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Large Hadron Collider Experiment Shows Potential Evidence of “Odderon” Sought For Decades

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Particle physicists at CERN have caught the first glimpse of a long-sought-after quasiparticle, which they've been hunting since the 1970s. The curious state, called an odderon, is made up of an odd number of gluons, the carriers of a strong nuclear force. This force keeps protons and neutrons together and “glues” the quarks that these particles are composed of together.

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Protons are smashed into one another in the Large Hadron Collider and peculiar states of matter like quark-gluon plasma can form. The atom smasher can also create bound states, which are the so-called quasiparticles, peculiar objects that are not particles but behave like them nonetheless.

Pairs of gluons have been seen forming bound states, but scientists have never seen this happen for an odd number of gluons. However, the latest measurements suggest that this is possible. The findings are submitted for publication and can be read on the CERN preprint server in two papers (here and here).

“Until now, most models were thinking there was a pair of gluons – always an even number,” team member Professor Christophe Royon, from the University of Kansas (KU), said in a statement. “Now we measure for the first time the higher number of events and properties and at a new energy. We found measurements that are incompatible with this traditional model of assuming an even number of gluons. It's a kind of discovery that we might have seen for the first time, this odd exchange of the number of gluons. There may be three, five, seven or more gluons.”

The findings from the experiment provide new insight into the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that connects forces to fundamental particles. We know that the Standard Model is not perfect or complete (it doesn’t include gravity, for example) and there is probably a better theory out there somewhere. There are some hints of violation from some experiments, but so far we haven’t found a smoking gun. Any new findings might help us understand it better.

“This doesn't break the Standard Model, but there are very opaque regions of the Standard Model, and this work shines a light on one of those opaque regions,” said Timothy Raben, a particle theorist at KU who has worked on the odderon.

The experiment that looks for these gluon bound states is called TOTEM and is CERN’s “longest” experiment, as its detectors spread across almost half a kilometer (1,640 feet). It measures the time-of-flight of protons and its work can be applied to a range of subjects, from space physics to the proton therapies used to treat cancer.

Physicists Have Observed The Light Spectrum of Antimatter For First Time

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After two decades of trying, physicists at CERN have reported the first ever measurement of the light emitted by an antimatter atom, revealing that anti-hydrogen is the exact mirror image of regular hydrogen.

The result, which finally confirms what has long been predicted by the laws of physics, opens up a new way of testing Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and could help us answer one of the biggest mysteries in modern physics - why is there so much more regular matter than antimatter in the Universe?

"This represents a historic point in the decades-long efforts to create antimatter and compare its properties to those of matter," theoretical physicist Alan Kostelecky from Indiana University, who was not involved in the study, told NPR.

If you’re not familiar with the whole "Where is all the antimatter?" problem in physics, here’s some background info.

The law of physics predicts that for every particle of regular matter, there’s an antiparticle. So for every negatively-charged electron, there’s a positively charged positron.

That means for every regular hydrogen atom, there’s an anti-hydrogen atom, and just as a hydrogen atom is made up of an electron bound to a proton, an anti-hydrogen atom is made up of an anti-electron (or positron) bound to an anti-proton.

If an antiparticle happens to find a regular particle, they will cancel each other out, releasing energy in the form of light.

This fact creates two rather hefty problems. The first is that because there’s so much regular matter in the Universe, it’s virtually impossible for physicists to find antimatter in nature, because it’ll be annihilated before they even get the chance to start looking.

The second problem is why there’s so much more regular matter than antimatter - if our current physics models suggest that an equal amount of regular particles and antiparticles were produced by the Big Bang, shouldn’t everything in the Universe have cancelled itself out?

"Something happened, some small asymmetry that led some of the matter to survive, and we simply have no good idea that explains that right now," says one of the team, Jeffrey Hangst, from the ALPHA experiment at CERN in Switzerland.

ALPHA experiment at CERN. Credit: CERN

That might all be about to change though, because for the first time, scientists have been able to measure the kind of light given off by an anti-hydrogen atom when hit by a laser, and compare that with the light given off by a regular hydrogen atom.

That might not sound like much, but it’s the first time we’ve been able to control an anti-hydrogen atom long enough to directly measure its behavior, and compare it to its regular hydrogen counterpart.

"Using a laser to observe a transition in anti-hydrogen and comparing it to hydrogen to see if they obey the same laws of physics has always been a key goal of antimatter research," Hangst said in a press statement.

Because it's impossible to find an anti-hydrogen particle in nature - seeing as hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe, so easily cancels out any lurking anti-hydrogens - scientists need to produce their own anti-hydrogen atoms.

Over the past 20 years, the ALPHA team has been figuring out how to produce enough of these anti-hydrogen atoms to actually get a chance to work with them, and have finally come up with a technique that allows them to create about 25,000 antihydrogen atoms every 15 minutes, and trap around 14 of them.

Previous methods could only ever trap 1.2 antihydrogen atoms per 15 minutes.

These trapped particles would then be blasted by laser light to force their positrons to 'jump' from a lower energy level to a higher one. As the positrons returned to the lower energy level, the light amount that's released can be measured.

The team found that the antihydrogen atom emitted the exact same light spectrum as regular hydrogen atoms put through the same test.

"It’s long been thought that antimatter is an exact reflection of matter, and we are gathering evidence to show that is indeed true," Tim Tharp from ALPHA told Ryan F. Mandelbaum at Gizmodo.

This result is consistent with the Standard Model of particle physics, which predicts that hydrogen and antihydrogen will have identical light-emitting characteristics, but now physicists have the chance to test even more spectra emissions by using different types of lasers.

If they all end up identical, Einstein's special relatively lives for another day, as Adrian Cho explains for Nature:

"Explaining exactly why special relativity requires antimatter to mirror matter involves a lot of math. But in a nutshell, if that mirror relationship were not exact, then the basic idea behind special relativity couldn’t be exactly right. Special relativity assumes that a single unified thing called spacetime splits differently into space and time for observers moving relative to each other. It posits that neither observer can say who is really moving and who is stationary. But, that can’t be exactly right if matter and antimatter don't mirror each other."

But if matter and antimatter don't mirror each other - if antimatter doesn't obey the same laws of physics as regular matter - our models of the Big Bang will be flawed.

And that gives us the chance to rethink everything and figure out once and for all why matter escaped total annihilation in the Universe and allowed us and everything else to exist.

We're obviously getting ahead of ourselves here, but these are the kinds of possibilities this experiment has opened up, and it's really exciting stuff.

"We're kind of really overjoyed to finally be able to say we have done this," Hangst told NPR. "For us, it's a really big deal."

The research has been published in Nature.

China Is Building Its Own Version Of CERN: Twice The Size And 7 Times More Powerful

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China aims to build the largest and most powerful machine ever built by mankind, a super-collider twice the size of CERN in an effort to finally understand the universe and its composition.

The reign of the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the LHC, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, could be coming to an end, and no, it is not going to obliterate our world and create a massive black hole in our solar system… yet.

China is actually planning to build a massive particle accelerator, one that would measure more than the double of what CERN measures. China’s version of CERN would measure between 50 and 100 kilometers and would be up to SEVEN times more powerful that the LHC in Switzerland.

According to China Daily, the new facility would be able to produce millions of Higgs bosons, many more than the European accelerator, where the Higgs boson particle was discovered in 2012.

The gigantic machine is currently in planning stages and construction is expected to start in 2021.

“We have completed the initial conceptual design and organized international peer review recently, and the final conceptual design will be completed by the end of 2016,” Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, told China Daily in an exclusive interview.

The Institute of High Energy Physics already controls the largest facilities of High Energy Physics in China: the Beijing Electron Collider and Neutrino Detector Daya Bay.

But scientists want more ‘juice’ and have proposed a much more ambitious task, to build a new accelerator seven times the power of the European LHC.

Even though the LHC has managed to find all the particles predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics (the theory that predicts all the constituents of ordinary matter) there is still a lot of stuff in the universe that needs explanation.

Looking at the bigger picture, ordinary matter, which gives rise to stars and galaxies, is only responsible for a meager 4.5% of the total mass of the universe.

Another 23% is constituted by another mysterious kind of invisible matter (dark matter) and the remaining 72.5% by an even more mysterious form of energy, dark energy.

This is why many scientists agree that an entirely new form of new physics is waiting on the “other side” of the Standard Model, and in order to address it, we need a much more powerful machine than what we have on Earth today.

The Standard Model of particle physics, for example, dues not offer an explanation for gravity, which is one of the four fundamental forces of nature.

Also, it does not say anything about the astronomical observations that have demonstrated the existence of dark matter, which does not emit any radiation (so we can not see it) and that relates to the rest of the universe precisely through gravity.

The model also does not explain why matter prevailed over antimatter at the beginning of the universe, and to make matters worse, the small mass of the Higgs boson suggests that the matter of which we are all made of is fundamentally unstable.

Source: China daily and Nature Journal.

Reference: Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Physicists Have Captured the First Spectral 'Look' Of Antimatter

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It’s been about nine months since a team of CERN researchers succeeded in their goal of measuring the spectrum of light emitted from hydrogen’s mirror particle, antihydrogen.

They were just getting started. Now the researchers have detailed evidence of the structure of antihydrogen using spectroscopy, setting a landmark in our quest to determine why there is something in the Universe rather than nothing.

Led by Canadian researchers under what’s called the ALPHA Collaboration, the first detailed observation of “home made” antihydrogen’s structure has shown its spectral lines are virtually identical to those of hydrogen.

Had they been even slightly different this would be quite a different story, one heralding a crack in our models on the Universe that could reveal why it looks the way it does.

One of the current big mysteries facing modern physics is the question of why everything seems to be made of one kind of matter, when there are two kinds.

The Standard Model of physics predicts that all particles have something of a twin; a matching particle that has mirror properties, such as an opposite charge.

For example, the negatively charged electron has a positively charged partner called a positron.

These particles form together as a pair. What’s more, if the opposing kinds of particles meet, they cancel out in a blaze of gamma radiation.

That leaves the question why there is so much of one kind of matter, and not just an empty Universe humming with radiation.

If there was some kind of imbalance in the apparent symmetry of the Universe, it would go a long way to explaining why we ended up with enough matter sticking around after the Big Bang to build a couple trillion galaxies.

Looking for a difference in the two kinds of matter is as good a place to start as any.

Step number one is getting enough antimatter in one place, which is no easy task.

The ALPHA Collaboration managed to do it by cranking up CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator and churning out about 90,000 antiprotons.

To make the element antihydrogen, they needed to couple each antiproton with a positron.

Even after making 1.6 million positrons, the researchers only managed to make about 25,000 antihydrogen atoms.

A relative handful of these were slow enough to be trapped inside a special force field that kept them from touching ‘normal’ matter and vanishing in a blink of light.

“We have to keep them apart,” says researcher Justine Munich.

“We can’t just put our anti-atoms into an ordinary container. They have to be trapped or held inside a special magnetic bottle.”

In all, the team managed to trap and detect just 194 atoms over a number of trials, which gives you some idea of the difficulties involved in studying even the simplest forms of antimatter.

Fortunately it was enough to irradiate a sample of antihydrogen with microwaves of varying frequencies and observe their reaction.

Spectroscopy

When a unit of electromagnetic radiation such as a microwave hits an electron, it absorbs it and changes position. Bouncing back, it spits out its own wave of light.

Different elements absorb and emit their own spectrum of light at specific wavelengths, producing a pattern that tells physicists a lot about the structure of the atom producing them.

“Spectral lines are like fingerprints. Every element has its own unique pattern,” says researcher Michael Hayden from Simon Fraser University.

Theoretically as mirrors of the same element, hydrogen and antihydrogen should share this pattern.

Earlier research suggested this was true, but the detail wasn’t clear enough to be conclusive.

For the first time, researchers have found a way to capture fine details of antihydrogen’s spectral lines and show they are in fact identical to hydrogen.

Radiating the antihydrogen atoms with microwaves allowed the physicists to determine its light fingerprint in a rather indirect way, using specific changes in the antihydrogen that caused them to eject from the magnetic bottle to fine tune estimates on its spectral lines.

“Spectroscopy is a very important tool in all areas of physics. We are now entering a new era as we extend spectroscopy to antimatter,” says Jeffrey Hangst, spokesperson for the ALPHA experiment.

“With our unique techniques, we are now able to observe the detailed structure of antimatter atoms in hours rather than weeks, something we could not even imagine a few years ago.”

Right now, the comparison has shown the effectiveness of using spectroscopy rather than resulting in monumental new physics. But new tools like these are going to be important in studying antimatter in the future.

“By studying the properties of anti-atoms we hope to learn more about the Universe in which we live,” says Hayden.

“We can make antimatter in the lab, but it doesn’t seem to exist naturally except in miniscule quantities. Why is this? We simply don’t know. But perhaps antihydrogen can give us some clues.”

This research was published in Nature.

Article courtesy Futurism & ScienceAlert.

Boy Genius Believes Our Universe Was Destroyed By CERN?! Listen To His Explanation

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Spooky "Fingerprints" Of Antimatter Observed At CERN For First Time

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The ALPHA experiment at CERN hopes to answer one of the most fundamental questions in physics: Why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe? This is a rather troublesome quest to pursue, because antimatter is notoriously difficult to contain – as soon as it touches regular matter, both are annihilated.

Nevertheless, steps are being made to better understand the unusual structure and behavior of antimatter, and a new Nature paper out this week represents the latest success in this regard. Using cutting-edge techniques, an international team of physicists have managed to observe, for the first time, something in antihydrogen – the counterpart to regular hydrogen – named the “hyperfine structure”.

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In much the way atoms of matter have electrons orbiting them, antimatter anti-atoms have positrons orbiting them. When these particles and antiparticles are energized, they leap “up” to a higher energy state, and when they lose energy, they fall “down” to a lower energy state.

Seen from a “zoomed out” perspective, this is known as the fine structure; zoomed in to a more precise level, this is known as the hyperfine structure.

This has been observed in regular hydrogen atoms for many decades now, but CERN are now reporting that they’ve observed this in antihydrogen. Apart from the obvious, there was no difference in the hyperfine structures between hydrogen and antihydrogen. In order to get to this point, they first created a fair few antihydrogen anti-atoms through a series of high-energy collisions.

For every million particle collisions at CERN, about four proton-antiproton pairs are created. Using extremely powerful magnetic fields, these antiprotons are then drawn away and brought to the Antiproton Decelerator, which reduces their speed from 96 percent to just 10 percent of the speed of light.

In much the same way one typical hydrogen atom contains just one proton, one antihydrogen anti-atom contains just one antiproton. Isolating these at ALPHA and using precise microwave energy bursts to energetically excite them, the team could observe with remarkable precision the antimatter’s hyperfine structure.

Some have referred to this as the spectral “fingerprint” of antihydrogen, a key identifying feature that no other piece of antimatter displays. Now that it’s been documented, the team will be able to repeat the same experiments for heavier samples of antimatter, including antihelium.

Ultimately, the unfamiliar atomic mirror world to our own will be entirely mapped out by the cartographers of CERN – and perhaps one of the greatest enigmas of our time will be closer to being resolved.