Mesons Flip Between Matter and Antimatter 150
steve writes "A team of over 700 physicists at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator have observed the B-sub-s meson oscillating between matter and antimatter states at 3 trillion times a second. From the Fermilab press release: 'Immediately after the Big Bang some 13 billion years ago, equal amounts of matter and antimatter formed. Much of it quickly acted to annihilate the other, but for little-understood reasons, a bit more matter than antimatter survived, providing the universe with the planets, stars and galaxies visible today.' The Standard Model predicted the oscillation, and Fermilab has been working for 19 years to confirm it. The announcement is good press for Fermilab, which is pushing Congress to build a new 18-mile-long International Linear Collider."
Good thing this wasn't discovered in 2004 (Score:5, Funny)
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Or worse (Score:2)
Non Creationist speak = disagreeing with Bush = enemy combatant
no, John Kerry is a bistable multivibrator :) (Score:2)
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More likely they'd have burned the scientist at the state for heresy.
Only a bit (Score:5, Funny)
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Compared to the multiverse, it's just a trifle.
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Re:Only a bit (Score:4, Interesting)
P.S.: In Hawking radiation the effect of more matter than antimatter is also observed.
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Re:Only a bit (Score:4, Informative)
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I forgot the theory's name.
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So logically this means that... (Score:2)
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Re:So logically this means that... (Score:5, Funny)
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*rimshots*
Mod up - punny
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Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week!
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Any real physicists care to confirm/deny?
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Time Travel (Score:2)
Unless the aliens are also traveling backwards in time and made of antimatter. Then we're screwed.
(actually there IS another part of CP called T which is time reversal, and is theorized to always cancle out the CP violation in the math)
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Telling the difference (Score:2)
The short answer is that, yes, a sufficiently motivated particle physicist could tell the difference between living in a universe made entirely of matter and one entirely made of antimatter.
Here's a (partial) long answer: I read an article in Scientific American in about 1991 that explored how Alice (of Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass fame) could tell which universe she was in by u
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I knew she was an intelligent and imaginitive girl, but I didn't know she was smart enough for that!
:)
Although, I guess hanging with the Cheshire Cat and shrinking to the size of a mouse would tend to direct one's interests towards subatomic quantum physics.
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But wait! What... What if we ARE all made out of antimatter and living on antimatter planets?!
/me runs off to write a really, really bad movie script
I thought that.... (Score:2)
BTW, I AM NOT A PHYSICIST. (If it isn't aparent already.)
Phil
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No. Matter is, well, matter (i.e. electrons, protons, etc.). Energy is a property of matter/fields.
The m here is "mass", not "matter". Again, mass is a property of matter.
BTW, this equation holds only for matter at rest; generally it's E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2.
Normally matter and antimatter are produced in equal amounts. Note that antimatter has positive energy (and positive mass) as well.
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Mistake? (Score:2)
-- Douglas Adams, another man who thought that the universe could be a mistake.
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The "initial" (whatever that turns out to mean) mixture mat have been perfectly equal. But departure from thermal equilibrium due to the expansion, combined with asymmetric rates for reactions involving matter vs. antimatter, lead to a small imbalance.
GiggityGiggityGiggityGiggityGiggity (Score:4, Funny)
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I oscillate (Score:2, Funny)
Antimatter Affecting Main Page (Score:5, Funny)
Science: Mesons Flip Between Matter and Antimatter 7 of 6 comments
Someone must have snuck in an antimatter posting or something.
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It was +5 Insightful, Interesting AND Funny as well, I'm telling you!
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Eek, I think it's spreading to other stories!
Games: Peter Jackson on the Future of Storytelling 6 of 4 comments
New terminology (Score:4, Funny)
Since these Mesons flip between matter and anti-matter regularly, I propose calling them...
Freemesons.
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Not from TFA... (Score:1)
Actually, that quote is not from the Fermilab press release. It's from this Chicago Tribune article [chicagotribune.com] which is a little more down-to-earth for us non-physicists.
Oh! Shiny! (Score:5, Interesting)
I certainly expect many
The US is the world leader in physics research, one of the few fields we still can claim that in. We have 8 of the world's Fusion power research facilities (and 4 more have been decomissioned for a total over time of 12,) more than the other nation in the world combined (if you exclude the ITER which we have rejoined.) But by letting the ILC go to Europe or Japan, we'd be deflating our physics potential. The ILC will be unparralleled in its power; attracting the brightest minds in physics today with real opportunity. If the ILC is in America, we'd be very attractive to those bright minds and with them opportunities to put their minds to work for our country. The LHC (slated to be the largest particle accelerator completed in 2007) would be the only comparable facility.
I think we lost out on a real opportunity by not building the superconducting supercollider. Whether or not you believe it was just being funded to show up the Soviets or not, I can't help but place it's closing as the begining of a distinct lack of focus on science in the US that is only getting worse today. Funding the ILC would at least be a demonstration that America still has interest in its scientific future, and at best would help us get the facility here and mark a hopeful turn in trends.
But showboating our physics prowess and bringing in a few eggheads isn't the only real benefit. The projects like the ILC and other big time projects like the ISS can invigorate the mind of our young children, prompting them to take an early interest in science and physics; the key factor in our nation's future. How many children do you know who want to be an astronaught because they hear about NASA and it's contributions to the ISS? It doesn't matter if it's international, as long as we participate in a meaningful way it gets talked about and can influence our kids.
So I think we should fund the ILC. Lets do it for the children.
Re:Oh! Shiny! (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not some trivial "bragging rights" move. Brain drain is REAL, and very important for the economies of nations.
WWII pushing so many scientists to move out of Europe, is one of the main reasons the US became the top superpower in the world.
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Don't worry, we still love you...
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Not liking US foreign policy is not at all "US HATE MONGERING".
Or are you another one of these morons who can't see a world were people aren't either entirely with you or entirely against you?
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The point remains. It's not a trivial issue, as you make it out to be.
You could argue that... You'd be so wrong it's not funny and showing your complete ignorance of 20th century history... but you could argue that.
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Quite easily... There is ample evidence that the US as a superpower has had a tremendous stablizing affect on the entire world. Though it has not ended war, it has dramatically decreased the number of people who die, yearly, in armed conflicts. Not to mention record economic prosperity around the globe.
It's one thing to be critical of certain, specific policies.
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You
Need
To
Show
that one can dislike US foriegn policy if and only if they're ignorant of 20th Century history...
which you clearly cannot.
Nice rant, but it didn't answer my point at all.
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I'll run through this one more time for you. Slower still, I guess.
I said:
"I'd argue that it would be good for the world if they became just an ordinary country rather than a wanna-be global cop."
You said:
"You could argue that... You'd be so wrong it's not funny and showing your complete ignorance of 20th century history... but you could argue that."
I replied:
"...only if you can show that one can dislike US foriegn policy if and only if they're ignorant of 20th Century history, which you clearly canno
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Repeated enough times, this trickles down into education and your country's economy. You are now less capable than y
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Re:Oh! Shiny! (Score:5, Informative)
At the 2006 March Meeting [aps.org] of the American Physical Society, some of us physicists (students and professors) went to Washington DC to lobby our Congressmen (see Congressional Visits [aps.org]) about looming shortfalls of hard sciences in the USA and to encourage them to vote on upcoming bills to increase science funding.
There is alot of eye-opening data showing how Europe and Asia are significantly outpacing the US in terms of funding basic science education, in terms of the number of undergraduate and graduate degrees in the basic sciences, etc. Graphs plotting hard sciences degrees offered per year show the US lagging quite significantly (where we used to be leading 5+ years ago). Such trends are fairly worrisome because the hard sciences are tightly coupled to engineering and industry. Industries tend to attract to places with higher concentrations of scientists, so the US losing scientists will manifest itself in loss of industries down the line.
These are the kind of things that Senators and Representatives care about. To complicate matters there is a lag between industry and science, meaning that changes in science funding and numbers of scientists now won't be manifest significantly in industry until a decade or longer out. I met with two of my Congressmen and one of my Senators (really with their staffers), who luckily were familiar with this and assured us their bosses would be voting for the upcoming legislation to increase funding.
I come from a blue state, where the Congressmen are usually liberal with such education and funding programs. The red stater politicans were more hostile to funding sciences without seeing immediate industrial rewards. Such short-term thinking in those cases is what is leading to the decline of US scientific leadership.
On a different note, I've also seen major shifts in the attraction of foreign students to the US over the past few years. The Bush administration his been cracking down on student visas, which is also hurting our lead. In my department, within the past 3-4 years, each year a handful of good students accepted to the program are denied visas to enter the US (usually from China). Well, these guys aren't going to put their career on hold, and they'll go elsewhere. Many more foreign students are going to Canada and Europe, for instance, and the great brain drain that the US was known for the past few decades is beginning to show signs of reversing.
Anyway, I just wanted to throw in my two cents becuase I specifically lobbied my Congressmen about this very issue only six months ago.
Cost (Score:2)
Cool discovery, but not unexpected (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a really cool measurement. But the summary is a little sensationalist. First, the B-sub-s is not the only particle that oscillates between matter and anti-matter. Kaons have been known to do this for decades and regular B mesons have been observed to do this for 20 years or so. In fact we've known for a long time that B-sub-s mesons oscillated. What we didn't know is how fast. We knew "really fast" but not a number.
In fact, the cool thing is that a B-sub-s, statistically, will oscillate many times between particle and anti-particle before it ultimately decays. Nothing else in this class of particles will do that. For instance, most B mesons will not change flavor before decaying.
But, this is a very interesting result.
3 trillion on 3 billion ? (Score:3)
But that's only American trillions (10EXP12) and not the real trillion (10EXP18)
10EXP Am RestOfTheWolrd
6 million million
9 billion thousand million (or milliard)
12 trillion billion
15 quadrillion thousand billion (or billiard)
18 quintillion trillion
For really big numbers, see:
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~manfear/numbers_names.php [uni-bonn.de]
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(yeah, that's kinda lame, but I couldn't think of an Americanized measure of rapidity of movement, so I went with energy insted. Deal.)
Meanwhile, Meson's brother still sits on the couch (Score:2)
-Eric
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Re:Enough with the big colliders already! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we can't immediately predict what will come out of this. But then, when electron spin was first discovered I'd imagine people were saying similar things- and only recently have there been reports that electron spin has been harnassed for storage/computation, which means it will finally come into the realm of practicality.
Not everything needs to have an immediate, obvious payoff to be worthwhile.
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Re:Enough with the big colliders already! (Score:4, Funny)
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Just picture one of those outdoor contruction yard toilet box things. Attach a grav-manipulator to it, wait until someone gets in and switch on. Just picture the look on his face when he steps out and finds himself floating in outer space. Now that would be hilarious.
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1) space elevators: I think this would be a material science endeavor.
2) blimps: not sure what you want done with blimps. Aerospace engineering.
3) levees: civil engineering.
4) monolithic dome: umm?
5) sustainable housing: not sure what this means either, but it isn't physics.
6) alternative energy: a little too broad for me to classify.
Honestly the amount spent on science (Score:2)
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Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, if you don't like the science that particle accelerators do, demonstrate that belief by refusing to get any MRI or PET scans, gamma knife surgery when you get cancer, or any of the dozens of other medical technologies that either derive from science learned in particle accelerators, or use particle accelerators directly. Of course, the very instant you need one
Re:Brother, can you spare a hadron? (Score:5, Informative)
First bigger is better. Although we haven't even turned on the LHC (large hadron collider)it isn't hard to imagine that at some point down the road we will reach the limit of what we can easily study here (much like fermilab is now). Do you realize just how long it actually takes to design, build, and get one of these things running? Decades really. And that isn't to mention the time spent just trying to lobby for funding. In effect we need to start now if we don't want to spend 5 years sitting on our asses waiting for construction. And you don't really want 5000 physicist, bored and with nothing to do?
Secondly, the LHC is a ring collider. This means that it has a large circle that it accelerates the particles in. While this has some advantages in that it is easier to run at high energies, there are disadvantages as well. One of the larger problems is polarization of the incoming particles. Basicly spinning particles in a circle randomizes the spin direction which makes it very hard to study. There are some clever tricks to get around this (Check out 'spin flippers' at RHIC) but a linear collider can study this much more precisely.
Another reason for a new collider is that it will collide different particles. Leptons not Hadrons for you physics geeks out there. Again the idea is that it will be harder to achive the same energy but the results will have much less error (roughly speaking). The idea of the NLC (next linear collider) is to be able to study in much more detail some very subtle effects that will be lost in noise at the LHC. And by noise I don't mean noise due to poor construction, but noise due to quantum mechanics.
A last reason to build the NLC in the US and not Geneva is that all of us American's are flocking to Geneva (Yes I'm one of them). We jokingly call CERN the american brain drain. It would be good for american science as a whole I do belive to employ more of us locally.
Arg, but it is late here and if I made any serious physics errors reguarding the LHC or NLC I appologize. Also this is a very hand waving sort of argument, very light on the details, take it as such.
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Actually, yes, that would be good. Otherwise you might discover that the indivisible unit of mass/energy in this universe is the "ficton", with unimaginable consequences.
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A meson gun might be a beam of pions (pions are one type of meson and the most stable). At the energies provided by the Tevatron, you need several meters of steel to filter out a reasonable number of these pions. They cause interactions that release other (lower energy) pions and you get a cascade effect. Yeah, you wouldn't want to be hit by an intense pion beam.
Of course, why bother with pions? A beam of protons would have the same effect (that's how you produce a beam of mesons).
I'll skip commenti
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Thanks for catching up.