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New Ghost Particle may Have Manifested at Large Hadron Collider:
'Something terribly new' goes bump in data yet to be confirmed by Atlas detector.
Scientists at the Cern nuclear physics lab near Geneva are investigating whether a bizarre and unexpected new particle popped into existence during experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.
Researchers on the machine's multipurpose Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector have spotted curious bumps in their data that may be the calling card of an unknown particle that has more than twice the mass of a carbon atom.
The prospect of such a mysterious particle has baffled physicists as much as it has excited them. At the moment, none of their favoured theories of reality include the particle, though many theorists are now hard at work on models that do.
"I'd say theorists are excited and experimentalists are very sceptical," said Alexandre Nikitenko, a theorist on the CMS team who worked on the data. "As a physicist I must be very critical, but as the author of this analysis I must have some optimism too."
[...] In two separate analyses, the CMS team found data that pointed to a build-up of muons, or heavy electrons, in their detector. If real, the data indicates a new particle with a mass of 28GeV or 1[sic] billion electron volts, slightly less than a quarter of the mass of a Higgs boson. Whatever it is, it is not the particle Nikitenko and his colleagues were looking for.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Thursday November 01 2018, @12:07PM (5 children)
That would be true, if it wasn't for the fact that the Standard Model can't explain an awful lot of things.
Either our understanding of the model and how it applies to real life is flawed, or it's not quite the whole picture.
Remember, Newtonian physics lasted over 300 years before it was realised that it's just a macroscopic interpretation of something much more complex.
What makes you think that in less than 100 years we can not only formulate the Standard Model, confirm it in thousands of experiments, and then claim that it's at all definitive and absolute when there are still huge gaping holes in it?
It may be "correct". But it may also (very likely) be just the top-layer that we see, much as Newtonian physics is still the top-layer with all the Standard Model action underneath. And it may even be "wrong" to the point that it happens to match reality in many instances, except the critical ones (the way Newtonian physics matched reality in everything but the macroscopic and microscopic), and actually the real explanation is a lot more complicated and we haven't even started to formulate that yet.
Physics is slowed up, not because there is no more physics to understand, but because we can't explain the holes that we can plainly see everywhere we look.
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Thursday November 01 2018, @02:40PM (4 children)
I would agree with Ledow's post and attempt to extend his remarks WRT
To specify:
1) There's no existing quantum mechanical theory of gravity. Yeah, yeah, one operates at huge scale and the other at really small scale but physicists are all wound up about there's no "link" connecting them. With respect to stuff like biology creation/evolution "debates" its kind of like here's a really freak'n good fossil of a quantum mechanics that makes lasers and shit, and theres a really freak'n good fossil of theory of relativity and gravity that does all this time dilation stuff and gravitational lenses and space probe trajectories and those work REALLY well separately deep into the decimal places, and the universe being continuous (or ... per fringe-ish bit stream physics... is it?) there's the implication that deep in the decimal places or not, they SHOULD interoperate at some level beyond "well sheeeeit just add them together and hand wave it away"
2) This can either be a specific category or a detail of #1 above, but the whole "time" thing and "dimension" thing kinda make a twisted appearance in the theory of relativity and related matters, but at the quantum level, being unconnected by any known physics, they do not. So apologies for this being a very bad analogy that's technically incorrect, but nobody really knows why lasers on a large scale have to follow the arrow of time and emit light instead of eat light for the sheer hell of it. With a side dish of its unclear how thermodynamics smears across scales because of arrow of time and stuff. This is less fuzzy than some areas, not as crystal clear as other areas.
3) Standard model implements mass using the higgs field which seems to work, but "some" physicists feel it has kind of a "code smell" to it like the bad old days of trying to calculate planet orbits using ever more complicated circular epicycles. No one is saying it doesn't work when tested and observed, but "some" people think there's obviously deeper prettier physics rattling around in there. Its probably too harsh to unleash a Feynman sarcastic quote about "being turtles all the way down" but enough people think the Higgs field will have more ink spilled over it in the next centuries or so. "spontaneous symmetry breaking", come on man, just say God waved his hand in the book of Genesis, its a bit less mathematical but sounds about as likely...
4) Related to #1, or maybe not, is standard model has limited commentary and experimental data on the topic of singularities like blackholes. We're pretty good at understanding light bending around them and stuff at huge scale, but whats up is much more fuzzy at subatomic scale. Hawking (the wheel chair guy) had some good commentary on this, but as per #3 above there's an expectation more ink will be spilled on this topic in the future.
5) Per Einstein and nuclear energy and bombs and particle colliders the whole E=mc**2 thing is non-controversial but there's some weird as hell asymmetry that is maybe not too well explained where a shitton of energy "should" convert and squirt out 50:50 matter and antimatter but observations of the actual ratio are disturbing. Kind of like if chemists mixed sodium and chlorine and sometimes you got salt and sometimes you got gold. Something is up. This also fits in with some strange big bang observations. Maybe we exist in a unknown field that locally suppresses antimatter but any variations in that mystery field don't show up in cosmology observations so ....
6) Per higgs being weird, everyone likes to talk about higgs being perfect and works and get all cognitive dissonant about neutrinos obviously not having theoretical mass but in practice seeming to have mass, so WTF? Higgs predictions always work if you hand wave away when they don't.
7) I was amused to google around in the process of writing this post and since I learned this stuff in the 90s there's been multiple weird things with muons. Turns out standard model don't work with muons in the deep decimal places. Huh. Its not clear how many discrepancies are real and how many are polywater (only old timers will "get" polywater) or simple experimental error.
8) There's a charge-parity problem in quantum chromodynamics that I do not understand that's PROBABLY a cousin of the larger scale antimatter problem, although that being obvious to everyone does not seem to have helped solving the problem so maybe isolated problems that coincidentally are in the same topic, kinda?
Its kind of like the pre-relativity era where newtonian theory works really well over newtonian ranges but we're advancing into technological scales where it does not work anymore, whoopsie. It worked perfectly, it seems, in the 70s and 80s, but experimental physics marches onward and ...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 01 2018, @05:52PM
Phase transitions are examples of spontaneous symmetry breaking, so I wouldn't be TOO flippant about them.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday November 01 2018, @11:41PM (2 children)
In the universes where 1:1 matter:antimatter is spit out, they meet and each annihilates the other leaving no matter, and leading to no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no scientists.
So, obviously we are in a universe where the ratio isn't 1:1. What's disturbing about that? It was a given to start with.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday November 02 2018, @12:39AM (1 child)
It's disturbing because the standard model firmly predicts 1:1 (and so no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no scientists). The field as a whole was hoping something might come up to explain the obvious defect but so far nothing presents itself.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday November 02 2018, @12:47AM
You are quite correct and I partially repent of my smart-alec-ery.