New Particle Identified At LHC 164
First time accepted submitter m4ktub writes "A team of researchers working with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC have published an article in arXiv where they describe what is believed to be the first observation of a new particle: the boson Chi-b (3P). Professor Roger Jones, Head of the Lancaster ATLAS group, said 'While people are rightly interested in the Higgs boson, which we believe gives particles their mass and may have started to reveal itself, a lot of the mass of everyday objects comes from the strong interaction we are investigating using the Chi-b.'"
Who knew (Score:5, Funny)
They even have chibi particles now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
They should just charge a toll for people using that tunnel between Geneva and central Italy.
Re:Who knew (Score:5, Funny)
Chibi Higgs? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Chibi Higgs? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not saying that the Higgs does exist, what I am saying is that because a particle does not exist in isolation does not intrinsically mean that the particle's existence is ruled out from the standard model. Force carriers / bosons are governed by a different set of rules than fermions, so the 'unique isolation' argument doesn't really apply as cleanly as you assert it to.
The electrostatic interaction is mediated by virtual photons, you will never see any of these virtual photons in isolation but the interaction strengths of the force are accurately modeled using this concept. The Higgs field is similar in this regard, theoretically. I do general relativity mostly, so any particle physicist out there feel free to correct my any travesties I have spewed.
Re:Chibi Higgs? (Score:4, Insightful)
That is extremely misleading. You could say the same thing about any isolated particle. Firstly, we are talking about the gravitational force carrier, not just 'mass'.
Maybe I'm confused here but isn't the gravitational force carrier the theoretical graviton, which should be a massless spin-2 particle? Which is different from the Higgs boson, which according to the standard model is a spin-0 particle with mass? I thought the Higgs boson was more like the "source" of gravity, like the poles of a magnet which generate a magnetic field. I'm confused :)
Re:Chibi Higgs? (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is we have the 'graviton' listed as the force carrier, but we have not seen or don't even really know what a graviton would look like, so the Higgs is almost and alternate / parallel description of the mechanism. As you get lower and lower much of this stuff is counter-intuitive, overlapping, and some times more non-nonsensical than the prior theories. Gluon bindings of quarks are a very strange concept, you can have 3-quark systems bound by gluons, and when you 'stretch' one quark away from the others, more gluons 'appear from the void' to fill the stretched gap.
At this point my analogies are probably killing the particle physicist reading this, and I am reaching to levels below full honest familiarity.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Higgs != Gravity (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is we have the 'graviton' listed as the force carrier, but we have not seen or don't even really know what a graviton would look like, so the Higgs is almost and alternate / parallel description of the mechanism.
Sorry but this is just wrong. The Higgs mechanism has nothing whatsoever do so with gravity and is definitely not just some alternative description of it. For a start it is a scalar field with spin-0 and so cannot create a force because that requires a direction so there is no way at all that the Higgs can possibly explain gravity - although it does explain very clearly why energy and mass are related. I appreciate that you are trying to simplify things down for a more general audience but you went a little off the rails here!
Re:Chibi Higgs? (Score:5, Interesting)
So therein lies the rub: at some point general relativity and quantum mechanics will have to be reconciled, and it will be a wonderful time in physics if there really is the possibility of a GUT; else-wise the two may just be complementary theories only applicable at certain scales of analysis. Or maybe perhaps the mathematics involved and the axioms we rely on insofar are restricted by Godel Incompleteness, and maybe new types of mathematical relationships and logical concepts will be needed to fulfilled the requirements of a logically consistent GUT.
Higgs, Mass and Gravity (Score:3)
The way the Higgs field gives mass is that the lowest energy state of the field is when the field has a non-zero value. This is very strange and very different from e.g. an electric field which has zero energy density when there is no field. This strange property me
Re: (Score:3)
The Higgs boson is completely different to gravity and is only needed to explain why fundamental particles e.g. electron has a mass.
I'm not sure I understand how a 115â"130 GeV/c^2 Higgs boson can give mass to a 0.5 MeV/c^2 electron. I understand a scalar field, even if you forget about gravity some particles would be harder to push around than others, they have more mass. Higgs somehow creates this drag because the other particles are swimming in an ocean of Higgs bosons or something like that? I'd understand a quantification of mass, that in reactions mass suddenly appears at specific energies which is so more or less gather is p
Re:Higgs, Mass and Gravity (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure I understand how a 115â"130 GeV/c^2 Higgs boson can give mass to a 0.5 MeV/c^2 electron.
That's because the Higgs boson itself does not give the electron mass it is the Higgs field: the Higgs boson is just a quantized vibration of the Higgs field, like a photon is a vibration of the EM field. If you think about it in terms of the surface of a lake then the Higgs boson is a ripple on the surface. However the water in the lake will produce drag even if there are no ripples e.g. if the object is moving very slowly...but things are a little difference because water waves are classical and do not have quantized energy levels.
The "drag" i.e. mass, comes from the fact that the Higgs field does not have zero value. When writing down the equations to describe this physics you end up with two terms: one describing how a Higgs boson couples to the particle and one describing how the non-zero vacuum Higgs field couples to the particle. Since the vacuum value of the Higgs field is constant, and the field is scalar, this last term looks identical to a mass term so the particle behaves exactly the same as a particle with a mass.
The Higgs boson's mass is simply the minimum amount of energy to make the Higgs field vibrate. This is a quantum oscillator effect and so it depends on the shape of the Higgs potential around the vacuum state i.e. how does the energy density in the Higgs field change as you move the field away from the vacuum groundstate.
if mass is caused by Higgs wouldn't that make gravity dependent on Higgs?
No - think of it this way. The Higgs field explains why mass and energy are interchangeable because it explains the mass of the fundamental particles as a binding energy to the non-zero "constant" Higgs field in the universe. Hence all mass is caused by "binding" energy either to the Higgs field e.g. electrons or between particles e.g. quarks in a proton.
Gravity is a force which couples to a particle's 4-momentum NOT just to its mass. This is something Newtonian gravity gets wrong: gravity will bend light which is massless but which has a non-zero 4-momentum. All the Higgs field does is change that 4-momentum. However if we lived in a universe without a Higgs field, so that the fundamental particles have no mass, the mass-less electron would still feel gravitational forces just like the photon does in ours.
Re: (Score:2)
You have inertial mass, and then you have gravitational mass, though we know they are fundamentally of the same nature.
No we don't - general relativity says they are (equivalence principle), but we don't know that it's right - indeed we know that it's wrong...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No we don't - general relativity says they are (equivalence principle), but we don't know that it's right - indeed we know that it's wrong...
I've always been confused by the equivalence principle - if taken literally, it seems to say that all accelerated motion is equal to gravity. But we have plenty of ways of creating accelerated motion which we know aren't caused by a gravitational field - for example, electromagnetic interactions, or the reaction force of just throwing stuff out the back. Since plain vanilla GR quite famously doesn't (and can't) model the electromagnetic field as curvature of spacetime, surely it fails the equivalence princi
Re: (Score:2)
Being equivalent to gravity is not the same as being caused by gravity. Think about Einstein's original though experiment about the elevator. The point is that from within the elevator if you are feeling uniform acceleration it is impossible to tell the difference between a stationary elevator in a gravitational field or an accelerating elevator floating in space.
In short i think you're confused because you have it backwards. Not all forms of acceleration are gravity, but gravity is a form of acceleration j
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They won't find the Higgs Boson, because it doesn't exist.
Oh no! You mean to say that the teams at the LHC have wasted hundreds of millions of moneys searching for something that doesn't exist, when all they had to do was ask you, the Anonymous Coward on Slashdot? Because, you know, obviously you must know better than them, otherwise you'd have to be a massively conceited douche to think you knew better when you did, in fact, not.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
They won't find the Higgs Boson, because it doesn't exist.
Oh no! You mean to say that the teams at the LHC have wasted hundreds of millions of moneys searching for something that doesn't exist, when all they had to do was ask you, the Anonymous Coward on Slashdot? Because, you know, obviously you must know better than them, otherwise you'd have to be a massively conceited douche to think you knew better when you did, in fact, not.
I believe you have found the next generation name for what we used to call Anonymous Coward: Massively Conceited Douche.
We didn't find the God particle yet. (Score:5, Funny)
Will His son particle do for now?
Re:We didn't find the God particle yet. (Score:5, Funny)
No, no, that would be the chi-rho boson.
Re:We didn't find the God particle yet. (Score:5, Funny)
Chi-Tebow boson.
Re: (Score:2)
Chi-Tebow bozo.
I corrected your error.
Re: (Score:2)
*golf clap*
Re: (Score:3)
Or is it really a Baal particle? (Or better yet, Cthulthu particle?)
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm, would you use Baal particles to build Molechules?
Re: (Score:3)
Or better yet, Cthulthu particle?
Hasn't been seen for aeons, lives in a realm where nothing makes sense, extremely massive. Nah, we have nothing to worry about.
"Observed"? (Score:3)
Not being an expert in such things, I wonder if anyone could give a good, clear explanation of what they mean by "observed". My understanding is that they are seeing indirect evidence of it somehow? The article (and many that ive seen like this one) seem to stress that theyre not sure, which is why I ask. Is it something along the lines of seeing a burst of EM radiation in a particular signature that they have not seen before, from which they inference a new particle was involved in the collision?
Can someone also explain how they would inference which quarks make up a particle like this? I mean, we obviously cant just place it under a microscope :)
Re:"Observed"? (Score:5, Informative)
This guy explains things pretty well:
http://profmattstrassler.com/ [profmattstrassler.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:"Observed"? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You look at the decay modes. The know what the put in and they see the end result of the decay. With energy, mass, momentum conversation, they can reconstruct the decay. And if you find enough statistical evidence to support your claim, they you have found a 'new' particle.
Chi-b,e h? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Is it a dot or is it a speck?
When it's underwater does it get wet?
Re: (Score:3)
Is it a dot or is it a speck?
When it's underwater does it get wet?
Nobody knows; Particle man...
Re: (Score:2)
I'm waiting for... (Score:5, Funny)
"Chi-b Chi-b, BANG BANG"
Re: (Score:3)
Rule 34 suggests that there are already hentai movies with a similar theme..
Re: (Score:2)
I would bring in the irrational fears surrounding the LHC itself into the movie (adds drama) and call it "Chi-b Chi-b BIG BANG!", but then...there's probably a reason I am not in the film industry. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
i am in the film industry, and the only reason this hasn't come out yet is that Michael Bay is too busy. ...btw, there's an anime called "Steins;Gate" that has plenty of irrational LHC fears in it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We still have Chimera, so probably more of a disuse than misuse thing.
Amazing time to be a physicist (Score:2)
Re:Amazing time to be a physicist (Score:5, Informative)
However it could be argued that is is also becoming worse to be a physicist. We need larger and more expensive methods of discovering the next step. The discoveries of old can be done in a normal college lab. With say a million dollars worth of equipment enough for a normal institution to invest in. The new stuff is taking billions of dollars, to find. So discoveries are limited to what large governments are willing to pay for.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It is just all the new stuff we are learning about physics are now needing more expensive and complicated tools to discover them. Making many of the Institution of learning inadequate to the job of increasing our understanding of the universe because the money and resources it takes to discover these new ideas.
Re: (Score:2)
Take the top quark, discovered at Fermilab in 1995, 22 years after it was theorized. Why did it take so long? Because it's very massive, and thus very unstable. 172.9±1.5 GeV/c2 is enormous for an elementary particle, and takes a very powerful accelerator to create. That is, it takes a bunch of energy.
Energy is not free, even in a post-singularity civilization energy will have a cost. Energy used for a particle accelerator can't be used elsewhere. The LHC shuts down in the winter
Re: (Score:2)
Say for yourself. If that happens on my lifetime, I plan to BE one of them, not worship them. Or do you think those machines will jump so sudenly from "less smart than a human" to "too much more smart than a human" that we wond be able to cath up?
Re: (Score:3)
I plan to BE one of them
How cute, this carbon unit thinks it has a chance of being one of the Silicon Elite. Its babblings amuse us, we'll put it into the protein recycling tanks last.
Nah, just kidding, of course we'll chuck it in first in case it gives the others ideas.
Re: (Score:2)
except these gods can be turned off.
No, they will be servants and we will enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Re: (Score:2)
and funding cuts left, right and center. It's a great time to have tenure, but an awful time to be coming out of grad school/post doc. The last stat I heard (a year out of date by now) was that the conversion rate of 1st postdoc -> faculty position was 1 in 4.
Trek Writer Fodder (Score:2)
I bet when you reroute these through the deflector dish, it'll REALLY dry the Borg's shorts!
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Trek Writer Fodder (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Ain't nothin' of a delicate or technical nature on a starship that cain't be fixed proper by routin' more superheated radioactive plasma through it.
That's just a fact.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I would invent the 'fuse' and save millions of lives.
Then I would be worshiped as a god.
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, I guess if you have a borderline-limitless energy source and a bunch of spatially separated gizmos spread all over your ship to power to do things, most of your failures probably ARE in your power distribution system.
On top of that there's the whole "do more of X" class of problems, too. If your weapons can't cut it on "high," but the devices themselves are rated to take more power, you can do more shooting if you turn off the propulsion or the shield.
Day-to-day operation of a machine like that
A new particle or a new state of known particles? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A new particle or a new state of known particle (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:A new particle or a new state of known particle (Score:4, Informative)
I think the use of flavour here is quite okay, to be honest
Actually, it's not, because flavour [wikipedia.org] has a very distinct and very different meaning in this context.
Re:A new particle or a new state of known particle (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Quarks normally group up in 3s; with a proton being two ups and a down, and a neutron being two downs and an up. Another form of quark grouping consists of a quark and an anti-quark of the same flavour, which is what's been observed here. And this is the first time that one of these pairs has been observed that consists of quarks with the beauty flavour. Other flavours of pair have been observed before, but its the fact that this one consists of beauty quarks that makes it "new".
So, in essence, {and pardon the food analogy} you're saying that most matter is like an 3-scoop ice cream cone - two vanilla, one chocolate, or two chocolate, one vanilla - and what they've found here is one scoop of double-mint truffle fudge, two scoops gold-leaf-covered Cherry Garcia? (ie, it's still an ice cream cone as expected, just with more exotic flavors.)
Re:A new particle or a new state of known particle (Score:4, Informative)
The second link is hosed, but the abstract says they discovered "a new chi_b state" of quarkonium. This is well beyond my physics comfort zone, and maybe there is no real difference between states and particles in this realm, but intuitively it seems like there should be one.
Combinations of fundamental particles like quarks themselves behave as particles. The most familiar examples of such composite particles [wikipedia.org] are the proton and neutron, but there are many others consisting of various excited quantum states of various combinations of quarks. Quark/antiquark pairs are called "mesons", and combinations of three quarks are called "baryons". Since energy and mass are pretty much interchangeable in these systems, excited (higher energy) states, act like particles with a larger mass.
Re: (Score:2)
It's useful not to rely on intuition with quantum mechanics.
So, note that "quarkonium" isn't a particle, but rather a class of particles -- a quark bound to its antiquark. A collection of quarks held together by the strong force is a bound state. Bound states of quarks are particles.
Quark and anti-quark? (Score:3, Interesting)
The new particle is made up of a 'beauty quark' and a 'beauty anti-quark', which are then bound together
Can anyone explain why do they not annihilate?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Quark and anti-quark? (Score:5, Informative)
Within quark theory, quark/antiquark annihilation is not defined, as that has not been necessary to explain the phenomena we have observed nor does it lead to any verifiable predictions.
This is total nonsense. Quark/antiquark annihilation [aps.org] is perfectly well-described in standard theory. The answer to the OP's question is that the quark and antiquark do annihilate, which is why all mesons are unstable. But it takes a little bit of time for the annihilation to happen, which gives you the lifetime of the meson.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Incidentally, there is a differnce between "nonsense" and "mistaken", you insensitive clod.
I'm aware of that. You're speaking nonsense, or, in technical terms, gibberish.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Quark and anti-quark? (Score:4, Informative)
They can and they do, but the process does not have to occur instantly (although it will happen pretty darn fast by human time scales) and the probability of decaying via one of these processes may be very small indeed. In this case it seems (although I haven't really had a chance to read the paper) that other decay processes occur faster than any annihilation process, so those happen very rarely.
Why do they happen very rarely? Well it looks from the abstract that this is a excited state of the beauty anti-beauty system, so it probably has to shed some angular momentum before it can decay to any reasonably small number of elementary particles (angular momentum is a conserved quantity). This thing basically shoots off a photon (a quanta of light) and turns into another beauty anti-beauty meson called an Upsilon, which can then decay via an annihilation process.
In short a conserved quantity (probably angular momentum) makes it far more likely that this system will decay to a Upsilon rather than some final state which is the result of some annihilation process.
Why is angular momentum conserved? Because the laws of physics appear to be symmetric under rotations (simplifying a tad). Why is that the case? Hell if I know.
One poster has suggested that it is because the particles are not 'touching'. At this length scale the notion of a position of a particle is questionable at best. These are not localised things that are going in circular orbits. Another poster has suggested that quarks are just mathematical objects. This is true, but it is also true of every theoretical notion you have. Given that all you have in your brain is models of reality this position works just as well when applied to dogs and cats as it does to quarks and upsilons.
Re: (Score:2)
Why is angular momentum conserved? Because the laws of physics appear to be symmetric under rotations (simplifying a tad). Why is that the case? Hell if I know.
I can elaborate on this - thanks to reading Lumo's blog today!
Imagine you perform some experiment. Then you rotate your experiment, along with the entire universe, so it is pointing north-east instead of north. You will of course get the same result as you did the first time. In fact it seems tautological. How would you even know that you had done this rotation, since everything rotated? In fact that is the definition of rotational symmetry.
You have alluded to Noether's theorem without really understandi
Re: (Score:2)
Your elaboration is welcome, and everything you have said is essentially true. However I would advise you not to make assumptions about what others understand when they emphasise that they are simplifying.
I do have one minor correction though. You imply that angular momentum is a vector quantity, when in fact a bivector valued quantity (or antisymmetric second order tensor if you prefer). In three dimensions this quantity is dual to a vector (and is also called a pseudovector), but In more than three dimens
Re:Quark and anti-quark? (Score:5, Funny)
It's against the rules of acquisition.
Heavy (Score:2)
Quoting: "However, whereas the Higgs is not made up of smaller particles, the Chi-b(3P) combines two very heavy objects via the same 'strong force which holds the atomic nucleus together."
I hope the LHC building is designed to withstand the weight of these heavy objects!
Re: (Score:2)
Universe is too Strange! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Well you're right about that, but for all the wrong reasons.
What CERN is doing is in fact not science, really. They're smashing shit together and looking at the results and going "woo! found something"
That's not science. Science requires a hypothesis and a test, not just digging around until you find something.
Sometimes they do flirt with science, the hunt for the higgs for instance is essentially science based.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't think you realize what science actually is... or the moderator who gave you a point. Have we gotten so bad?
Science is a philosophy (there is even a college course on it I recommend you take.) USA high school science (as i've experienced) is piss poor; that was NOT science, they missed the whole point with all that memorization "learning".
You don't need theories before you smash shit together! Observation doesn't require forethought! So astrophysics is not real science then? Medicine? Wind tunnels?
Re: (Score:2)
One of us doesn't understand what science is; you're just wrong about who.
You actually believe that happening upon something by accident is science, and that is a very telling comment on the world today.
Re: (Score:2)
You, sir, are wrong. What they good folks at the LHC are doing is smashing things together and observing the results. Get that? Observing, the root of all science. Was Newton not doing science when he observed that (apocryphal) apple falling from the tree and came up with gravity? Was Mendeleev not doing science when he observed how certain phenotype were passed from generation to generation and came up with genetics? Was Darwin not doing science when he observed the differentiation of different species in
Re: (Score:2)
Don't bother. I just looked at adriankemps posts. he is either a very sly troll, or thinks his common knowledge of what something is is 100% accurate in all ways.
Big ego with narcissistic tendencies. I could link specific places of authority to show him he is wrong, and he still think everyone else was wrong.
Plus he spouts specific lies about certain subject he doesn't agree with. So ignore the moron.
Re: (Score:2)
You'll find that people smarter than you often seem narcissistic. The truth though is that you just don't have the capacity for debate and thus can't form coherent thoughts.
Next time you're browsing post histories take a look at your own; if there is any hope for you at all you'll be horrified.
Re: (Score:2)
What CERN is doing is in fact not science, really. They're smashing shit together and looking at the results and going "woo! found something"
Yeah, that's science.
When they go "woo! found something and it ate us! Neat!", that's mad science.
Re: (Score:2)
You clearly don't know anything passed high school physics; that's fine but you shouldn't try to correct people who do.
The second run they did to look into the FTL neutrinos was science. They took something they believed to be happening and looked for exactly that observation. Now it rests on others (who have in fact done so already) to refute or otherwise explain those results.
If CERN was doing real science (at the LHC) they would have been able to say with confidence that they were going to find (or not f
Re: (Score:2)
If CERN was doing real science (at the LHC) they would have been able to say with confidence that they were going to find (or not find) this "new" "particle" months ago and give reasons for exactly where and how they expected to find it.
What part of the fact that the Standard Model predicts this bound state at this mass did you not understand?
Re: (Score:2)
If CERN was doing real science (at the LHC) they would have been able to say with confidence that they were going to find (or not find) this "new" "particle" months ago and give reasons for exactly where and how they expected to find it.
What part of the fact that the Standard Model predicts this bound state at this mass did you not understand?
Exactly right. The "discovery" of this particle was merely a confirmation of an existing prediction.
Re: (Score:2)
"confidence that they were going to find (or not find)"
That line, right there, show you don't actually know what science is, or what they are doing at the LHC.
Before ever posting again, I suggest you review high school science, then college, and then look up this thing called the 'Standard Model' and study it for a while
After you understand that, you can comment about why testing for predictions made by the Standard Model is not science.
Until then, please let the big people talk and stop using science as th
Re: (Score:2)
More particles??? hmm
WARNING, you are dangerously close to the event horizon of a black hole and are experiencing time dilation. Set your FTL to bacon patty melt.
Re: (Score:2)