Meh. I get stranger things for free in my breakfast cereal.
Massive news in the micro-world: a hexaquark particle
A German research synchrotron is trumpeting its find of a new exotic particle with six quarks – the largest quark number ever observed. The "dibaryon" (two baryons) is described in a paper in Physical Review Letters (abstract here, pre-print version here at Arxiv). If you're like this Vulture South hack, the paper reads as a …
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 07:43 GMT fch
For an early morning comment on particle physics, that really tops it. Couldn't you find something more charming to say ? Commenting clearly reached a bottom, but I don't dare to predict whether things are going down further, or finally up again !
One more quark, that's when it'll get really interesting :-)
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 07:46 GMT Gordon 10
Im tempted to agree with the first poster. We have found another way that quarks can glue together woop de doo. If glue is the right word for something that has such a brief lifetime.
Does it really tell us anything new, or just refine a tiny little detail? Unless they are a building block for something exciting, or a step on the path to what ever the next Higgs scale particle is it all seems a bit meh......
Apart from the Higgs experimental particle physics seems like gilding the lily these days. Unless they can come up with ways to stabilise and study the properties of these particles, apart from confirming theories - what good are they?
Where are my tachyons and portals to a new dimension?
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 08:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
This may be "woop de doo" to you
Just because a hexaquark particle in isolation has a short lifetime doesn't mean that would necessarily be so if we were able to get it together with other exotic or non-exotic particles. What happens if we try to bind a hexaquark and tetraquark together in an exotic atom? Maybe they'll stabilize each other, similar to how binding with a proton stabilizes a neutron.
Who knows what we could learn by experimenting with such material. Maybe that's what dark matter is. Or maybe it could be used someday to build materials with far superior physical properties to ones made of normal matter. We won't know if we don't try, and if we just said "woop de doo" anytime we discovered something new because it wasn't immediately useful at that time we'd still be fighting wars using the thigh bones of animals as weapons.
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 10:48 GMT Vic
Re: This may be "woop de doo" to you
if we just said "woop de doo" anytime we discovered something new because it wasn't immediately useful at that time we'd still be fighting wars using the thigh bones of animals as weapons.
You say that as if it would be a bad thing[1]...
Vic.
[1] It certainly would be for the animal.
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 19:46 GMT Scroticus Canis
Re: This may be "woop de doo" to you
While the universe was still just a quark-gluon soup, mere instants after the big bang and vastly more hot and dense than now, any possible quark-quark interactions would in all probability have happened.
Yet today all the quark matter we see persisting are protons and bound neutrons giving rise to a hundred or so stable elements and the mysterious dark matter (only hinted at by our understanding of gravity).
Not a single high energy experiment to date has produced any new form of matter which lasts longer than a microsecond so applications for this type of matter are pretty moot.
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 20:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: This may be "woop de doo" to you
Mere instants after the big bang is presumably when dark matter would have formed, too. If it is this rare to create hexaquark particle we've only done so now, what are the odds we'd create one along with whatever it would need to bind with to be stable, and have them collide to form that stable particle?
For that matter, if we did create a tiny blob of dark matter, how would we know? We can't detect it, after all. Perhaps we might be able to tell from the missing energy...anyone know?
Perhaps creating new types of matter will require orders of magnitude more energy than we're able to muster so far. What if the smallest unit of dark matter is a billion times more massive than a neutron? Be pretty hard to find with the LHC.
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 11:47 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: @dan1980
it's a tiny ball of wibbly-wobbly quarky-gluony ... stuff
More like a Feynman diagram of improbable depth and complexity (think all possible interactions on overhead slides, layered on top of each other, with lesser probability the more complex the diagram is); like a a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person! The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents...
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 16:08 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: Neutron decay
Protons and neutrons are composites of "up" and "down" quarks.(Two of one and one of the other, though I can't recall which way round they go.) Electrons are not made of quarks but belong to a distinct class of particle called leptons. Quarks and leptons are currently believed to be fundamental and in that sense are on a par with one another.
The idea that a neutron is a bound state of a proton and an electron hasn't been seriously entertained for many decades.
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 11:22 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Neutron decay
More likely they still decay, but the free electron is quickly bound to a nearby proton, turning it into a neutron. From the outside it would appear that the neutron is stable
Absolutely not!!!1!
Your physics intuition only competes with your lack of google fu.
The reason that neutrons do not decay in stable nuclei is because doing so would result in a nucleus with HIGHER energy. And this is forbidden by a Brussels decree!
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 11:59 GMT DanDanDan
Re: Neutron decay
@Destroy All Monsters
While you might be right, you might also be wrong. It's been a while since I did much actual computation with quantum physics, but I remember Feynman's 3rd volume showing how the exchange of "Virtual" photons binds stuff together (he shows a lot with simple two state systems). It wouldn't surprise me if the binding force between neutron and proton was in some manner comprised of the exchange of the "virtual" electron contained in the neutron in an atom. This would lead to a lower energy state when they're combined and that would back up your claim of "The reason that neutrons do not decay... is because doing so would result in a nucleus with HIGHER energy".
Either way, it might be an interesting calculation...
EDIT: Ignore that - Heisenberg tried it already:
https://www.britannica.com/nobelprize/article-60744
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 13:47 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Neutron decay
I am sure I can be wrong. However, these ideas are not from me, they are a rather self-consistent model of how it works created by thousands of people each more brainy than myself. I can't compete with that ...
Heisenberg believed that the exchange particle involved was an electron (he did not have many particles from which to choose). This electron had to have some rather odd characteristics, however, such as no spin and no magnetic moment, and this made Heisenberg's theory ultimately unacceptable.
The binding is done via meson exchange, right? I remember that Yukawa came up with that idea. Note that if the neutron *could* decay in a stable nucleus, you *would* see it as there is always a diagram in which it decays immediately before any exchange happens (and it is bound to be advertised to the rest of the universe as such, i.e. "observed"). So energy constraints, like program contracts and assertions, are strong.
Anyway, today we have Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics, and the first Google result that comes up:
1000 PetaFLOPS * Year for an Alpha Particle Approximation? FUND IT!
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 10:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re. portal to other dimension
Sure. Give me a month and a budget of $750M and I'll see what I can do.
Note: Might require some substantial modifications to fit into a remote control sized box, the device I have plans for is about the size and mass of a pickup truck and needs an absurd amount of power comparable to 8-10 Flamanvilles running in parallel for a week to store up enough energy for one jump.
Note 2: Assumes that substantial modifications to the Standard Model are correct, including the use of antigravity fields to displace spacetime into a modified Einstein-Rosen bridge in a compact volume less than 0.3 metres across.
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 13:58 GMT Destroy All Monsters
It was Gell-Mann and Zweig who first introduced the concept of quarks in 1964, not Freeman Dyson.
Well, Gell-Mann pissed all over the idea at first and gave believers a hard time and some righteous belittling - he was sure "quarks" were only a mathematical neat way of expressing the nucleon behaviour. Apparently this is also where the name "quark" comes from - he called them "quirks", which sounded like "quarks". None of the Finnegan's Wake tall story stuff.
Once experiments came in, he decided to retcon his attitude on the actual existence of quarks. Such is life in the physics community.
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Wednesday 11th June 2014 08:00 GMT greig
RE: Murray Gell-Mann, not Freeman Dyson
I agree that Gell-Mann thought quarks were simply a mathematical tool that helped described the observed spectra of mesons and baryons. However, your second statement is wrong: he used "quarks" in his 1964 paper along with a citation to Finnegan's Wake.
M. Gell-Mann
A schematic model of baryons and mesons
Physics Letters, Volume 8, Issue 3, 1 February 1964
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0031-9163(64)92001-3
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031916364920013
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Monday 16th June 2014 18:20 GMT squark
There is nothing "momentous" about this observation. People have been looking for dibaryons for decades. The evidence reported here is very indirect, since it comes from a phase shift analysis update (due to some new asymmetry data) and NOT from an observation of a bump in the dibaryon mass spectrum which would have been much more convincing. Particle physicists (I'm one of them) will not really "buy" this until such a bump is observed.
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