Daily science stuff

[Alelou]

Hmm. Might be useful for gardeners too.

[Silverbullet]

JT, there is a saying, I don't know how Apt it is:

"If you are not a liberal at 20 you have no Heart.

If you are not a Conservative at 40 you have no Brains.

I was a raging Liberal at 20 and now am a Independent. neither Liberal or Conservative.
I passed through the conservative stage some time ago.

[Entilzha]

Hottest temperature ever helps explain Big Bang http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7245121/Hottest-temperature-ever-helps-explain-Big-Bang.html. If the sun had that kind of surface temperature I imagine you could grill meat several light years away .

[Elessar]

Interesting... they seem to keep breaking this record... what's even cooler is the last time I heard about the record being set it was with a completely different setup... it was with a bunch of simultaneous lasers all superheating a radiation target... It's nice to know that particle accelerators around the world that are dwarfed by the LHC are still good for somethin! Especially Brookhaven, because that one's kind of old...

[justTripn]

!!! Yes, I am anxiously awaiting the answer to why matter exists at all instead of just energy, though I suspect I won't be able to understand the answer when I get it.

I already realize I am confused about the difference between high energies and high temperatures. I guess temperature is an average of the energies of the different constituent molecules? So the LHC may be the only colider able to create energies high enough to . . . oh look for the Higgs particle and other particles. But the high temperatures at this smaller collider melt a bunch of protons and neutrons into quarks and gluons to recreate the conditions just before the beginning of the universe? Whereas the LHC just knocks apart one proton at a time hopefully into pieces smaller than quarks and gluons?

[Elessar]

!!! Yes, I am anxiously awaiting the answer to why matter exists at all instead of just energy, though I suspect I won't be able to understand the answer when I get it.

I already realize I am confused about the difference between high energies and high temperatures. I guess temperature is an average of the energies of the different constituent molecules? So the LHC may be the only colider able to create energies high enough to . . . oh look for the Higgs particle and other particles. But the high temperatures at this smaller collider melt a bunch of protons and neutrons into quarks and gluons to recreate the conditions just before the beginning of the universe? Whereas the LHC just knocks apart one proton at a time hopefully into pieces smaller than quarks and gluons?

Well, at this level, there's practically no difference between temperature and energy aside from a conversion factor... except... it may have something to do with colliding gold atoms.

I mean LHC isn't running at full power yet, so it will undoubtedly create large ion collisions (I believe it has a lead ion collision track) with hotter temperatures than this - eventually. I'm not sure if it's running at all yet, if they've finished the repairs or not. But once they have, and it gets about a year to get up to max power, it will definitely surpass this record.

What I'm not 100% clear on is why Brookhaven can produce higher temperatures than, say, Fermilab, who I am pretty sure has a higher energy collider. It's probably something to do with the specific conditions of the collisions they're producing at Brookhaven.

The LHC isn't necessarily going to break particles up into smaller particles than quarks and gluons, it's going to hopefully break protons up and have enough energy to create (and enough sensitivity to detect) the particles that the standard model predicts the Higgs Boson will decay to. Let me look up that reaction.....

Ok wow. I can't find exactly how the Higgs decays but I do see that they believe it will be formed one of two ways --

1. a pair of gluons decay into top/anti-top quark pairs, in which a top/anti-top pair can form a Higgs boson (this is because the Higgs couples strongly to the top/anti-top annihilation reaction similar to the way an electron couples to the photon in an electron/positron creation/annihilation pair reaction)

2. two quarks decay into a pair of W or Z bosons which then combine to form the Higgs

Um, ok so what's this mean? Well two things we can read from these as to why the Higgs is hard to see and why the LHC must be very powerful to produce it. From 1. we get the fact that you need to have gluons acting individually, which doesn't... really... happen. It's weird, I just refreshed myself. Basically, "normal gluons" are really just virtual particles inside hadrons. They have color charge (which was described interestingly in the Wiki article as existing in a flux tube and not extending beyond the range of the gluon itself very far) in fact it has a range of 10^-15 meters, or about the diameter of a hydrogen nuclei. (Color charge has to be confined to gluons that connect to each other and "neutralize" each others' charge to "white". Since 3 gluons make up a quark, they basically say that gluons have red, blue and green color charge and can only exist in combinations of blue, green, red; or anti-blue, anti-green, and anti-red. BUT! There was a recent possible discovery of a "pentaquark", basically a quark with a blue-green-red pair (or anti-red-anti-blue-anti-green!) PLUS, another color/anti-color pair). In other words, it just has to simplify to white. What would you call that? Tripolar? Anyway, it's just kind of a framework for understanding why 3 gluons must ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS be together in a hadron, and never be observed individually, since color charge is never observed in nature.

For this reason, there's something called gluon confinement... basically, gluons don't interact directly with other hadrons (gluons make up a hadron - like a proton), they only interact with each other. There are some funky theories out there about the creation or existence of gluons outside of a hadron (such a particle's called a glueball), but it's never been detected. The point being? In order to bust a hadron apart and get the gluons to do things like decay and have your detector see them do so, and create the Higgs, and have it see the Higgs before it decays? You need to have this happen A LOT. Particle physics is all about statistics, and in a given interaction if you only make something happen 5 times, you won't see it. You need it to happen 5,000,000 times so that your detector sees it; aka, you need more interactions, aka, you need a more powerful collision.

From 2. we can see why it's hard to see the Higgs in this way for a similar reason - W and Z bosons are very VERY heavy and decay VERY quickly. They're the force mediators for the weak nuclear force, and they're extremely heavy... that's why the Higgs is so heavy. They don't really know the mass of the Higgs, they just know it's very very energy UNFAVORABLE, which makes it hard to create. Basically when you're smashing particles together it's like forcing 800 gallons of water into a water balloon the size of a baseball.... you may get it all in there through some kind of weird ass super compression for like a millisecond, but it's gonna burst apart and the water inside (millions of tiny constituent particles) are going to go flying, and if you're not looking carefully enough, or not forcing the water into the balloon HARD enough, you won't ever lay eyes on the 800 gallon baseball

God I'm glad there's not a physicist here They'd castigate me for that metaphor

Another piece of weird news: looks like just last year they detected something they're calling a "ZZ Diboson". It's exactly what it sounds like... a Z-Z pair of bosons . Apparently this is important because Higgs production will involve being able to detect the ZZ Diboson. This was at Fermilab just last year.

[justTripn]

Thanks for trying to help. I'm not following everything (no big surprise there) but I would dispute this:

Particle physics is all about statistics, and in a given interaction if you only make something happen 5 times, you won't see it. You need it to happen 5,000,000 times so that your detector sees it; aka, you need more interactions, aka, you need a more powerful collision.

The way the detectors are built one observation would be conclusive. I think. They make these curving line pictures from which you can decipher the energy and charge, speed, and mass of all the particles leaving the interaction. I think.

Yes, I just looked it up. Here is what a Higgs event would look like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CMS_Higgs-event.jpg

[justTripn]

Wait! The ONLY way to "see" the Higgs particle is to see it's decay products . . . Or not?

[honeybee]

King Tut was a physical mess:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =123781211

[Distracted]

One word explanation: Inbreeding.

[justTripn]

There was a really horribly awful (in a good way?) X-Files episode on this theme. EWWHH!!! *shivers*

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Superman's secret lair - The Fortress of Solitude - found:

The Mega Crystals of Naica Mine

[Entilzha]

Wow that is so cool.

[Elessar]

Thanks for trying to help. I'm not following everything (no big surprise there) but I would dispute this:

Particle physics is all about statistics, and in a given interaction if you only make something happen 5 times, you won't see it. You need it to happen 5,000,000 times so that your detector sees it; aka, you need more interactions, aka, you need a more powerful collision.

The way the detectors are built one observation would be conclusive. I think. They make these curving line pictures from which you can decipher the energy and charge, speed, and mass of all the particles leaving the interaction. I think.

Yes, I just looked it up. Here is what a Higgs event would look like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CMS_Higgs-event.jpg

It would be "compelling" it would NOT be conclusive. But what I said wasn't that you'd need to see it more than once. What I said was that you'd need to make it happen more than once because your detector isn't going to "see" every single occurrence. You need to make it happen a lot to make sure your detector sees it.

It's sort of like the inverse of the logical reasoning used to infer based on the existence of rocky planets that we've observed that there are many rocky planets that exist since it's tremendously unlikely that if rocky planets were rare we'd be detecting them, since there are so many places to look.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

It's official: An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs