Large Hadron Collider May Have Produced New Matter 238
Covalent writes "The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator and the 'Big Bang machine' that was used to discover what appears to be the long-sought Higgs boson particle (as announced July 4), may have another surprise up its sleeve this year: The LHC looks to have produced a new type of matter, according to a new analysis of particle collision data by scientists at MIT and Rice University. The new type of matter, which has yet to be verified, is theorized to be one of two possible forms: Either 'color-glass condensate' — a flattened nucleus transformed into a 'wall' of gluons, which are smaller binding subatomic particles, or it could be 'quark-gluon plasma,' a dense, soup or liquid-like collection of individual particles."
First post (Score:4, Funny)
that matters.
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Speaking of matter: a wall of gluons sounds just like the ultra strong base material needed to construct orbital superstructures. Could anyone enlighten us as to the expected material properties?(let me guess: halflife ½ picosecond)
Re:First post (Score:5, Funny)
Since it's made of gluons, it's probably very sticky.
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Since it's made of gluons, it's probably very sticky.
Oooohhh... you scientists with your technical mumbo-jumbo. Tell us what we really want to know - what does it taste like?
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Kindergarten paste.
Re:First post (Score:5, Funny)
I presume the anti particles are made of teflons.
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Re:First post (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like discovering nuclear power and wondering what kind of steam locomotive we could build with it.
Hilarious example, considering how nuclear power works. You realize a nuclear plant is just a steam turbine, right?
Re:First post (Score:5, Funny)
And how may locomotives use one?
Excellent point. Can you imagine if we used our nuclear technologies for something so backward as, say, ironclad steamboats?
Excellent point, yourself. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Excellent point, yourself. (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the smaller nuclear power plants for a sub might actually be quite efficient for a very large locomotive running on a much larger-than-standard track. At speed with radiator cooling you might manage some good efficiency. Tanker cars for coolant. Green as hell as as far as CO2 is concerned. You could move heavy freight. I bet in the fifties or sixties some serious thought went into big nuclear trains. Not feasible then with the reactors they had, but some of the N power plants in our ships are very compact now I believe. Albeit highly classified. What a poor analogy the poster made in his tirade against the sci fi fan.. Because, obvious security and political disadvantages aside, using a nuclear power plant in a big-ass steam locomotive may not be a half bad idea. Especially these days.
Yep. [barentsobserver.com]
Cnocubo! (Score:2)
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Trains are still by far the most efficient way to haul cargo. New information technologies are great and all, but hauling bulk cargo about energy and efficiency, and steel wheels on steel rail are hard to beat.
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and steel wheels on steel rail are hard to beat.
Float the cargo.
Re:First post (Score:4, Informative)
It's like discovering nuclear power and wondering what kind of steam locomotive we could build with it.
Odd then, that just about every use of nuclear power is to drive a steam engine/turbine first, and a generator second.
Old tech never dies, it just gets embedded.
No comments, then a flood of experts (Score:2, Funny)
No comments, as no one here actually knows anything on the subject. Soon to be FULL of comments, by people passing themselves off as actually being subject matter experts on the topic.
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As a matter of fact, I am an expert on this topic.
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So, can you fill us in? What are the implications of such discoveries? Or is this another one of those things that happen (a happy accident) with no real consequence besides filling up a few research papers?
Re:No comments, then a flood of experts (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't htink there will be any "this generation" practical applications to anything the LHC finds - anything that only exists at LHC energy level is pretty far out there. Indirectly, however, particle physics was stalled for 20 years following the cancellation of the SCSC, and the LHC got it moving again. Fundamental experimental physics research always pays off in the long term, as it's our most basic understanding of the universe.
Finding some serious flaw in the standard model, which is as crufty and a
Re:No comments, then a flood of experts (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the coolest part is it surprised them, that doesn't happen to often to those guys.
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As a matter of fact, I am an expert on this topic.
As a matter of fact, I drove by a Holiday Inn Express once.
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As a matter of fact, I am an expert on this topic.
Confirmed. I am an expert in identifying experts on topics.
Re:No comments, then a flood of experts (Score:5, Funny)
Vanity, thy name is Slashdot.
Re:No comments, then a flood of experts (Score:4, Funny)
Did it for you: +1 Insightful
Wait... DAMN!
Re:No comments, then a flood of experts (Score:5, Informative)
Let me 'splain. No. There is too much. Let me sum up.
So, when you collide high-energy particles, you get lots of outgoing particles. Sometimes more, sometimes fewer. One thing that you can do to study the outgoing particles is to look at all pairs of tracks in the event (the combinatorics get very large, but you can still do it), and make a histogram of how close together all the pairs were. When you do this, you find that there is a proliferation of tracks that are very close to one another. This is because the outgoing particles tend to come in clusters (we call them "jets"), all moving in approximately the same direction. This happens, more or less, because if you get one outgoing particle with very high energy, but it is an unstable particle, its decay products will tend to be moving in roughly the same direction as the original particle.
Now, you can also do something slightly more sophisticated: instead of just looking at the angle (in any direction) between two tracks, you can use spherical coordinates, and look separately at the angular distance *around* the beamline (azimuth / phi) and the angular distance *from* the beamline (polar angle / theta) (although we actually convert the polar angle into a strange quantity called "pseudorapidity" instead ... this is unimportant for this discussion). When you do that, if you look at events with relatively few outgoing tracks (<35), you see exactly what you expect: an proliferation of tracks that are close in both azimuth and polar angle -- jets again.
On the other hand, if you look at events with lots of outgoing tracks (>= 110), you still see the excess of tracks that are close in both azimuth and polar angle from jets, but you also see a "ridge" -- an excess of tracks that have almost exactly the same azimuth as one another, but have very different polar angles. This is unexpected, and unexpected results == SCIENCE!
So, we expect particles to appear tightly clustered together, but what we see (in some events) is more like a flat spray of particles that goes from one beamline to the other, but is very tightly constrained in one azimuthal slice.
Terrible analogy: We expect cities to occupy a roughly circular area of the earth's surface -- tightly constrained in both latitude (polar angle) and longitude (azimuth). This is like finding a planet that has a city that stretches from pole to pole, but only along a single meridian -- tightly constrained in longitude but totally unconstrained in latitude. It's just plain weird.
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Oh enough on this, where is the car analogy guy when you need it?!
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Oh enough on this, where is the car analogy guy when you need it?!
Based on what I got out of the summary, the basic car analogy would be that a lot of cars exploded, and now the crime scene investigators are trying to figure out if the cars went "KABOOOOM!"
*smashes hands into each other a few times, than slowly spreads them out like a fireball from an movie-style car crash explosion*
or "KERBLAM!!!"
*makes the same hand wavy motions, but adds in some slow motion facial expressions of people getting into an accident*
They're not sure which it is yet.
Re:No comments, then a flood of experts (Score:5, Funny)
Oh enough on this, where is the car analogy guy when you need it?!
Two cars collided head-on and all the debris, blood, fluids, and remains lined up in a 2' wide straight line at a 104 degree angle to the collision. This was not the expected outcome.
Re:No comments, then a flood of experts (Score:4, Funny)
Let me 'splain. No. There is too much. Let me sum up.
We've discovered the Dread Particle Roberts?
QCD field, not decays (Score:2)
This happens, more or less, because if you get one outgoing particle with very high energy, but it is an unstable particle, its decay products will tend to be moving in roughly the same direction
Not really - the particles (quarks or gluons in this case) can be perfectly stable. The problem is that the colour field that surrounds them acts like a really, really strong electric field. So strong that as the quark is blasted away from its opposite charged partner the energy in the field becomes so large that it is energetically favourable to create quark/anti-quark pairs and shrink the size of the field. This is why even up and down quarks produce jets despite being stable.
This is unexpected, and unexpected results == SCIENCE!
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particle physics is all about indirectly observing & then indirectly counting stamps. Kinda like stamp collecting, but there's a lot more of them, most of them are worthless, or worth far less than their cost & no one really cares except the collectors. Am I close...? ;-p
Pretty much, except that around 1945 one of those stamps turned out to be capable of giving a wedgie to an entire city.
And suddenly a lot of jocks became extremely interested in stamp collecting.
For the last fifty years most of the stamps have been looking boring again, but the jocks are still nervous that there might be a super-mega-wedgie hidden in there, so they're still funding and organizing the Philatelic Club meetings just in case.
Maybe... (Score:2)
Or the stuff that makes makes homoeopathy work. And where aura's are made up from.
Finally proof!
Ha, I bet you wont find any disbelievers any more now!
Now I think of it.... Blast! I always claimed that the paranormal cant be measured with 'conventional' physics... Now I am truly confused what exactly to believe...
I'll be off to my tarot cards to see what I shall make of thi
“You don't expect quark gluon plasma effects (Score:2, Funny)
Re:“You don't expect quark gluon plasma effe (Score:4, Funny)
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New Matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know its just the heading, but the whole "new matter" vs "new TYPE of matter" is kind of an important distinction.
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I know its just the heading, but the whole "new matter" vs "new TYPE of matter" is kind of an important distinction.
Does it *really* matter?
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>Is it just me, or are circles pointless?
Not if you look at them side on.
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Haha yea, I was originally like "HOLY SHIT! One of the fundamental laws of the universe has been potentially broken? FREE ENERGY FOR ALL!"
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How would a device that use a a metric shit ton of Beowulf clusters of LoCs of power to smash things together create anything from nothing?
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>It depends from which direction you are looking:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YYWUIxGdl4 [youtube.com]
Depends (Score:2)
I know its just the heading, but the whole "new matter" vs "new TYPE of matter" is kind of an important distinction.
It depends on what the result is due to. Quark-gluon-plasma is really a phase of matter and, in fact, not really that new since it was discovered in jet-quench events at the LHC several years ago. If it is a colour-glass condensate then you could argue that this is a new type of matter since it is essentially something constructed out of gluons.
New matter (Score:2)
For everyone who got bored with the old one.
But seriously. So what exactly is that "new matter". And, more important, why didn't it exist before? I mean, let's be blunt here, the universe is friggin' huge and I kinda doubt the conditions in the LHC are universally unique. And yet we never observed that kind of matter before?
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And yet we never observed that kind of matter before?
People focus on the accelerator, but what really matters is the detector. And now that we have a nice detector, lets get a high beam current at a high enough energy to make something interesting to look at.
If you just want to look at high energy collisions, wait around for high energy cosmic rays. Individually some are much higher energy than any accelerator, but the equivalent of the "beam current" is ridiculous low, like two digit orders of magnitude lower.
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The conditions that the LHC can recreate are unique in that they are thought to have been present only during the Big Bang. As such, yes, this could be new matter that we haven't seen before anywhere else.
And that's why the LHC was and is every particle physicist's wet dream: they get to see and play with the conditions of the Big Bang. Nothing else does.
Re:New matter (Score:4, Informative)
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Its like saying fusion research is a waste of time because the sun does it.
Introducing: The Dyson Sphere!
"Stop Wasting Sun while we have the Time to do it."
Cosmic Rays (Score:3)
The conditions that the LHC can recreate are unique in that they are thought to have been present only during the Big Bang.
Actually really high energy cosmic rays recreate LHC collision energies everytime they hit a planet, star or any other material object. There are not very many of them but they can actually exceed LHC energies by quite a few orders of magnitude. Some large scale cosmic ray detectors get to study these but in nowhere near as much detail as we get to at the LHC but they do have some really cool detectors to play with such as a cubic kilometre of ice [wikipedia.org] several kilometres under the south pole.
So to answer the
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Re:New matter (Score:5, Informative)
Both of these conditions have been observed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in the USA. The CGC was reported in 2003/2004, and the QGP in 2010/2011. So while observing them at LHC is exciting, neither is really "new." LHC's luminosity is much higher than RHIC's, though, so one would expect to be able to study both conditions more readily...
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And yet we never observed that kind of matter before?
Probably (at least this has been the case with a lot of accelerator discoveries, AFAIK) because you need phenomenal amounts of energy to produce these particles/states of matter, and while such energies might exist all over the universe, none of them are close enough to us (thankfully) that we'd be able to observe the (and this is the second reason) ridiculous short lives of these unstable particles/states.
Muons created in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays, for instance, only get as far as the surface whe
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As far as I can tell, this is probably not best described as "new matter", but perhaps more like a distribution from a scattering collision that was theorized to exist, but not yet observed (although there are debates if it has been seen before in other colliders).
I'm not up on all the details, but as I remember it, there is a mathematical result from QCD (quantum chromo-dynamics) that scattering angle has a power-law relationship which varies with energy (or something like that). I guess they found some s
finally! unobtainium! (Score:2)
now I can fix my really old stuff
Coincidence? (Score:2)
Just when NASA was needing some exotic matter [discovery.com], new ones are discovered.
At least, until we are used to see them, this new ones will be pretty exotic.
Done already (Score:2)
I'm no expert (Score:2)
the math for what happens inside the event horizon of a black hole. That will be a revolution. (har)
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an electron has no size, but has spin, mass and charge. that's kind of singularity.
Is it UU Matter? (Score:2)
That can be handy
Oh, oh, what could the matter be...? (Score:3)
Seriously. What could the matter be?
Tony Stark called.. (Score:2)
End of the Universe Yet? (Score:2)
orly? (Score:2)
pardon me (Score:2)
Is that a large hadron, or are you just happy to see me?
You're making it too complicated (Score:2)
There was no need to build a particle accelerator to get new matter. I can go down to the store and get new matter. Actually, all I need to do is step outside. I take a jar with me, open it up, collect new matter and come back. OK, well, technically it's not new; but it's new to me and that's what matters. Pun intended.
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I can go down to the store and get new matter.
Sign at a local store: Matter cannot be created or destroyed, nor can it be returned without a receipt.
Re:Do we need a new Mendeleev? (Score:4, Informative)
Not really. The current known elementary particles are all neatly arranged into the Standard Model. The one gap (Higgs boson) was recently filled. What we now need is to discover some process which shows the SM to be incomplete.
Why? (Score:2)
Why are physicists so eager to show the standard model to be lacking? Every few months now we see articles telling how better experiments are confirming the standard model and eliminating some of the alternatives. Just because the standard model isn't new or built on a spiffy new foundation like "string theory" doesn't mean we should want to kill it. In fact, some of those things probably don't deserve use of the term "theory"
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Why are physicists so eager to show the standard model to be lacking? Every few months now we see articles telling how better experiments are confirming the standard model and eliminating some of the alternatives. Just because the standard model isn't new or built on a spiffy new foundation like "string theory" doesn't mean we should want to kill it. In fact, some of those things probably don't deserve use of the term "theory" since they are more complex and haven't been experimentally confirmed in any way (except to the extent they match the simpler "standard model").
Because the standard model does not work for everything. It dose not work well with what we think we know about general relativity.
The assumption is that the universe does not in fact run on 2 differing sets of rules. So it follows that the standard model wile working very well for the things it works for is not in fact true. Even though we believe it to be false it still works really well so we use it.
The standard model though is not a true representation of how the universe really works. We would like to find that.
Re:Do we need a new Mendeleev? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, that it is incomplete is about all the hell we've got at this point. The LHC has basically been ruling proposed SUSY models out unceasingly, and if we're unlucky and New Physics lies past 14TeV, it will likely be a damn long time until we discover it because the LHC took up the theoretical physics budgets of nearly every nation that does theoretical physics for the better part of a decade to build, and they already had the tunnel. To make significant advances with a successor hadron accelerator we'd be talking about building something at least several times larger and the obstacles are enormous... Staggering costs, the irradiation of the inner detectors, data processing, construction times stretching into multiple decades. Not to mention that the LHC consumed most of the world's supply of helium for years on end.
In the worst-case scenario, there's nothing significantly new until one reaches strong-force unification, and that lies a trillion times beyond the LHC,
Re:Do we need a new Mendeleev? (Score:5, Funny)
To make significant advances with a successor hadron accelerator we'd be talking about building something at least several times larger and the obstacles are enormous... Staggering costs, the irradiation of the inner detectors, data processing, construction times stretching into multiple decades. Not to mention that the LHC consumed most of the world's supply of helium for years on end.
Well we'd best get started then. I can contribute $100 or so and will pick up some helium balloons from the party store. Anyone else in?
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Not to mention that the LHC consumed most of the world's supply of helium for years on end.
Admittedly that was just for the after-hours office parties. But if you put 10,000 physicists in a room, how else are you going to keep them entertained?
(You really don't want to see the Silly Putty and Slinkie budget.)
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Dark matter and dark energy have to be made of something.
Dark energy isn't made of anything. It's the shape of space. Although it is worth noting that curvature isn't one of those things treated by the Standard Model.
As to dark matter, it's always possible that dark matter is some sort of particle we already have, maybe, for example, a huge number of extremely low energy neutrinos.
Unfortunately, that it is incomplete is about all the hell we've got at this point. The LHC has basically been ruling proposed SUSY models out unceasingly, and if we're unlucky and New Physics lies past 14TeV, it will likely be a damn long time until we discover it because the LHC took up the theoretical physics budgets of nearly every nation that does theoretical physics for the better part of a decade to build, and they already had the tunnel. To make significant advances with a successor hadron accelerator we'd be talking about building something at least several times larger and the obstacles are enormous... Staggering costs, the irradiation of the inner detectors, data processing, construction times stretching into multiple decades. Not to mention that the LHC consumed most of the world's supply of helium for years on end.
I guess we'll just have to figure out how to do the next generation collider cheaper then.
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So have you missed the 6-sigma confirmation news a couple of weeks after the initial (still un-confirmed) news?
Or did you choose to ignore them?
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It was a confirmation of a particle with a mass similar and decayments to what is expected for the Higgs. It's not confirmation of the Higgs.
There are still a lot of properties that must be measured before we call the Higgs "confirmed".
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I think it's been 'tentatively observed' & the scientific jury is still out. And 6-sigma, which only requires accuracy to within 0.000002% defects, is a far cry from proving anything about a particle that only exists for 10x22secs! I didn't know that the scientific method was now using manufacturing/business principles to prove anything btw ;-p.
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Maybe we need a new way to look at the table:
http://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/1373923/Rebuilding_the_Periodic_Debate__Philip_Stewart.html [chemistryviews.org]
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Obviously they lived long enough to report on it, so I say all systems are green. Unfortunately this may not have been the first time someone created new matter, it just never made it to Sashdot.
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Does anyone even know?
Nope. But you can keep an eye on things here! [lhcfeed.com]
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Yes, yes, yes, no.
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http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/ [hasthelarg...rldyet.com]
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No boom today. Boom tomorrow.
There's always a boom tomorrow.
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Of course it explodes. The LHC can only detect the explosion derbris.
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There was a huge stink [utk.edu] about this when the RHIC was brought on line (stranglets will eat Long Island !!!). This report [bnl.gov] covers the basics.
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Clearly they should have started a campaign on Kickstarter
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You do realize that the use of force is not the only means of human cooperation, right?
Actually, it is. Because those who are willing to be violent will obliterate those who are unwilling. That has nothing to do with human morals and everything to do with the laws of physics ("bullet through the brain causes a splattering of gray matter everywhere").
Until you find a way for the "cooperators" to control the "violence users" in a way that doesn't involve violence, you're just wrong.
Strong nuclear force over distance (Score:2)
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Iron, not lead.
Peak at Fe, boundary at Pb (Score:2)
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We can create as many as we want. But they are not stable.
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Because the larger the atoms get, the less stable they become. All of the new atoms we've every created have decayed almost instantly.
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"I MAY be writing this comment from the space station"
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Physicist: We're only 99.9997% sure that it did cross the road.
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It's called Darwinwite, after the award the Earth will win on Dec. 21 when LHC ramps up the voltage to study it further.
I think if you do it on a planetary scale you win a Fermi Award [wikipedia.org].