Reply With Quotemost unfortunate, I cant find what is so juvenile >_<
No but corrected quite rapidly I am informed... not fast enough for the internet thoOriginally Posted by torstan
most unfortunate, I cant find what is so juvenile >_<
Headline....
Bill Stickers is innocent! It isn't Bill's fault that he was hanging out in the wrong place.
Please make an effort to tag all threads. This will greatly enhance the usability of the forums.
oh lol I read right over that...
What a shame it was not build under Westminster - I mean if it did happen to go spectacularly wrong then it wouldn't be *all* bad...
Nothing like an impending election to irritate the electorate and bring up Guy Fawkes fantasies...
So a small update. The LHC is trotting along nicely, operating at good luminosity at 7TeV. This will give everyone enough data so that graduate students around the world can graduate, but is unlikely to throw up evidence of new physics unless we are really lucky. However in other news - the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago has pulled a huge result out of the bag right at the time when it's about to be overtaken. They have measured a process that behaves differently for particles than for anti-particles. It's the decay of the B_S (yes really - physicists really should know better when naming things) which is a combination of a bottom quark and an anti-strange. It oscillates back and forth to a strange quark and an anti-bottom (I have to say these sorts of things with a straight face...). The decay of each should be exactly the same (up to a small deviation) but they are not. There's a 1% difference in their decays which cannot be accounted for within the standard model. This is a clear signal of physics beyond the standard model of particle physics. It was discovered by D0 at the Tevatron and we're waiting for a response from CDF (the other big detector) as to whether they see it or not.
Now you may have read that this will solve the question of why the universe is made up of matter rather than anti-matter. It doesn't. However it's certainly pointing in the right direction. It's possible that this is one of a number of such effects that occur at high energies that will tell us where all the anti-matter went. And please discount any quote given by Joe Lykken. This is not the toe of God. He should really know better than to say things like that.
You know, I was accepted at University to become a Chemical Engineer but went into Computer Science instead. Today I do something else entirely and run my own business but it is times like this where I wonder if I might understand what you were talking about if I had remained on that Chemical Engineering path. LOL
I will also admit I fell off this thread some time back so maybe if I was to read it all the way through I might follow at this point. Still it is funny some of the names that get chosen. I mean I see a lot of people who could use some anti-bottom, ROFL
“When it’s over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If so, the score does not matter. But if you find that you did your best you were capable of, you will find it to your liking.” -John Wooden
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It's worse in Europe as they name those quarks truth and beauty rather than top and bottom. So in that case it would be a discovery about anti-beauty...
I try to keep things relatively self contained so I don't think there's much earlier in the thread that covers this stuff. I was typing that up quickly earlier this morning more in a response to the news stories than a self contained explanation. I'll see what I can do to remedy that here.
Basically we have a problem. In the early universe we have a lot of energy. That energy is converted to matter through pair production. So a photon (a bit of light) creates one electron and one positron (antimatter electron). The fact that we produce both together evens up the book-keeping and allows for a conservation of the number of electrons. Before the event we have 0 electrons. After the event we have 1+(-1)=0 electrons. So the total number of electrons is conserved.
This has been tested and seen to be true. It's why the LEP collier at CERN collided electrons and positrons, because they would annihilate to pure energy which would then go on to create other stuff. So we know that if we have equal amounts of matter and antimatter we create pure energy and if we have pure energy we can create matter and antimatter.
Now in the early universe we believe that we had a lot of energy that created lots of matter and anit-matter pairs, that then annihilated to energy and so on. If you averaged over the whole content of the universe, all the matter and antimatter even out and the total matter content of the universe would be zero. Obviously that's not the case because we have rather a lot of matter and we don't have a lot of antimatter. So the question is - where did all the antimatter go?
It could just be somewhere else - say our galaxy is made of matter, and another galaxy is made of antimatter? Well that's possible, but you'd have to explain why it all went over there in a great lump. Also, galaxies collide and if a galaxy made of antimatter collided with a galaxy made of matter they would annihilate spectacularly. We see an awful lot of galaxies and a pretty large number of galaxy coliisions and mergers and we've never seen anything that would suggest the existence of antimatter galaxies.
So we have to accept that it really did go away. For it to go away, there must be a flaw in our logic earlier on. There must be something that breaks the symmetry between matter and anti-matter. Now the Tevatron has observed an effect in which B_S mesons decay differently from their antimatter partners so we've seen a violation of that symmetry. It is not in itself large enough to account for the fact that all we see is matter and not antimatter - but it's likely to be the first breadcrumb in a series of clues that leads us to the answer.
As the Tevatron is a lower energy machine to the LHC, anything the Tevatron sees will be visible at the LHC. So we should learn a lot more about it in the next few years and actually get to the heart of the matter/anti-matter asymmetry.
Does that help? Let me know which bits are mystifying (including all of it!) and I'll step back and add in some more explanation.
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