Free Republic

Dreams of a world powered by antigravity got quashed by a particle physics today. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ It turns out that Einstein was right yet again. A recent experiment just proved that antigravity doesn’t exist and we probably won’t ever get to use antimatter to levitate or build a perpetual motion machine or power warp drives (sorry, Star Trek). Antimatter itself is very real. Made of particles that mostly behave like regular matter, but their electrical charges are reversed, an anti-proton looks just like a proton but has a negative charge, while an anti-electron (or positron) looks and moves just like an...

Scientists just outside Chicago have found that the mass of a sub-atomic particle is not what it should be. The measurement is the first conclusive experimental result that is at odds with one of the most important and successful theories of modern physics. The team has found that the particle, known as a W boson, is more massive than the theories predicted. The scientists at the Fermilab Collider Detector (CDF) in Illinois have found only a tiny difference in the mass of the W Boson compared with what the theory says it should be - just 0.1%. But if confirmed...

Cosmic physics mimicked on table-top as graphene enables Schwinger effect. Researchers at The University of Manchester have succeeded in observing the so-called Schwinger effect, an elusive process that normally occurs only in cosmic events. By applying high currents through specially designed graphene-based devices, the team — based at the National Graphene Institute — succeeded in producing particle-antiparticle pairs from a vacuum. A vacuum is assumed to be completely empty space, without any matter or elementary particles. However, it was predicted by Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger 70 years ago that intense electric or magnetic fields can break down the vacuum and...

At its simplest, entanglement describes the idea that two particles can have an intrinsic connection that persists no matter how far apart they are. The particles are ethereally coupled: measure something about one particle, such as its position, and you’ll also glean information about the position of its entangled partner; make a change to one particle and your actions will teleport a corresponding change to the other, all at speeds faster than the speed of light. The scientists in the first experiment... placed tiny drums, each around 10 micrometers long, on a crystal chip, before supercooling them to near absolute...

Update (24 March 2021): The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment is still insisting there's a flaw in our best model of particle physics. As explained below, previous results comparing the collider's data with what we might expect from the Standard Model threw up a curious discrepancy by around 3 standard deviations, but we needed a lot more information to be confident it truly reflected something new in physics. Newly released data have now pushed us closer to that confidence, putting the results at 3.1 sigma; there's still a 1 in 1,000 possibility that what we're seeing is the result...

LHCb experiment cavern at LHC. Credit: CERN Imperial physicists are part of a team that has announced ‘intriguing’ results that potentially cannot be explained by our current laws of nature. The LHCb Collaboration at CERN has found particles not behaving in the way they should according to the guiding theory of particle physics – the Standard Model. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that particles called beauty quarks, which are measured in the LHCb experiment, should decay into either muons or electrons in equal measure. However, the new result suggests that this may not be happening, which could point...

Scientists are celebrating the long-sought discovery of the odderon, a strange phenomenon that appears only rarely when protons collide at high energies, such as inside particle accelerators. Though the odderon was first predicted to exist in the early 1970s, it wasn’t until recently that physicists finally gathered the data they needed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to confirm a true discovery. The discovery contributes to physicists’ understanding of how all the matter in the universe interacts at the smallest levels. Unlike the famous Higgs boson, which was officially discovered in 2012, the odderon isn’t a particle exactly. Instead, it’s the...

On December 6, 2016, a high-energy particle called an electron antineutrino hurtled to Earth from outer space at close to the speed of light carrying 6.3 petaelectronvolts (PeV) of energy. Deep inside the ice sheet at the South Pole, it smashed into an electron and produced a particle that quickly decayed into a shower of secondary particles. The interaction was captured by a massive telescope buried in the Antarctic glacier, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. IceCube had seen a Glashow resonance event, a phenomenon predicted by Nobel laureate physicist Sheldon Glashow in 1960. With this detection, scientists provided another confirmation of...

The newly-discovered particles, named Σb(6097)+ and Σb(6097)-, are predicted by the quark model, and belong to the same family of particles as the protons that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerates and collides: baryons, which are made up of three quarks. But the type of quarks they contain are different: whereas protons contain two up quarks and one down quark, the new particles are bottom baryons composed of one bottom quark and two up quarks or one bottom quark and two down quarks respectively.The LHCb researchers found these particles using the classic particle-hunting technique of looking for an excess of...

When it comes to physics, fewer things are more exciting than proving something wrong. Proving theories wrong has led to entirely new fields of study. The fruits that come from wrongness can be so rewarding that scientists devote a considerable amount of time to probing well-known theories, hoping to find a crack. But a team of JILA physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, Boulder is reporting that, once again, the theory was right—specifically, the Standard Model of particle physics and its prediction of just how spherical the distribution of an electron’s charge...

During the 19th and 20th centuries, physicists began to probe deep into the nature of matter and energy. In so doing, they quickly realized that the rules which govern them become increasingly blurry the deeper one goes. Whereas the predominant theory used to be that all matter was made up of indivisible atoms, scientists began to realize that atoms are themselves composed of even smaller particles. From these investigations, the Standard Model of Particle Physics was born. According to this model, all matter in the Universe is composed of two kinds of particles: hadrons – from which Large Hadron Collider...

The gigantic accelerator in Europe has produced hints of an exotic particle that defies the known laws of physics. A little wiggle on a graph, representing just a handful of particles, has set the world of physics abuzz. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, the largest particle accelerator on Earth, reported yesterday that their machine might have produced a brand new particle not included in the established laws of particle physics known as the Standard Model. Their results, based on the data collected from April to November after the LHC began colliding protons at nearly twice the...

BROOKHAVEN, N.Y., May 9 (UPI) -- U.S. physicists say they're planning a new experiment in particle physics -- but first there's the small matter of moving a 50-foot-diameter magnet 3,200 miles. Along with colleagues from 26 institutions around the world, they are planning an experiment to study the properties of muons, tiny subatomic particles that exist for only 2.2 millionths of a second. But first the core of the experimental equipment, a complex electromagnet 50 feet in diameter, needs to be moved from the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to the department's Fermi National Accelerator...

GENEVA (AP) - Physicists said Thursday they are now confident they have discovered a crucial subatomic particle known as a Higgs boson - a major discovery that will go a long ways toward helping them explain why the universe is the way it is. They made the statement following study of the data gathered last year from the world's largest atom-smasher, which lies beneath the Swiss-French border outside Geneva. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said that what they found last year was, indeed, a version of what is popularly referred to as the "God particle."

Enlarge Image Twin peaks. Both the CMS (top) and the ATLAS (bottom) detectors see evidence of the Higgs boson decaying into a pair of photons in the form of a peak in a so-called mass plot. The agreement of the two peaks and other data clinch the discovery of the Higgs. Credit: CMS and ATLAS collaborations MEYRIN, SWITZERLAND—The long wait is over. Today, physicists working with the world's largest atom smasher here at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, reported that they have discovered the long-sought Higgs boson—the last missing bit in their standard model of fundamental particles and...

Enlarge Image Star power. Saul Perlmutter (left), Brian Schmidt (center), and Adam Riess share this year's Nobel Prize in physics. Credit: LBNL, ANU, JHU Thirteen years ago, two teams of astronomers and physicists independently made the same stark discovery: Not only is the universe expanding like a vast inflating balloon, but its expansion is speeding up. At the time, many scientists expected that the gravitational pull of the galaxies ought to slow down the expansion. Today, researchers from both teams shared the Nobel Prize in physics for that dramatic observation, which has changed the conceptual landscape in cosmology, astronomy,...

Antimatter, an elusive type of matter that's rare in the universe, has now been trapped for more than 16 minutes — an eternity in particle physics. In fact, scientists who've been trapping antihydrogen atoms at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva say isolating the exotic particles has become so routine that they expect to soon begin experiments on this rare substance. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/06/05/antimatter-trapped-for-amazingly-long-16-minutes/#ixzz1OSzvDI4k

Scientists celebrated at the world's biggest atom smasher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva on Tuesday as they started colliding particles at record energy levels mimicking conditions close to the Big Bang, opening a new era in the quest for the secrets of the universe. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said it had unleashed the unprecedented bursts of energy on the third attempt, as beams of protons thrust around the 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) accelerator collided at close to the speed of light. "This is physics in the making, the beginning of a new era, we...

WHAT KIND OF BEAM TO USE WANT? There are two types of particle beams; the one used depends on what the weapon is used for, either exoatmospheric or endoatmospheric. Exoatmospheric are in conditions where there is nothing, like space or a vacuum tube. Endoatmospheric are in conditions where an atmosphere exists, like on Earth or orbiting Earth. For exoatmospheric use the beam that exits the weapon must be neutral, have no charge, to prevent beam divergence. Beam divergence happens when a beam of charged particles increases in diameter as it travels through empty space. This is not good. If the...

Operators of the world's largest atom smasher on Friday ramped up their massive machine to three times the energy ever previously achieved, in the run-up to experiments probing the secrets of the universe. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said beams of protons circulated at 3.5 trillion electron volts in both directions around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border at Geneva. The next major development is expected in a few days when CERN starts colliding the beams in a new round of research to examine the tiniest particles and forces within...