like to add my congratulations to everyone involved in this achievement,” he added later.
“It’s really an incredible thing that it’s happened in my lifetime.”
Prof Stephen Hawking joined in with an opinion on a topic often discussed in hushed tones.
“This is an important result and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize,” he told BBC News.
“But it is a pity in a way because the great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn’t expect.”
read the full story from BB news http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-18702455
God Particle found at Large Hadron Collider
Scientists say they have found signs of the Higgs boson while conducting tests at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the French-Swiss border near Geneva.
Researchers at the LHC revealed the details at a packed press conference on Tuesday which was streamed live on the internet.
The search for the Higgs boson has been taking place near Geneva in a 27-kilometre circular tunnel 100 metres below the ground.
It is dubbed the “Big Bang machine” because scientists reckon it can recreate conditions a fraction of a second after the birth of the universe.
The machine has been built as a cost of £2.6 billion and weighs more than 38,000 tonnes.
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Science world awaits Cern announcement on Higgs boson
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are expected to announce on Tuesday that they may have caught the first glimpse of the elusive God Particle.
God particle at CERN
Physicists working at the Cern laboratory in Geneva have summoned colleagues from around the world to a special seminar where they will announce their latest findings.
Although they will stop short of claiming a definitive scientific discovery, their data is understood to point towards the existence of the sought-after Higgs Boson – dubbed the “God particle.”
read the full article by Nick Collins of the daily telegrapgh
Could the Large Hadron Collider really act as telephone for talking to the past?
Spurs-a-jingle boffins in America say that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), most puissant matter-rending machine ever assembled by humanity, may also turn out to be the first time machine ever built. According to the physicists’ calculations, instruments at the mighty particle-smasher may soon detect signs of “singlets” which it has not yet generated, sent back from their creation in the future.
“Our theory is a long shot,” admits physics prof Tom Weiler, “but it doesn’t violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.”
According to calculations by Weiler and his colleague Chui Man Ho, if the LHC manages to generate the long-theorised but never actually seen Higgs Boson (aka “the god particle” – confirmation of its existence was a major reason for the Collider’s construction) it should also create another mysterious particle dubbed the “Higgs singlet”*. These singlets, according to Weiler and Ho, might be able to move in a fifth dimension transverse to our existing four-dimensional continuum – thus they could pop out of our universe and subsequently re-enter it elsewhere in time.
This thinking relies on the idea that the 4-D continuum we can perceive exists within a 10- or 11-dimensional universe, rather as a flat two-dimensional membrane could float suspended in normal three-d space. Versions of the so-called “M-theory” in physics hold that this is the case, but that almost all kinds of forces, waves, particles etc are stuck to the four-dimensional membrane, aka the “brane” for short.
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CERN launche new blog on Quantum Diaries platform
CERN is launching a new blog on the Quantum Diaries platform. Until now Quantum Diaries was focussed on providing a platform for individual particle physicists from around the world to post their thoughts on work and life. Today CERN and other particle physics laboratories have joined by launching official institutional blogs. Quantum Diaries is an initiative of the Interactions collaboration, a joint communication resource from the world’s physics laboratories.