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Racing to the 'God Particle'
Wired via WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Saturday, August 17, 2002 | By Lakshmi Sandhana

Posted on 08/17/2002 4:50:36 AM PDT by JohnHuang2

Edited on 06/29/2004 7:09:22 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]

Physicists from all over the world are racing to prove the existence of a particle that's surmised to be at the heart of the matter. Literally.

Dubbed the "God particle" by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, the Higgs boson is a controversial particle believed to bestow mass on all other particles.


(Excerpt) Read more at wired.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: blackholes; higgsboson; realscience
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To: Physicist
Is there an "Anti-Higgs" with negative mass?
21 posted on 08/18/2002 12:08:14 AM PDT by Don Joe
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To: JohnHuang2
Wasn't President Bush #1 building a particle accelerator somewhere underground in Texas until Clinton came along and stopped construction of it? Maybe Presdient Bush #2 can revive it?
22 posted on 08/18/2002 12:29:14 AM PDT by Contra
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To: JohnHuang2
Wasn't President Bush #1 building a particle accelerator somewhere underground in Texas until Clinton came along and stopped construction of it? Maybe Presdient Bush #2 can revive it?
23 posted on 08/18/2002 12:36:10 AM PDT by Contra
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To: Don Joe
Is there an "Anti-Higgs" with negative mass?

No and yes.

First, there is no such thing as negative mass. Antiparticles have exactly the same mass as their matter counterparts. (E=mc², remember, so the fact that matter and antimatter release nonzero energy when they annihilate tells you that their masses can't cancel.)

Now, is there an anti-Higgs? Yes, and it's the Higgs boson! The fundamental bosons--such as the photon--are "self-conjugate", meaning that they are their own anti-particles. [Geek alert: some bosons, such as the W, carry charge, and are not exactly self-conjugate, but both of the charge states are of equal rank: the W+ and the W- have equal claims on being the "matter" particle.]

Personally, I don't think of these "gauge bosons" as matter at all, never mind the fact that some of them are quite massive! I think of them as particles of force. The universe is composed of matter and force, and both are quantized into particles.

In the religious spirit of the threads title, I submit that quarks and leptons are the "nouns" of God's Word, while the gauge bosons are the verbs.

24 posted on 08/18/2002 5:00:18 AM PDT by Physicist
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To: Contra
You're thinking of the superconducting supercollider. Reagan approved it in 1986 (in fact, the laboratory was later named after him), but congress killed it in 1993. To give Clinton his due, he did support the project, and it was killed over his tepid objections.

I came to Penn to do SSC development work in August, 1993. The SSC was killed in October, 1993. It represented half of the U.S. effort in experimental high-energy physics. Since then, the "base program" has shrunk by another third, so my field has shrunk by 2/3 in the last decade.

That's not to say that the field is dead; it is just in the process of moving out of the United States. Upon the cancellation of the SSC, many physicists turned to work on the LHC, a competing machine being built in Geneva. It should see first collisions in 2008.

There is no possibility of reviving the SSC. The incomplete tunnel has been filled in and the laboratory dismantled. Fermilab will own the energy frontier for another six years, but after that the future of physics lies in Europe.

25 posted on 08/18/2002 5:13:25 AM PDT by Physicist
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To: Physicist
Most of this is an isometric exercise for my paltry brain. Does it have anything to do with the idea that the observable universe may have arisen from 'nothing' as the result of a vacuum fluctuation (was that an Alan Guth idea?)?

26 posted on 08/18/2002 5:46:01 AM PDT by Ben Chad
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To: Ben Chad
Does it have anything to do with the idea that the observable universe may have arisen from 'nothing' as the result of a vacuum fluctuation (was that an Alan Guth idea?)?

Not necessarily. There are a couple of models of the very early universe, and all of them are compatible with the Standard Model of particle physics. (They had better be!)

Guth's idea (inflation) was motivated by a desire to explain the "flatness" problems of cosmology (comprising such apparently unconnected problems as why different parts of the universe look so thermodynamically similar, and why we don't see any magnetic monopoles). The notion that the universe could have arisen out of essentially nothing was a surprising consequence of his solution.

27 posted on 08/18/2002 6:08:30 AM PDT by Physicist
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To: Physicist
Placemarker
28 posted on 08/18/2002 9:24:04 AM PDT by Dementon
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To: JohnHuang2
bump
29 posted on 08/18/2002 9:26:56 AM PDT by tophat9000
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To: Physicist
... distinguish the photon from the electromagnetic field ... We know that the electromagnetic field can be quantized...

What's the length of a single photon? Pick any energy.

30 posted on 08/18/2002 9:43:32 AM PDT by mikegi
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To: JohnHuang2
For the discussion, here's a little background information:

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory article on "What is the World made of?"

New Scientist article on the last attempt to find the Higgs boson

An interesting Raytheon article putting it in perspective with regard to Cosmology


31 posted on 08/18/2002 10:30:27 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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To: mikegi
What's the length of a single photon? Pick any energy.

According to quantum mechanics--and experiment--photons don't have a specific position or energy until you go to measure one of these properties. Each photon has a position distribution (a size, if you will) and an energy distribution (i.e., a frequency spectrum).

Let's say that you measure a photon's position. The more accurately you measure its position--and as far as we are able to measure, real photons can be localized to an arbitrarily small point--the greater becomes the distribution of its energy. The more accurately you measure its energy (frequency), the larger becomes the distribution of its position. The product of these uncertainties is greater than or equal to Planck's constant divided by 2 pi. This relationship is known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I want to stress that this principle is a statement about the nature of the properties of the photon and not a consequence of our specific methods of measuring them.

So in answer to your question, a photon's "size", if you want to call it that, depends not on its frequency, but on its spread of frequencies.

[Geek alert: math nerds may understand this wording better: momentum is the Fourier transform of position.]

[Insufferable geek alert: when we go to measure the size of a real photon, the answer, so far as we are able to determine, is that it is pointlike. The story for virtual photons, however, is different. They not only have size, but shape! This is because the virtual photons pull quark-antiquark pairs out of the vacuum. These form little spacetime "loops" with which other virtual photons can interact. The variation of the photon structure function F2 with momentum-transfer-squared is one of the most important experimental tests of quantum chromodynamics (the theory of the strong nuclear force).]

32 posted on 08/18/2002 10:33:15 AM PDT by Physicist
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To: Physicist
Let's say I create a linearly polarized one terahertz electromagnetic wave (an ultrashort pulse, like those from photoconducting antennas). Is it a single photon or a collection of photons?
33 posted on 08/18/2002 12:32:09 PM PDT by mikegi
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To: mikegi
Let's say I create a linearly polarized one terahertz electromagnetic wave (an ultrashort pulse, like those from photoconducting antennas). Is it a single photon or a collection of photons?

That depends how much energy you're radiating. Each photon has an energy equal to the frequency times Planck's constant. If you know the frequency and know how much energy you've put into the pulse, you can calculate the number of photons in the pulse. One is a perfectly good number; if you want a single photon per pulse, you just have to turn the intensity down to the correct level.

34 posted on 08/18/2002 1:28:12 PM PDT by Physicist
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