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Particle Physics: New Discoveries

Why is there any matter in the universe at all? New study sheds light

Source: phys.org
Date: 28 February, 2020

Scientists at the University of Sussex have measured a property of the neutron—a fundamental particle in the universe—more precisely than ever before. Their research is part of an investigation into why there is matter left over in the universe, that is, why all the antimatter created in the Big Bang didn't just cancel out the matter.

The team—which included the Science and Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland, and a number of other institutions—was looking into whether or not the neutron acts like an "electric compass." Neutrons are believed to be slightly asymmetrical in shape, being slightly positive at one end and slightly negative at the other—a bit like the electrical equivalent of a bar magnet. This is the so-called "electric dipole moment" (EDM), and is what the team was looking for.

This is an important piece of the puzzle in the mystery of why matter remains in the Universe, because scientific theories about why there is matter left over also predict that neutrons have the "electric compass" property, to a greater or lesser extent. Measuring it then it helps scientists to get closer to the truth about why matter remains.

https://m.phys.org/news/2020-02-universe.html
 
Comfortably Numb said:
Why is there any matter in the universe at all? New study sheds light

Source: phys.org
Date: 28 February, 2020


The team—which included the Science and Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland, and a number of other institutions—was looking into whether or not the neutron acts like an "electric compass." Neutrons are believed to be slightly asymmetrical in shape, being slightly positive at one end and slightly negative at the other—a bit like the electrical equivalent of a bar magnet. This is the so-called "electric dipole moment" (EDM), and is what the team was looking for.



https://m.phys.org/news/2020-02-universe.html
Click to expand...

So maybe they should all link together North to South ?
 
Just thinking.

Back in the good old days when amplifiers had valves that glowed comfortingly, The Cathode was at the chassis end and the Anode was positive with respect to it.
And electrons flowed from Cathode to Anode. As any self respecting electron should.

Also should you be a tad careless where you probed you could get a very nasty if not fatal surprise.

(Just fishing )
 
After 50 Years, Physicists Confirm The Existence of an Elusive Quasiparticle

23 March, 2021
sciencealert.com

Through painstaking work, scientists have found evidence of a quasiparticle that was first imagined as a hypothesis almost 50 years ago: the odderon.

The odderon is a combination of subatomic particles rather than a new fundamental particle – but it does act like the latter in some respects, and the way it fits into the fundamental building blocks of matter makes the discovery a huge moment for physicists.

The odderon was finally revealed through a detailed analysis of two groups of data, hitting the 5 sigma chance of probability researchers use as a threshold.

"This means that if the odderon did not exist, the probability that we observe an effect like this in the data by chance would be 1 in 3.5 million," says physicist Cristian Baldenegro from the University of Kansas.

https://www.sciencealert.com/eviden...ron-quasiparticle-has-been-found-at-long-last
 
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Breaking News

New result from the LHCb experiment challenges leading theory in physics

Posted 20 minutes ago by Hayley Dunning , Imperial College London

Very rare decay of a beauty meson involving an electron and positron observed at LHCb. Credit: Imperial College London

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 to the existence of new particles or interactions not explained by the Standard Model.

Physicists from Imperial College London and the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge led the analysis of the data to produce this result, with funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council. The result was announced today at the Moriond Electroweak Physics conference and published as a preprint.

Beyond the Standard Model

The Standard Model is the current best theory of particle physics, describing all the known fundamental particles that make up our Universe and the forces that they interact with.

However, the Standard Model cannot explain some of the deepest mysteries in modern physics, including what dark matter is made of and the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the Universe.

Researchers have therefore been searching for particles behaving in different ways than would be expected in the Standard Model, to help explain some of these mysteries.

Dr. Mitesh Patel, from the Department of Physics at Imperial and one of the leading physicists behind the measurement, said: "We were actually shaking when we first looked at the results, we were that excited. Our hearts did beat a bit faster.

"It's too early to say if this genuinely is a deviation from the Standard Model but the potential implications are such that these results are the most exciting thing I've done in 20 years in the field. It has been a long journey to get here."

Today's results were produced by the LHCb experiment, one of four huge particle detectors at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-result-lhcb-theory-physics.html
 
Physicists "cautiously optimistic" about CERN evidence for new fundamental particle

If the finding really is the result of new fundamental particles then it will finally be the breakthrough that physicists have been yearning for for decades.

astronomy.com
23 March, 2021

When CERN's gargantuan accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), fired up ten years ago, hopes abounded that new particles would soon be discovered that could help us unravel physics’ deepest mysteries. Dark matter, microscopic black holes, and hidden dimensions were just some of the possibilities. But aside from the spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson, the project has failed to yield any clues as to what might lie beyond the standard model of particle physics, our current best theory of the micro-cosmos.

So our new paper from LHCb, one of the four giant LHC experiments, is likely to set physicists’ hearts beating just a little faster. After analyzing trillions of collisions produced over the last decade, we may be seeing evidence of something altogether new – potentially the carrier of a brand new force of nature.

But the excitement is tempered by extreme caution. The standard model has withstood every experimental test thrown at it since it was assembled in the 1970s, so to claim that we’re finally seeing something it can’t explain requires extraordinary evidence.

https://astronomy.com/news/2021/03/...ut-cern-evidence-for-new-fundamental-particle
 
I asked Escet about this on face book. Here is his reply -

This is exciting yet frustrating.

The Standard Model (SM) says that all leptons are basically the same (apart from their mass).

If we see electrons and muons behaving different, and it can't be explained by their different mass, then that's a sign of new physics beyond the SM.

There's mounting evidence (as has been for a long time) that something weird is going on with leptons, which is very exciting part.

The frustrating part is that it doesn't tell us what that weird thing is.

It could be almost anything that's causing these differences, and it will probably take a decade or two to work out, but what it does mean is that the SM is starting to break, and we might be seeing the first evidence of a new force!
Click to expand...

I asked 'What would the new force be like?' which is as scientific as I could put it!
 
The Near-Magical Mystery of Quasiparticles

quantamagazine.org
24 March, 2021

The zoo of spontaneously emerging particlelike entities known as quasiparticles has grown quickly and become more and more exotic. Here are a few of the most curious and potentially useful examples.

Waking up in an alternate reality, Harry Kim, an officer aboard the starship USS Voyager, creates a distortion in the space-time continuum with a beam of polarons. Sounds like science fiction? Well, yes, but only in part.

“Star Trek used to love taking the names of real quasiparticles and ascribing magical properties to them,” said Douglas Natelson, a physicist at Rice University in Texas whose job involves creating actual quasiparticles with near-magical properties.

Quasiparticles are kind of particles. Barred entry from the exclusive club of 17 “fundamental” particles that are thought to be the building blocks of all material reality, quasiparticles emerge out of the complicated interactions between huge numbers of those fundamental particles. Physicists can take a solid, liquid or plasma made of a vast number of particles, subject it to extreme temperatures and pressures, and describe the resulting system as a few robust, particlelike entities. The emerging quasiparticles can be quite stable with well-defined properties like mass and charge.

Polarons, for instance, discovered by Lev Landau in 1933 and given a cameo on Star Trek: Voyager in 1995, materialize when many electrons are trapped inside a crystal. The push and pull between each electron and all the particles in its environment “dress” the electron so that it acts like a quasiparticle with a larger mass.

In other types of condensed matter that have dominated research over the last few decades, things get a whole lot weirder. Researchers can create quasiparticles that have a precise fraction of the electron’s charge or spin (a kind of intrinsic angular momentum). How these exotic properties emerge is still not understood. “It’s literally like magic,” said Sankar Das Sarma, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Maryland.

Using intuition, educated guesswork and computer simulations, condensed matter physicists have become better at figuring out which quasiparticles are theoretically possible. Meanwhile in the lab, as physicists push novel materials to new extremes, the quasiparticle zoo has grown quickly and become more and more exotic. “It really is a towering intellectual achievement,” said Natelson.

Recent discoveries include pi-tons, immovable fractons and warped wrinklons. “We now think about quasiparticles with properties that we never really dreamt of before,” said Steve Simon, a theoretical condensed matter physicist at the University of Oxford.

Here are a few of the most curious and potentially useful quasiparticles.

Quantum Computing With Majoranas

One of the earliest quasiparticles discovered was a “hole”: simply the absence of an electron in a place where one should exist. Physicists in the 1940s discovered that holes hop around inside solids like positively charged particles. Weirder still — and potentially very useful — are hypothesized Majorana quasiparticles, which have a split personality: They are half an electron and half a hole at the same time. “It’s such a crazy thing,” Das Sarma said.

[...]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/like-magic-physicists-conjure-curious-quasiparticles-20210324/
 
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