back to article Standard Model goes PEAR-SHAPED in CERN experiment

It's only a small thing, but it could be big news: researchers at CERN have turned up the first evidence of exotic (and short-lived) atoms with pear-shaped nuclei. The reasons the boffins are excited is they believe the eccentric nuclei can help them probe one of physics' official Big Questions: how come there's something …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Matter/anti-matter

    Nothing really matters. Anyone can see.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. robin48gx
        Happy

        Re: Matter/anti-matter

        Exotic matter. Lets build a stargate!

        1. GitMeMyShootinIrons

          Re: Matter/anti-matter

          "Exotic matter. Lets build a stargate!"

          But would it be pear shape....?

      2. BorkedAgain
        Thumb Up

        Re: Matter/anti-matter

        ...Anyway the wind blows...

  2. ian 22
    Thumb Up

    At last

    LHC begins to justify its expence as it opens doors to new knowledge.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: At last

      ISOLDE != LHC

      The ISOLDE lab is fed by the Proton Synchotron - a much smaller accelerator ring which predates the LHC by about 60 years or so ...

      If it helps:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cern-accelerator-complex.svg

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: At last

        Actually it may even only be fed off the initial PS Booster ring (older still than the PS and much smaller). I do like how they just keep taking the output of one accelerator and throwing into the next bigger one the make - can't wait to see what the LHC feeds in 50 years ;)

  3. lunatik96

    Pear shaped matter?

    Let's see - they smash a heavy atom into another not as heavy atom and the shape is asymmetric? hmmm. If a big car hit a not so big car, would one be pear shaped? just saying. Maybe the image they captured is at a moment of recoil. It would reason that atoms deform under appropriate stress.

    The fact that this image is produced is amazing enough in itself don't u think?

    1. Blofeld's Cat
      Facepalm

      Re: Pear shaped matter?

      "... they smash a heavy atom into another not as heavy atom ..."

      So a job for a Quantum Panel-beater rather than a Quantum Mechanic then.

      1. Mike Pellatt
        Thumb Up

        Re: Pear shaped matter?

        You, sir, owe me a new keyboard.

      2. wayne 8

        Re: Pear shaped matter?

        I studied to be a quantum mechanic. I had to give it up. I never knew whether the tool I needed would be in the toolbox until I opened the box. It was very difficult to grasp a quantum part.

        1. DavCrav

          Re: Pear shaped matter?

          "I studied to be a quantum mechanic. I had to give it up. I never knew whether the tool I needed would be in the toolbox until I opened the box. It was very difficult to grasp a quantum part."

          I took the exam to be a quantum mechanic and everything: when I asked if I'd passed, they said "yes and no".

          1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
            Coat

            Re: Pear shaped matter?

            > It was very difficult to grasp a quantum part.

            I dunno.

            Personally, it was all fine, man!

        2. A J Stiles
          Joke

          Re: Pear shaped matter?

          I hitched a lift with a quantum mechanic once. We got pulled over by the Old Bill. This officer asked him "Do you know how fast you were going?"

          "No," he said, "but I know exactly where I was!"

          1. DavCrav

            Re: Pear shaped matter?

            "I hitched a lift with a quantum mechanic once. We got pulled over by the Old Bill. This officer asked him "Do you know how fast you were going?"

            "No," he said, "but I know exactly where I was!""

            If he got sent to jail, how did they know if he passed Go or not?

    2. Hollerith 1

      Re: Pear shaped matter?

      What's irritating about banging quantum panels is that every time you knock a dent out of one, the entangled panel gets one knocked in.

  4. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Thumb Up

    *If* true that would make the Standard Model a pretty blunt tool.

    However I recall a very old documentary on relativistic physics which talked about communicating with an alien race that might be made of anti-matter, making any meeting with them a very bad idea.

    But how could you devise a test to find out if they were?

    There is a difference. IIRC it was all about the asymmetry in gamma ray emissions from certain nuclei.

    What I can't remember is if this demonstrated both a difference in emission angle and amount, which I think would be necessary to ensure the matter (over time) outnumbered the anti matter particles.

    But definitely intriguing. Thumbs up for some neat physics.

    1. Jay Holmes
      Thumb Up

      Re: *If* true that would make the Standard Model a pretty blunt tool.

      If you want to test what would happen we could always use chavs! See they do have a use after all.

      Back on topic, although not entirely understanding what the hell is going on at CERN (brain not big enough!). I applaud the fact that they are doing something to further figure out what is going on in the world. It shows that we don't know everything (and yes religous nuts, I am looking at you!), but we are not afraid to look! (still looking at you religous nuts)

    2. Mike Bell

      Re: *If* true that would make the Standard Model a pretty blunt tool.

      I think I saw that documentary, too, donkeys years ago. IIRC, it revealed that a certain isotope of cobalt is seen to preferentially spit out electrons (beta decay) in a different way to its antiparticle.

      The fact that there is an asymmetry in the universe has always troubled me. I imagined that if I was God, and created a left hand and a right hand, how would I know which is which? For a human, it's not too hard to do, because we're surrounded by large scale asymmetries, like generally having a heart on the left, and halves of the brain that work in different ways. But if you're the supreme being, dealing with the building blocks of nature, there can be no such external reference. "This is an anti-particle because I say it is, and this one is a particle because it's the opposite of the other one that I said was an anti-particle" sounds like a bit of a dodgy argument. How God gets away with it is a mystery to me.

      And a mystery to me, it's likely to remain, since descriptions of the subject bring horrible imaginary numbers and matrix multiplications into the frame. Far too baffling for me to understand.

      1. JDX Gold badge

        Re: *If* true that would make the Standard Model a pretty blunt tool.

        Um, as a "religious nut" I applaud this kind of scientific progress...

        1. Jay Holmes
          Happy

          Re: *If* true that would make the Standard Model a pretty blunt tool.

          Ohh cmon, you know Im not on about the average, run of the mill, garden variety religious nuts. Im on about the religious nuts who believe the world was created in 6days with a 7th for rest 6000 odd years ago or the whackadoodles that blow themselves up in the name of (insert invisible deity of choice here) to "further their cause"!

      2. M Gale

        Re: How God gets away with it is a mystery to me.

        Same way that the Invisible Pink Unicorn gets away with it.

      3. Nigel 11

        Asymmetry can be an emergent property.

        The general belief is that the universe started symmetric but unstable, or evolved to become unstable, and then spontaneously changed into a more stable but less symmetric configuration. Imagine a ball perched on a mound in the exact middle of a dish, with perfect rotational symmetry about the Z axis. Precisely because it is perfectly symmetric, the ball doesn't move. The slightest fluctation of anything changes the situation from metastable to unstable. The ball starts to roll. Once this starts, it will ultimately settle down to stability in a lower part of the dish, displaced from the centre. The arrangement of ball and dish is no longer symmetric about its Z axis. Incidentally the ball is also merely metastable with respect to rolling to and fro in its sponaneously chosen X-Z plane and won't "ignore" its freedom to also move in the Y direction for very long.

        If you ask how it got onto the mound, one answer is that the dish itself always retains perfect rotational symmetry, but is evolving in shape from one with the lowest point at the exact centre, to one with a mound at the centre. At the critical point where the centre is no longer the low point, the ball ceases to be stable and becomes metastable.

      4. Ken Hagan Gold badge

        Re: *If* true that would make the Standard Model a pretty blunt tool.

        "I think I saw that documentary, too, donkeys years ago."

        I don't know about the documentary, but you've remembered the experiment and, yes, this is fairly old stuff. I found out about it from Martin Gardner's "Ambidextrous Universe", which was itself first published before my time. I think he was the one who introduced the Ozma problem of talking to anti-aliens.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambidextrous_Universe

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Except that...

    These results would be interesting, except for the fact that experiments that produce results at variance with the Standard Model (and GR and QM,) don't exactly have a really good track record...

    1. James 36

      Re: Except that...

      and that is precisely the reason to keep trying

  6. Rol

    Antimatter and anti-gravity anyone?

    If the idea that antimatter has an inane dislike of crowds ever gets proven, then I do believe the answer to all this matter we happily gaze upon will be upon us.

    Just like in a nuclear explosion, most of the material, as in almost 100%, gets explosively dispersed before it gets the slightest chance to go pop itself.

    So, big bang. Matter and antimatter gets dispersed at light speed and bugger me, the antimatter just keeps on running away from all its neighbours and hence the disparity we "see" is not a disparity at all.

    So, where's all the antimatter then, if it didn't hang around for the year zero party?

    Well you know that weird dark stuff, we can't see, touch or sense, but seems to have a gravitational influence on galaxies and the like, well, err, might I suggest the gravitational effect is actually an anti-gravitational effect from the antimatter that prefers life outside of matter's domain and similarly likes to keep everything out of it's.

    That antimatter dislikes company and actively pushes against all contact, might also point to the often not asked question, where are all the antimatter stars and black holes?

    I get paid sod all for my scientific ponderings, so for those of you who can't take their eyes off the money, might I suggest you jog on and get back to me several years and several trillion dollars later.

    1. JDX Gold badge

      Re: Antimatter and anti-gravity anyone?

      Anti-matter responds to gravity in the regular way. AM in tiny quantities is easy to make as evidenced by the existance if the PET Scan.

      1. Rol

        Re: Antimatter and anti-gravity anyone?

        but difficult to interrogate it's gravitational properties when it is swathed in a magnetic flux several orders of magnitude greater than gravity.

        However some tentative experiments in our matter infested world has thrown up results showing antimatter does have anti-gravity properties.

      2. David Given
        Stop

        Re: Antimatter and anti-gravity anyone?

        Actually, that has not been tested yet. There are some experiments currently underway; this is one: http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2013/04/alpha-novel-investigation-gravity-and-antimatter

        Unfortunately actually measuring the motion of an atom of antihydrogen when you drop it is kinda hard, and the results aren't anywhere like conclusive.

    2. Christopher Slater-Walker

      Re: Antimatter and anti-gravity anyone?

      I thought the point about the apparent asymmetry of matter and antimatter was that there was an excess of matter, and so I suppose that almost all, or perhaps indeed all of the antimatter was annihilated. The same happened to _most_ of the matter, but since there was an excess of matter, what was left after the mutual annihilation is what we now see.

      Nevertheless I stand ready to be corrected.

      1. Rol

        Re: Antimatter and anti-gravity anyone?

        We detect the existence of matter by the energy it reflects or emits.

        If AM is as shy as I consider then;-

        1.. It will avoid interaction with everything and therefore not be reflecting anything.

        2.. Will not interact, even with its kith and kin and therefore not emit anything.

        I suppose once the vastness of space is considered, it can easily be realised how widely dispersed antimatter can be, so like a neutrino can pass through a planet, energy can pass through space without ever hitting antimatter. Hence, we can't see it.

        Elusive dark matter? Pah! Antimatter and nothing more.

    3. Anonymous John

      Re: Antimatter and anti-gravity anyone?

      It wouldn't surprise me if matter and anti-mater repelled each other. Or if the CP violation was the result of the matter/anti-matter imbalance, not the cause.

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Re: Antimatter and anti-gravity anyone?

        Yeah Eadon, it would be reeeeallllly surprising if antimatter behaved differently than normal matter in its spacetime bending behaviour.

        After all, you can seamlessly transform matter into antimatter with a bit of E=mc² and some luck, and nowhere do we see negative signs appear suddenly in front the constant total mass energy.

        Might be a neat null experiment but I wouldn't want to bet my PhD on it.

        tl;dr ; gb2 slagging Windows.

  7. Yet Another Commentard

    About that graphical representation...

    I'm not too sure what I am supposed to be seeing there, and what the colours mean. My initial thoughts would be that it's some form of probability graph, that a proton/neutrino is likely to exist on there, very likely on the dark red through to not so much on the blue.

    Is that right, or am I waaaaay behind the rest of the class here?

  8. Dexter

    Do we know that anti-matter responds to gravity the same as matter?

    I seem to recall someone was trying to test that, but of course it is very hard with the tiny amounts of anti-matter we can make.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      We don't *know*, but we are pretty sure it does

      We don't yet *know* if antimatter responds to gravity the same way as matter, but we are pretty sure it does; if it doesn't, it would really change our understanding of the universe.

      The reasoning goes like this:

      An object in free fall is following a straight line in space-time (the line may not seem straight in space, but remember, we are seeing a slice along the time axis, not the full line in space-time. That's why we say "gravity curves space-time", or more properly, "gravity IS a curvature of space-time.").

      Now, consider if you had something that had a different response to gravity than normal. Let's say you have a ball that has an inertial mass of 1kg (that is, a force of 1N will accelerate it at 1m/s^2), but experiences a force due to gravity on Earth of 1N rather than 9.8N. You let your "odd" ball and a normal 1kg ball loose at the same time, close enough that the differences in the curvature of space-time are negligible. The normal ball will have 9.8N of force on it and will accelerate at 9.8m/s^2, the "odd" ball will have a force of 1N on it and will accelerate at 1m/s^2. But, in theory, both are just following a straight line in space-time, and since we've constructed the experiment that the lines should be the same, we have a reducio ad absurdum - we've created a paradox. So, the reasoning goes, inertial mass and gravitational mass must be the same. And since we do have a very good set of evidence that antimatter has positive inertial mass (things like the recoil of an atom releasing a positron, for example), we thus have a strong reason to expect antimatter to react the same to gravity as normal matter.

      The experiments with trying to prove that are difficult, as we cannot just make an "odd" ball of antimatter and drop it - the quantities of antimatter can can make are small, they tend to come into being moving very fast, and even if we can slow them down to where gravity is a significant factor, they don't stick around very long (they tend to fall down, find some matter, and go FLASH in a very short period of time). So the error bars on the experiments are pretty large - we can say that antimatter is less than 100 times more strongly attracted by gravity than normal matter, and not less than -60 times as strongly attracted (read: repelled) as normal matter. That's like saying you have found by experiment to have between -60 and 100 heads - we suspect the real answer is 1, and -60 < 1 < 100, so our experiment has not disproved our assumption.

      Now, if we ever did find an "odd" ball - be it antimatter, or floobydust, or whatever, but that didn't respond to gravity the same way as normal matter - then we'd have to rethink general relativity in a pretty big way, a way as big as general relativity was for Newtonian mechanics. That might happen: we know that quantum mechanics and General Relativity don't fit together, and we know that quantum mechanics and General Relativity are pretty good descriptions of the universe in their own domains, and we know the universe contains both the domain for which quantum mechanics is valid and the domain for which General Relativity is valid at the same time, so we know we don't know everything. A major re-think like that might explain a lot, but since we have no data that would shape what that rethink should be, we cannot start it now. And that's what experiments like this are good for: they give us that evidence to say "OK, this is the direction you need to be looking in."

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Thumb Up

        Re: We don't *know*, but we are pretty sure it does

        Good read - thanks.

        1. Nigel 11

          Re: We don't *know*, but we are pretty sure it does

          Bosons are commonly their own antiparticles. The commonest such particle is the photon. Observation of light in gravitational fields on distance scales from smallish (Earth-Sun) to comsological show that photons are attracted by massive objects much as predicted by Einsteinian gravitation. And since they are their own antiparticles, then antiphotons are likewise attracted.

          We don't know of any Majorana fermions - ones which are their own antiparticles. The equations don't rule out such particles, and neutrinos are not yet well-enough understood to rule them out as candidates. But gravity acts alike on bosons and fermions, so it would be a major asymmetry if it acted oppositely for antibosons compared to antifermions!

      2. Nigel 11

        Re: We don't *know*, but we are pretty sure it does

        A major re-think like that might explain a lot, but since we have no data that would shape what that rethink should be, we cannot start it now

        Sightly too strong. If a theory of everything exists that supercedes both quantum mechanics and gravitation, it might be concieved of tomorrow by a mathematician of genius. If it were simpler than the existing two irreconcilables, I'd wager Occam's razor that it was right. And it would probably make predictions which were at odds with one or other of the existing theories, which would then help the experimentalists know what to look for.

        It wouldn't be the first time that the theory came first and observations that confirm the theory later.

        Some might say that the theory *has* to come first, otherwise the universe wouldn't know what to do. And a few would say that it didn't, until something somewhere started thinking. Philosophy, again.

  9. Robert E A Harvey

    Oh

    The hunt for 'the god particle' is over. Now we are looking for 'merlin matter'?

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @eadon

    You do know Microsoft doesn't own the laws of physics don't you? Not sure why you're posting in this thread.

  11. Mystic Megabyte
    Mushroom

    IIRC

    "Big Bang" should always be followed by the word "hypothesis".

    1. John H Woods Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: IIRC

      Mystic Megabyte: "Big Bang" should always be followed by the word "hypothesis".

      Or Theory?

    2. Alan Firminger

      I agree.

      A background microwave radiation does not prove the Big Bang, it complies with the hypothesis.

      Continuous creation, or perhaps recreation from dead photons may produce what is observed.

      1. Nigel 11

        Including the very slight fluctuations in the spectrum of that radiation in different directions?

        Continuous creation for infinite time would even the background radiation out in all directions, unless you're prepared to countenance that empty space has different properties in different directions as viewed from here.

        The big bang hypothesis predicts that there should have been quantum fluctuations in ther very early universe, the signature of which would be seen as anisotropy in the cosmic background radiation. Those fluctuations have now been observed, at levels that are not hard to reconcile with the hypothesis.

        1. Alan Firminger

          Thanks Nigel.

  12. B.T. See
    Alien

    Sharing: Dream of Four-Dimensional State and Fivengtange-Dimensional State

    Today i hav a strange dream, i dream a "chair" made out of many lines can be easily goes to Four-Dimensional State by twisting and bending its lines. However, this "chair" cannot goes to Five-Dimensional State because it will be destroyed completely. In contrast, a particle can goes to Five-Dimensional State by this way: A single point was turned to became a "chaossy" line.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Sharing: Dream of Four-Dimensional State and Fivengtange-Dimensional State

      Did you eat or drink anything interesting before this dream? :P

      1. Nigel 11

        Re: Sharing: Dream of Four-Dimensional State and Fivengtange-Dimensional State

        Don't knock such visions ... but unless you can retrieve the underlying meaning, if any, and set it down in the language of mathematics, you'll find it hard to convince many people that it's anything other than a purely subjective imagining.

        Organic chemistry was given a huge advance by Kekule, who dreamed of a snake swallowing its own tail and backtracked to the structure of a benzene molecule. Newton reputedly cracked gravity because of a falling apple, or its effect on his head. Many mathematicians and some scientists are Platonists. They believe that mathematics is the language in which the universe is best described, because it exists independantly and timelessly outside of all physical reality. Like most philosophies, it's hard or impossible to disprove, and I believe in Occam's razor! But allowing that they might be right, perhaps we do all occasionally come back from wherever we go when asleep with faint and scrambled recollections of the deepest of realities, and sometimes manage to reconstruct another tiny facet of the infinite?

        1. Palf

          Re: Sharing: Dream of Four-Dimensional State and Fivengtange-Dimensional State

          Suddenly I'm back in the nineties in the early days of UseNet (sci.physics) with the Finn Hannu P, his amazing Space Potato and his little daughter who drew cosmic truths.

          Apparently the guy is still going.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      Re: Sharing: Dream of Four-Dimensional State and Fivengtange-Dimensional State

      aManFromMars has finally let his son loose on El Reg!

  13. Dodgy Geezer Silver badge
    Coat

    I am currently looking for funding...

    ... for my theory that the fundamental particles of matter are all fruit-shaped.

    I believe that this can be determined if we re-configure the LHC into the shape of a banana, and fire pomegranate seeds through it into a melon....

  14. YouStupidBoy
    Joke

    When my uncle first heard about the LHC, he thought that it wound end in disaster. IIRC he said something like "Mark my words, that banging atoms into each other, no good will come of it. It'll all go pear-shaped".

    Turns out he may hve been right

  15. deMangler
    Headmaster

    Ontological pedantry alert

    Still wouldn't explain why there is something rather than nothing though - just why there is the matter rather than photons.

  16. E 2
    Alien

    Or just maybe...

    The universe is much bigger than we think...

    There was as much matter as antimatter...

    Local inhomogeneities in the matter/anti mix persisted through the expansionary (inflationary?) epoch...

    We live in an expanded region with an abundance of matter...

    There are other regions that have an abundance of antimatter...

    Globally the universe is in balance qua matter & antimatter...

    Where's my Nobel, heehee?

  17. A Long Fellow
    Pint

    Hmmm...

    I always thought antimatter was spontaneously consumed after the aperitivo and before the primo.

    Furthermore, it's clear that the real reason for the pear shape has to do with an excessive indulgence of the secondo, not to mention the formaggio e frutta.

    1. Palf

      Re: Hmmm...

      Like the Black Knight, I leap into the road and block your path leading to an attempt to confuse the Latin roots "before" (ante) and "opposite" (anti). You're not sneaking that one by us.

  18. Bartlomiej Kochan
    Linux

    4D cognition

    cze

    One can think that at this scale w can see the object "streched" in the time dimension. We only see it in a transition stage across past, present and future events. So the object still might be symmetrical after all.

    It bends time and visually it looks like a mini black hole, maybe similar to the one from theory of prof. S. Hawkins.

    "TIme is like a black hole vortex , we fall from the past into the unknown darkness of the future."

    P.S. In my professional opinion ( as a taxi driver ) a wormhole bridge between two points in space can be created by constructing two black holes made of entangled particles.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    God plays rugby not soccer

    No suprises here.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re. antimatter

    If antimatter's gravitational effect varies depending on distance ie locally attractive to normal matter but repels both itself and normal matter over cosmological distances then this could explain a lot i.e. inflation.

    AC/DC

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    give it to me straight like pear cider that's made from 100% pear...

    at least it's not apple-shaped....

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