A New Clue to Explain Existence
More data concerning the matter/antimatter abundance conundrum.
Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/05/making_more_matter.html
arxiv:1005.2757
If “the D0 results are about 50 times the level that could be explained by the standard model” then the standard model is falsified. It made a disproven prediction. It is wrong.
A vacuum left foot would discriminate between opposite shoes – a massed sector chiral vacuum background inert toward photons. Opposite geometric parity atomic mass distributions would vacuum free fall non-identically. An Eötvös experiment opposing chemically and macroscopically identical, single crystal test masses in enantiomorphic space groups would have a non-zero net output. alpha-Quartz in space groups P3(1)21 versus P3(2)21 or gamma-glycine in space groups P3(1) versus P3(2) are superb examples.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/erotor1.jpg
Somebody should look – the worst it can do is succeed.
@Uncle Al:
According to the paper, the result they got differs by 3.2 standard deviations from the Standard Model prediction.
Let’s put things in perspective: you have a theory that works really well and predicts that a certain coin is fair; but you flip the coin 100 times and get 20 heads more than tails. You shouldn’t dismiss the theory yet, what you should do is flip the coin 1000 more times. Maybe the first 100 times were unlucky (it’s been known to happen).
It has been known for some time that the Standard Model is incomplete. The preponderance of matter v antimatter isn’t a new finding; what’s new is being able to investigate it at higher energy.
I know the SM is incomplete (one big thing missing is an explanation for the neutrino mass, I think). It’s also true that the observable universe is almost only matter and no antimatter.
Still, that doesn’t mean that the Tevatron it’s actually generating more muons than anti-muons as the paper suggests. 3.2 sigma is still too low to be sure (i.e. could reasonably be a fluke). From what I gather, the general consensus seem to be about 5 sigma for “compelling” and 8 sigma for “pretty sure” evidence.
As it is, it seems that 3.2 sigma is a pretty good reason to keep watching very closely, but not much more.
Bonjour, Polite to tie you, I am Nancy