The question of whether normal matter’s shadowy counterpart anti-matter exerts a kind of “anti-gravity” is set to be answered, according to a new report.
Normal matter attracts all other matter in the Universe, but it remains unclear if anti-matter attracts or repels it.
A team reporting in Physics Review Letters says it has prepared stable pairs of electrons and their anti-matter particles, positrons.
A beam of these pairs can be used to finally solve the anti-gravity puzzle.
A team at the Large Hadron Collider is also trapping anti-matter “atoms” in order to study them
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.
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)
Large Hadron Collider rumoured to have found God Particle
Telegraph-A leaked internal memo contains unconfirmed reports that one of the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, had picked up signals that could be the long sought after particle, called the Higgs boson.
One of the main scientific goals of the huge £6 billion atom smasher was to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle believed to give everything in the universe mass.
The particle is a key part of the standard model used in physics to describe how particles and atoms are made up.
Rumours that scientists working on the LHC had found evidence of the Higgs boson began to circulate after an supposed internal memo was posted on the internet.
But physicists were quick to urge caution over the claims as many candidates for the particle that appear in collision experiments at the LHC are subsequently dismissed on further examination.
The Large Hadron Collider may soon prove supersymmetry theory is wrong
io9-Supersymmetry holds that all the subatomic particles we know have counterparts that are almost exactly the same, only much, much heavier. But the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t found any supersymmetric particles yet, and they’re running out of places to hide. Will we have to come up with a new model for subatomics?
The theory of supersymmetry is a favorite of many physicists because it elegantly explains a lot of basic mysteries about the subatomic world. The larger, unstable particles are responsible for the quantum fluctuations that would otherwise force the particles we’re familiar with to be much, much more massive than they otherwise are. (This is a short version of the problem - for a more detailed explanation, check out this Nature article, or check out our own primer on undiscovered particles for more on the so-called sparticles.) Some of the supersymmetric particles could also be responsible for dark matter, and supersymmetry could be key to uniting all forces into one all-encompassing theory.
But the Large Hadron Collider has now effectively ruled out masses for the sparticles below 700 gigaelectronvolts, and more and more mass ranges are getting eliminated all the time. This isn’t just a practical problem. The tighter the mass range for the sparticles gets, the more physicists have to fine-tune their values to properly account for the observed quantum fluctuations. Scientists are averse to this sort of fine-tuning - indeed, the whole reason SUSY became popular in the first place was because it eliminated the need to fine-tune the mass value for the Higgs boson to resolve the fluctuation problem.
