A research team found that the subatomic particles known as neutrinos do not move faster than light, laying to rest doubts raised by an earlier experiment.
Large Hadron Collider finds new particle
A team of international scientists including British researchers said they had discovered a new boson, a particle which helps form the nucleus of atoms.
The find was made using data from the ATLAS experiment, which last month announced it could have caught the first glimpse of the sought-after Higgs Boson.
Unlike the Higgs the new boson, known as Chi (the Greek X symbol) b (3p), consists of two parts – an elementary particle known as a “beauty” quark and its opposite antiquark, which are bound together by a “strong force”.
Andy Chisholm, a PhD student from the University of Birmingham who worked on the analysis said: “From this boson we can learn about the nature of the strong nuclear force – the same force that binds together the nucleus inside atoms.”
The particle had been widely predicted but had never actually been observed by physicists.
The Higgs Boson may have been found!!!
A typical candidate event including two high-energy photons whose energy (depicted by red towers) is measured in the CMS (Compact Muom Solenoid).
Credit: © 2011 CERN
Source: Candidate events in the CMS Standard Model Higgs Search using 2010 and 2011 data.
More
- Text background on the Higgs, and a glossary of important terms in Higgs research can be found here.
- CERN on Twitter
- Watch the live webcast
- Interesting entry in the blog of the theorist physicist Luboš Motl (Higgs: 17 hours ahead of the world)
Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than light - a finding that could overturn one of Einstein’s fundamental laws of the universe.
Telegraph-Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.
“We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing,” he said. “We now want colleagues to check them independently.”
If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a “cosmic constant” and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.
That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works.
The totally unexpected finding emerged from research by a physicists working on an experiment dubbed OPERA run jointly by the CERN particle research centre near Geneva and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy.
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)
Simulated Higgs particle decay in the ATLAS detector from CERN (via Bernd Stelzer)
In 1993, the UK Science Minister, William Waldegrave, challenged physicists to produce an answer that would fit on one page to the question ‘What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?’Stelzer’s site gives links to winning entries from physicists (I particularly like David Miller’s Margaret Thatcher cocktail party metaphor)
Sixteen minutes is not a particularly long time. It’s enough time for a cup of tea, or to run two miles, if you’re in good shape. But if you have a few atoms of antimatter, it may be enough time to learn about the birth of the universe.
On Sunday, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) generated excited headlines worldwide when it was announced that they had created and stored antimatter – the elusive “mirror image” of everything we see around us – in a stable state for the first time. They have managed to keep atoms of antihydrogen – the antimatter equivalent of hydrogen, the simplest element – trapped for 1,000 seconds, or 16 minutes and 40 seconds. Their previous record stood at just 172 milliseconds, or rather less than a fifth of a second. It’s an exciting breakthrough, but one that may have been hard to grasp for those of us without a physics degree.
To understand it, we first need to know what matter and antimatter really are. The universe is made of subatomic particles – electrons, protons and neutrons being the best known. In 1928, the English physicist Paul Dirac, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, created a detailed mathematical model of the subatomic world – but he realised that, for his equations to work, he required a particle with the same mass as an electron, but with the opposite, “positive” charge. In 1932, an American, Carl Anderson, observed such a particle, which became known as a positron. Later, it became clear to physicists that every particle of matter had an associated antiparticle. In 1955, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley identified an antineutron and antiproton.
But studying this antimatter was not easy. When an antiparticle of any kind meets its matter counterpart, the pair annihilate each other in a small but fierce burst of energy. An atom of antihydrogen, consisting of a positron and an antiproton, would instantly vanish upon contact with any matter. The only way to store antimatter, then, is to keep it in a magnetic field.
Until very recently, that meant that only subatomic antiparticles could be stored and studied because only charged antiparticles, antiprotons and positrons, can be manipulated by a magnetic field. Whole atoms do not have an electric charge and so magnets were of limited use.
