On July 1, scientists announced the discovery of a new exotic particle – a so-called “tetraquark” – a finding that marks a major breakthrough in a search of almost 20 years, carried out in particle physics labs all over the world. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/cern-physicists-discovery-new-particle-tetraquark…
Tag: particle physics
CERN Makes Bold Push To Build $23.5 Billion Super-Collider
CERN has taken a major step towards building a 100-kilometre circular super-collider to push the frontier of high-energy physics. From a report: The decision was unanimously endorsed by the CERN Council on 19 June, following the plan’s approval by an independent panel in March. Europe’s preeminent particle-physics organization will need global help to fund the project, which is expected to cost…
What is the Big Bang?
In the view of modern cosmologists, the Big Bang is the event that marked the birth of our universe. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/definition-what-is-the-big-bang…
Strange ice formations may have tricked physicists into seeing mysterious particles that weren’t there
What if one of the strangest, most unsettling findings in particle physics turned out to be an illusion? A new study suggest a simple physical explanation for a mysterious event. Source: https://www.livescience.com/mysterious-physics-particles-or-a-trick-of-the-ice.html
ATLAS Experiment measures the ‘beauty’ of the Higgs boson
Two years ago, the Higgs boson was observed decaying to a pair of beauty quarks (H→bb), moving its study from the “discovery era” to the “measurement era.” By measuring the properties of the Higgs boson and comparing them to theoretical predictions, physicists can better understand this unique particle, and in the process, search for deviations from predictions that would point to…
Why Do Matter Particles Come in Threes? A Physics Titan Weighs In.
Three progressively heavier copies of each type of matter particle exist, and no one knows why. A new paper by Steven Weinberg takes a stab at explaining the pattern. From a report: Electrons and two types of quarks, dubbed “up” and “down,” mix in various ways to produce every atom in existence. But puzzlingly, this family of matter particles — the…
New LHCb analysis still sees previous intriguing results
At a seminar today at CERN, the LHCb collaboration presented a new analysis of data from a specific transformation, or “decay,” that a particle called B0 meson can undergo. The analysis is based on twice as many B0 decays as previous LHCb analyses, which had disclosed some tension with the Standard Model of particle physics. The tension is still present in…
MoEDAL hunts for dyons
A magnetic monopole is a theoretical particle with a magnetic charge. Give it an electric charge, and you get another theoretical beast, dubbed a dyon. Many “grand unified theories” of particle physics, which connect fundamental forces at high energies into a single force, predict the existence of dyons, but no experiments at particle accelerators have so far searched for these hybrid…
Strange particles found in Antarctica cannot be explained by physics
A NASA science balloon picked up two high-energy particles and a new analysis reveals they cannot be explained by the standard model of particle physics Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2229988-strange-particles-found-in-antarctica-cannot-be-explained-by-physics/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Physicists Have Finally Seen Traces of the Long-Sought ‘Axion’ Particle
fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science: Scientists have finally found traces of the axion, an elusive particle that rarely interacts with normal matter. The axion was first predicted over 40 years ago but has never been seen until now. Scientists have suggested that dark matter, the invisible matter that permeates our universe, may be made of axions. But rather than…