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Brookhaven Probing Unknown Form of Matter (Maybe) 30

Posted by michael from the animal-vegetable-mineral dept.
boowax writes "The New York Times (free registration required) reports that there may be a new type of matter according to researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. This apparently has come from interpretation of data gathered from work with muons and discrepancies between predicted wobble and the actual affect. Their are doubters though, who claim that the difference comes from problems with the calculations used for prediction and not a separate form of matter."
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Brookhaven Probing Unknown Form of Matter (Maybe) More

Brookhaven Probing Unknown Form of Matter (Maybe)

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  • Well, I'm about as excited for this as I was when cold fusion 'may' have been proved viable.

    Come on, this is just flimsy.

    • Re:Huh (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Mt._Honkey ( 514673 )
      Yes, it's flimsy for now. Note this:
      Theorists who are not involved in the research, but whose computational results must be used to interpret it, have recently uncovered errors and uncertainties in their own work. For that reason, the Brookhaven experimenters say they are not ready to claim they have proved a new form of matter exists.
      They aren't claiming anything yet. They have something that MIGHT point to this new matter. And they're not just pulling this out of their asses either. Supersymetry theory claims that each matter particle has a corresponding "supersymetric" particle, a kind of a shadow particle. squarks, sleptons and the like are expected by this theory. Of course, this is just one of a few theories trying to supplement or overthrow the standard model, and has not nearly been proven.

      Don't make snide comments at people who are releasing experimental data without a conclusion. Right now, all they're saying is that they are measuring a .6 wobbles/sec difference from what they expected, that's it. They aren't claiming anything else yet. Eventually they will either make such a claim when they have enough solid data, or they will drop it due to lack of information or because they believe it is false.

  • Matter matters (Score:3, Funny)

    by eyepeepackets ( 33477 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2002 @11:36AM (#3986520)
    Yes, but the article suggests some interesting questions:

    "What does it matter?"

    or

    "Does the new matter matter to hatter?"

    or the obvious, "What's the (new) matter?"

    Yes, the article is certainly weak, mostly due to the fact that, as the one fella in the article says, it's all somewhat premature.

    Perhaps the most important point made in the article is the one about the Bush administration killing funding for the research: Where do the Bushies think all the new technology they can lock up for corporations comes from, anyway?

  • ...thought they were talking about the bit of stuff that's always left over after you eat the last sardine in the tin.
  • In a weird reflection of the boundless complexity of modern physics, top theorists from around the world were still sending conflicting calculations to the Brookhaven team in the hours before the new findings were disclosed yesterday afternoon at the laboratory.

    So why did they release it? I mean, the work isn't finished, so what gives?
    • So why did they release it? I mean, the work isn't finished, so what gives?

      What happened yesterday is that our collaboration announced our experimental result based on the data that we took in the winter of 2000. We have spent about two years staring at that data, and we are confident that we have extracted the right number from it. Consequently, we announced it yesterday and we are preparing a paper to submit to a journal.

      However, there is another side to the story. Other groups do theoretical calculations of what the standard model predicts we should measure in the absence of any "new physics." The confusion at the moment is on their side.

  • It's on Long Island. Of course they're going to discover new forms of matter. Hell, I discover new forms of matter just walking down the streets of NYC.
  • Read to the end of the article, to find the Real Problem.

    Meanwhile, the experimenters have a more immediate worry: the Bush administration has decided to end their financing after this year.

    • Meanwhile, the experimenters have a more immediate worry: the Bush administration has decided to end their financing after this year.

      The situation is a little more complicated that that. The President's budget did cut all funding through the Dept. of Energy for high-energy physics running at the Brookhaven AGS. This affects at least one other current experiment besides ours.

      The House did not add any of this funding back into their version of the budget. There are credible rumours that the Senate will add $50 million to the Dept. of Energy Office of Science budget in their version, which could conceivably be directed to Brookhaven. So, there's still a reasonable hope for additional data-taking this fiscal year.

  • More informative article (Score:5, Informative)

    by mcelrath ( 8027 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2002 @01:41PM (#3987334) Homepage
    Here [bnl.gov] is a far more informative article, straight from the horse's mouth. (I hate it when lay journalists "distill" the actual information down to nothingness and don't provide a reference to the original source...anyway) And Here is the experiment's home page [bnl.gov], with a nice plot of the measurement.

    This is simply a fantastic experiment. The level of precision they have acheived is phenomenal, and they should all be commended for their efforts. The fact that the experiment was cancelled is a great tragedy. These kinds of experiments are a cheap way to look for new forms of matter. They won't tell you what the new matter is, but they will tell you it's there. They do this by very accurately measuring things that are easy to measure (like the muon's magnetic moment, or "g-2"), which are changed very slightly by the presence of new matter. The complimentary experiments are The Tevatron [fnal.gov] and The Large Hadron Collider [www.cern.ch] which may be able to directly produce the new kinds of matter (if the new matter isn't too heavy) and thus identify it and study its properties.

    From a theoretical point of view, it is very easy to "screw up" this measurement. That is to say, if you write down a new theory that has almost any kind of new matter, it gives a contribution to the muon's g-2. This is why there was so much excitement last year when they announced a deviation from the Standard Model. One must remember however that the community's accepted standard for a "discovery" is 5 standard deviations between the measurement and the prediction. The top quark discovery had more than 5 standard deviations signal over background. I cannot find numbers on their home page but it appears from their plot that their measurement is around 2 standard deviations.

    Practically speaking, 2-standard deviation measurements pop up and then disappear all the time in physics. This is why we require the stringent "5-sigma" rule.

    -- Bob

    • Re:More informative article (Score:4, Informative)

      by FredGray ( 305594 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2002 @05:03PM (#3988584) Homepage
      This is simply a fantastic experiment.

      Thanks! (I'm a grad student on this experiment.)

      I cannot find numbers on their home page but it appears from their plot that their measurement is around 2 standard deviations.

      We compared the "world average" result against three recent published standard model evaluations by different authors. The discrepancies between our experimental result and these calculations range from 1.6 to 2.6 standard deviations.

      We should have a preprint available very soon now, by the way; we finished debating the last few words at a teleconference a few hours ago.

      • What's the word on the funding cut? Is it political or have you guys exhausted the experiment's capability?
        • Definitely just politics--our measurement is clearly still limited by statistical rather than systematic errors. In the 2000 data that was just published, the statistical uncertainty was 0.7 ppm compared to about 0.4 ppm of systematics. That 0.4 ppm will almost certainly be reduced even further in the analysis of the 2001 data set, and presumably in any future data taking.

          Additional running time for our experiment was endorsed last year by the BNL program advisory committee. The budget cut was at the Presidential level, and it affects all DOE-funded high-energy physics at the Brookhaven AGS. This includes not just our experiment but also one of the high-profile rare kaon decay search experiments.

    • After all, as W will tell you, there are only four sorts of matter: fire, water, air and earth.

      Duh.

  • heavy thoughts (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by orangesquid ( 79734 )
    The studies appear to confirm similar findings the scientists reported last year. The research involves muons, rare subatomic particles similar to electrons but 207 times as heavy.

    Ah, but these heavy "muons" are more common in America, where fast food and steakhouses abound.
  • Brookhaven Probing Unknown Form of Matter(Maybe)

    i remember my doctor saying something about this at my last appointment

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