new particle at nearly 4 sigma

[Shiraz]

http://asia.nikkei.com/Tech-Science/Science/Scientists-may-be-on-the-verge-of-smashing-the-Standard-Model-of-particle-physics

Blimey - this will generate a deluge of papers if it gets to 5sigma.

[Atmos]

That could be really interesting! Even without it being "confirmed" yet, it has at least been "detected" in two different detectors. Two is better than one :P

[Talby]

Found in 2 experiments , looking good .:)

[alpal]

Hi Ray,
a professor of physics said to all of us in the lecture theatre one day that he wondered
if these new particles were really relevant.
He said that maybe we are like children with building blocks
making new structures -
& it is us who have created these particles & they don't exist
in nature & never existed before?
In other words these new particles are meaningless?

cheers
Allan

[Atmos]

If we can create them then there are places in the universe that they are also created. Take the core collapse of a 20 solar mass star, it forms a black hole and during this process some very funky stuff happens.

It can also help give us a better understanding of the universe prior to the recombination event about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

[Shiraz]

I have also heard this view expressed by others Allan. I disagree with it.

This work is peering into the very nature of the stuff that makes up universe. I cannot think of any more meaningful activity in Physics. It is wonderful to see the hero projects (LHC, LIGO etc) delivering the goods. Maybe some of this research could eventually give us an understanding of what dark energy and dark matter are - it is slightly disturbing to live in a universe where 97% of it is unknown in nature.

[alpal]

I think that as a professor of physics his viewpoint was important.
How do we know that we aren't just combining building blocks to
create new particles?
It was more - an important question - than a statement of any fact.

[Talby]

I agree the discovery of a 750 GeV particle itself isn't the big deal. What is the big deal is if it leads to support of SUSY or extra compactified dimensions. Just like finding the Higgs particle at 125 Gev supported the presence of the Higgs field

[sjastro]

Strange how the article was published at a time when scientists have become less than enthusiastic about the existence of the particle and the 4 sigma result could be a statistical blip.
Even stranger is how this "anomaly" has turned up in both ATLAS and CMS detectors.

http://phys.org/news/2016-06-possibility-particle-discovery-lhc.html
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8608

[bojan]

Still.. even if we are the ones who are combining them, the process and outcome is telling us about the rules the fundamental particles obey in their interactions. This way we can obtain more accurate models.

[alpal]

How much does it tell us really if these huge particles only appear
once in say every 10 billion collisions?

[bojan]

Well… in terms of classical physics, this is something like measuring the diameter of the shaft and the sleeve with various gauges...
First you measure this diameter roughly with ruler to see if the shaft will go into the particular sleeve.
Then you measure with micrometre to see how well the shaft will fit into a sleeve and whether there is a play or not.
With micrometre you discover that there is a "bump" in the middle of the shaft, previously not "visible" with the ruler.
Your conclusion from the above experiment (measurement) is, the shaft will first easily go into the sleeve, but half way in it will get stuck if you try harder.
If you measure more samples with the new method (micrometre), you can even conclude about the quality and repeatability of the manufacturing processes... you can even figure out how the shaft was manufactured (by turning or by casting).

So, you are getting more information and your knowledge about the process involved gets better and more detailed. And you can even discover previously unknown details and outcomes (bump and stuck).

[Shiraz]

for a laugh, here is the British tabloid take on it - the not-funny thing is that people apparently read this stuff.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/684219/What-is-CERN-doing-Bizarre-clouds-over-Large-Hadron-Collider-prove-portals-are-opening

Anyway, back to the thread.

Allan, quantum physics is based on statistics - you need energies and probabilities to characterise what is there, so evidence of a large particle and knowledge of how often it is produced tells a lot - not just about that particle, but about the validity of the model used to describe all other particles. Dark stuff clearly indicates that there is a big hole in our knowledge - getting the models right will help determine what dark stuff might be.

Of course, there is still a very good chance that the particle is just a statistical anomaly - but even that knowledge will be very valuable in determining which models work best.

[clive milne]

I have a small degree of respect for publications like this in much the same way I can find it within myself to respect the showmanship of world championship wrestling.... unlike the Murdoch press which is no less contrived but has the hubris to make the pretence of being anything other than cynically manipulative theatre.

[Eratosthenes]

....what are these "things" scientists refer to as "particles" that emerge at specific energy levels and have some sort of statistical sigma level attached to them?

The very theory and experimental techniques that validate these "so-called" particles imply that there should be an infinite number of them at discrete energy levels all along the mythical and neurotic energy spectrum...

And of course Physicists are really talking about Fields - the particles being blimps along a field when detected by these ridiculously expensive detectors. These clowns will and say anything to protect the Standard Particle Model in their religious Physics texts and scriptures.

We are witnessing a conglomerate of 21st century scientific particle smashing sigma circuses that carve out a huge scar in the total global funding pie for scientific research

The Global Particle Physics community should apologise and return at least 75% of the funding they have cleverly siphoned from the public purse since 1973

:D

[Shiraz]

?? As the heading of the article says, if this thing turns out to be real (and there is still some strong doubt) it could actually leave the Standard Model in disarray - not "protect" it.

The whole point of this sort of work is to try to find holes in the current theories - in particle physics, nothing is writ in stone just yet. How could anything be settled when we still only have some idea about what makes up 5% of the universe we live in - the other 95% is unknown dark stuff ?

[Eratosthenes]

so you are stating in public that because an extra fat particle or field blimp is detected by a semi-rigged underground accelerator in a collapsing EU, the Standard Model (part 17) will all of a sudden be in disarray?

particle Physicists aren't fooling anyone with their reductionistically discrete detector illusions and sigma insecurities

:D

[Shiraz]

possibly

good to see you back here Peter.

[Atmos]

Within the Standard Model there were particles predicted to exist many years before they were discovered. As far as the Standard Model is concerned, we have discovered the fundamental particles that make up the universe. Well most of them anyway, we still don't know what Dark Matter is and depending on its actual properties, there is a chance that we may NEVER detect them.

So if we discover a new particle that hasn't been predicted by the Standard Model, we need to revisit our fundamental understanding of the universe.

[Eratosthenes]

thanks Merlot,

....are you sure that you want to associate yourself officially with my robust analysis and commentary on trivial scientific matters such as Quantum Mechanics and Cosmology?

:D

[Eratosthenes]

...the Baryonic component of the "one" Universe that we are sort-of partially aware of. (A component that barely makes up ~5% of the total "stuff")

Do String Theorists accept the reductionism of the Standard Model? How many fundamental sub-atomic scale entities do they believe?

[Talby]

Peter did you mean ,the fermionic component ,or are you anti electron- sorry positron:lol:

[Eratosthenes]

I am anti electron

I am very suspicious of atomic entities that aren't composed of quarks

[Shiraz]

looks like it didn't persist to 5 sigma - according to an un-named source that is...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3714453/Fifth-fundamental-force-NOT-Large-Hadron-Collider-comes-search-bizarre-particle-rewrite-laws-physics.html

[Eratosthenes]

....interesting comments by your Physics Professor.
In a reductionist world new particles seem to spew out from bigger and bigger particle accelerators - ie as the collision energy increases.
A little bit like the super elements scientists create in the Laboratory environment which are so unstable that they effectively vanish the moment they are created, but appear long enough to be detected.

Very fat nuclei crammed with protons and neutrons. A Russian team created a super element with 117 protons (atomic number). The theory suggests that there is a region or island of stability for super elements.

But is this discovery meaningful (as your good professor asks)? The largest naturally occurring element that has a stable isotope is U92. There are a few heavier elements such as Pu which are synthetic by-products of human endevours such as nuclear weapons explosions and nuclear power plant coriums.

Science is a very strange religion sometimes. There are rheologists that make the claim that solids are really liquids that have high yield stress values and are flowing slowly.

very odd days indeed for the priests of Science and their temple congregations

:D

[Shiraz]

nope, it was not real after all:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36976777

[alpal]

Yes - it was an interesting comment -

we make new particles & then say we've discovered them.

it's not very satisfying to me.

[julianh72]

Don't forget though - anything we can do with our puny machines on Earth (and yes, that includes the LHC!), nature can do many times over with the vastly higher energies available than we can muster here on Earth! If we can collide particles and make just one "new" particle every few years, that same particle is being created by the trillion every second somewhere "out there".

[Somnium]

i wouldn't be so sure of that, the hottest (outside of the big bang) and coldest places in the universe were made in labs. sure gamma ray bursts do create particles with more energy than we can create on earth, but we do generate some of the most extreme environments

[alpal]

That's always confused me.
They say that even more energetic particles than are made at CERN
enter our atmosphere all the time.
Since these high energy particles have lifespans measured in nano
or femtoseconds - where are they being created?
It couldn't be very far away yet I also hear they made in quasars & such like beasts which
are half way across the universe - a very long way away.

Can anyone explain it?

[Somnium]

space is really empty and nothing slows the particles down, it doesnt matter that it is far away

[alpal]

But they can't cross half the universe in a nano second -
they would have long since decayed.

[Shiraz]

maybe this could be useful https://www.theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2014/jan/26/even-the-most-boring-collisions-at-the-large-hadron-collider-tell-us-something-this-time-about-cosmic-rays

[bojan]

If their energy is sufficiently high (speed is close enough to c) they may have time to reach us from further away (because of time dilatation).
However, most short lived particles that reach the ground-based detectors are created in the upper layers of atmosphere by colisions of gamma rays with atoms/molecules.

[Atmos]

The particles that are decaying in our atmosphere aren't traveling all the way from the supernovae or whatever, they're actually created within our atmosphere. They're typically called a particle shower (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_shower) which is where a highly energised particle hits our atmosphere and then scatters secondary particles (like muons) down towards the Earth.

[Eratosthenes]

I don't have an issue generally with the results generated from high energy particle physics conducted in massive accelerators. The question for me is where does this reductionist quest for particles end? Each particle is associated or coupled with a field - a localised collapse of the field/wave equation that produces a discrete "blimp" in the field - a "so called" particle.

As a general rule Particle Physicists don't know what they are doing if you probe them deeply enough - they have abandoned their philosophical responsibilities as thinkers and become CRCPs (Conservative Reductionist Cartesian Priests) - also known as CCCPs (Corporatised Circus Clown Puppets). They should apologise in writing, resign and join another profession such as the Vatican Priesthood, Cartography or become newsreaders on state owned TV.

:D

[Shiraz]

well, it won't come to any conclusion for a while. http://www.nature.com/news/china-plans-super-collider-1.15603

maybe when we understand a little bit about dark stuff.... that might be a good time to rethink the future uses of the colliders?

[alpal]

I am talking about collisions of much greater energy than at CERN:

[alpal]

The link here may explain it:

http://www.livescience.com/53669-can-particle-accelerators-spawn-black-holes-and-global-extinction.html

Protons are stable & so don't decay like the particles at CERN.

[Shiraz]

Energetic protons are the active components in the LHC and they are also the most common high energy cosmic ray components - collisions in the LHC are the same as those in the the atmosphere. But cosmic ray protons can have way greater energy than anything that CERN produces. It is protons that come in from far off energetic events, not the temporary high energy particles that result when there is a collision in the atmosphere (or in the LHC for that matter).

So all of the temporary particles produced in LHC will also be produced in the atmosphere - plus even higher energy ones that cannot be produced in the LHC (if there are any of course).

The difference is that the collision results can be reliably observed in the LHC, but far less so in the uncontrolled atmospheric environment.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2014/jan/26/even-the-most-boring-collisions-at-the-large-hadron-collider-tell-us-something-this-time-about-cosmic-rays

[alpal]

OK - so protons are made in quasars or other high energy objects &
are are sent half way across the universe arriving in our atmosphere
at far greater energies than those produced at CERN.
Protons are stable so they can survive the long journey.

Can we agree on that?

[Shiraz]

yep

and those high energy protons produce temporary large particles on collision with atmospheric atoms (and I guess elsewhere on earth) - same process as happens in the LHC, only cosmic ray protons can have much higher energy than anything in the LHC.

The esoteric particles are not just inventions that exist only in far off supernovas etc and have nothing to do with us on earth - they are (presumably) produced all of the time in the air above our heads (and in the LHC, where they can be studied).