Tiny Particle With No Charge Discovered

ZonkerWilliam writes to mention PhysOrg is reporting that a tiny particle with no charge, called an 'axion' has been discovered. From the article: "The finding caps nearly three decades of research both by Piyare Jain, Ph.D., UB professor emeritus in the Department of Physics and lead investigator on the research, who works independently -- an anomaly in the field -- and by large groups of well-funded physicists who have, for three decades, unsuccessfully sought the recreation and detection of axions in the laboratory, using high-energy particle accelerators."

Detected...

[PresidentEnder]

how, exactly? I understand that the usual electronic detector won't work, so they use an electronic detector of some sort (this from the article), but how does that, um, happen? Anyone with more knowledge care to elaborate?

This is a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

From the last time I heard the axion was supposed to take a particle collider the size of the solar system. This is certainly curious. Additionally, the axion theory is a competitor to the string theory. If the results are true both the standard model and the string theory are going to be thrown into disarray.

Cool that he had to use an analog detector

[Chirs]

I think it's kind of a neat ironic twist that he needed to use an analog detection mechanism to position the detector close enough to the target to detect the particle.

Re:This is a big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Wikipedia article linked to previously: "It should be noted that the existence of axions is also a necessary component of string theory ." !!!!!

(posting ac because I already moderated this discussion).

Three Decades!!!

[Nom du Keyboard]

3 decades.

30 years.

10,957 days.

262,968 hours.

15,778,080 minutes.

946,684,800 seconds of your life.

All to find a virtually infinitesimally particle with no charge at all.

That, and mention on Slashdot: Priceless!!

Re:They find an axion??

[Anonymous Coward]

And it would still be cheaper and faster than what we are doing now; which waiting for the next election.

Re:It makes perfect sense

[bcrowell]

That an independent researcher would headline something like this, rather than some "well-funded" group. How could you ever write a grant to research something that is free of charge?

Hee hee...

...but seriously, one of the things that smells really fishy about this is that there are only two authors on the paper. Relativistic heavy-ion physics is a field that normally involves huge collaborations. You get maybe 50 or 100 authors on every paper. There's just no possible way, politically, that these two American guys could submit a proposal to CERN, do an experiment, publish results showing physics beyond the standard model, and not have any other names on the paper. If physicists at CERN believed the result, you'd better believe that some of their names would be on it.

Tiny Particle With No Charge Discovered

[Dr. Di-boson]

This story is completely incorrect. The paper of Jain and Singh, available at http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0954-3899/34/1/009 [iop.org] does not claim that the axion has been found. They simply report the observation of a couple of narrow resonances which can be interpreted as a signature of new particles. The scientific interpretation of these resonances is unclear at this point. In fact, astrophysical bounds completely rule out that one of these resonances is the so-called axion. I work in this field, so I know. I have no idea how the press is getting the idea that this means the axion has been found. It is *not* based on scientific facts.

doubt these are axions

[cosmicl]

A few things sound strange about this report. The title does not mention "observation of", or "evidence for" . Instead it is "Search for new particles decaying into electron pairs of mass below 100 MeV/c2" This means the author either chose not to use the stronger words of observation, or evidence in the title, or was unable to convince the referees to allow it. Nuclear emulsion is a low rate detector. If this effect is real, it reasonably likely that someone would have seen it by now, particularily the work did not require an accelerator. I did my dissertation in particle physics looking at an apparent enchancement in the number of +/- particle pairs produced with low relative velocity. They were produced by 28 GeV/c proton collisions on liquid hydrogen. I noticed an enhancement that at first look had the signature of some new particle or resonance. It was really exciting for a few days. It was not a new particle. Rather it was an enhancement, predicted back in the 1920's due to a modification of phase space arising from the attractive electromagnetic force between particles of opposite charge. It was interesting because the dominant force in the collision producing these particle was the much stronger strong-nuclear force. With a bit more work, I was able to show this enhancement for several types of charged particle pairs. (And finish my thesis.) I doubt this enhancement is what is happening in this axion claim. But there are mechanisms for creating enhancements that are not axions, especially if the statistics are limited and the number of trials (statistical penalty) not counted properly. Finding axions would be an extraordinary claim. It would need to be supported by extraordinary proof. It seems unlikely this paper contains either.

Re:true?

[bcrowell]

(the anomalous e+/e- pairs from ORANGE and EPOS experiments in Germany in the late 80's, whose results are now widely believed to have been fraudulent after the non-detection at Argonne)
Fraudulent, or just the product of wishful thinking, and cuts on the data engineered so that they would make the peaks appear? I knew some of the people involved (Greenberg, Rhein, Kaloskamis, Lister, Betts), and I don't recall anybody suggesting that it was outright fraud.

Re:true?

[bholzm1]

Fraudulent, or just the product of wishful thinking, and cuts on the data engineered so that they would make the peaks appear? I knew some of the people involved (Greenberg, Rhein, Kaloskamis, Lister, Betts), and I don't recall anybody suggesting that it was outright fraud.

It was just erroneous methodology at ORANGE and EPOS (and EPOS II). After the APEX results were in, most of the people involved (as good scientists should) accepted the results and moved on.