Particles Seen Emerging From Empty Space For First Time (newscientist.com) 56
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from NewScientist: According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) -- widely considered to be our best theory for describing the strong force, which binds quarks inside protons and neutrons -- even a perfect vacuum isn't truly empty. Instead, it is filled with short-lived disturbances in the underlying energy of space that flicker in and out of existence, known as virtual particles. Among them are quark-antiquark pairs. Under normal conditions, these fleeting pairs vanish almost as soon as they appear. But if enough energy is injected into a vacuum, QCD predicts they can be promoted into real, detectable particles with measurable mass. Now, the STAR collaboration -- an international team of physicists working at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state -- has observed this process for the first time.
The team smashed together high-energy protons in a vacuum, producing a spray of particles. Some of these particles should be quark-antiquark pairs pulled directly from the vacuum itself, but quarks can never exist alone and immediately combine into composite particles. Quarks and antiquarks are born with their spins correlated -- a shared quantum alignment inherited from the vacuum. The researchers found that this link persists even after the quarks and antiquarks become part of larger particles called hyperons, which decay in less than a tenth of a billionth of a second. Spotting these spin-aligned hyperons in the aftermath of the proton collisions allowed the researchers to confirm that the quarks within them came from the vacuum. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.
The team smashed together high-energy protons in a vacuum, producing a spray of particles. Some of these particles should be quark-antiquark pairs pulled directly from the vacuum itself, but quarks can never exist alone and immediately combine into composite particles. Quarks and antiquarks are born with their spins correlated -- a shared quantum alignment inherited from the vacuum. The researchers found that this link persists even after the quarks and antiquarks become part of larger particles called hyperons, which decay in less than a tenth of a billionth of a second. Spotting these spin-aligned hyperons in the aftermath of the proton collisions allowed the researchers to confirm that the quarks within them came from the vacuum. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.
They Didn't Find "Something From Nothing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:They Didn't Find "Something From Nothing (Score:5, Informative)
That's not how I read it (although I'm also only relying on the summary)
I read it as:
It's a given in the standard model that even in a perfect vacuum at absolute zero virtual (pairs of) particles are constantly being created and destroyed. While we can detect some side effects of that, the particles themselves cannot be detected or measured but we know that these virtual pairs must obey certain "rules" and, in particular, must be correlated in particular ways.
However, provide enough energy and those virtual pairs of particles can become real. When they become real they still have to obey the constraints that the virtual particles had to have.
What they have done here (assuming I've understood enough) is to provide enough energy so that the virtual particles can become real (surely this isn't surprising) and, additionally, detected the required correlations that the virtual particles made real must have.
I know nowhere near enough to know how they distinguished these virtual pairs made real from coincidence pairs created through "normal" proton-proton collisions but I assume that's covered in their paper.
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That is how I understood it.
Re:They Didn't Find "Something From Nothing (Score:4, Informative)
No. The collision concentrates the amount of (kinetic) energy into a small area. The energy density is high enough that a large amount of quarks emerge from the vacuum. When a proton is in an accelerated state, the energy within the proton radius is very high. This enables us to see the strange-quark/antiquarks popping in and out of existence as collision debris. The thing you can do with strange quarks is use them to make hyperons. Without strange quarks, you'd be trying to make carrot cake with flour but no carrot. The high energy density brings a large number of quarks into existence and that enables hyperons to form. These hyperons are formed by grabbing a few quarks in the vicinity. By checking for hyperons that are spin-aligned (entangled), they can tell it was directly formed by quarks that emerged from the vacuum and got captured. It's not new that we have particles appear from the vacuum, normally we can't distinguish the hyperons that formed directly from vacuum versus ones that formed from quarks that have already interacted via gluons in the vicinity. This can provide some info about the vacuum field itself.
Re:They Didn't Find "Something From Nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's true for anything. Literally. Your eyes and brain tell you that you're in a room in front of a computer but that's just an interpretation. Not even a very good one since you probably have this weird idea that the walls are "solid" and you're actually touching stuff, whatever that means.
I'm not sure why it's news though. You're glowing in spontaneously created particles. By some interpretations anyway.
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Re: They Didn't Find "Something From Nothing (Score:3)
I don't know. If you smashed two protons you would only have 6 quarks among them, and they wouldn't be spin aligned, as there are three quarks in a proton and spin alignment only works between pairs.
Unfortunately I couldn't read the article without subscribing and my particle physics knowledge is pretty similar to what's in a vacuum: mostly virtual particles if I put enough energy into it.
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Re: They Didn't Find "Something From Nothing (Score:3)
You didn't even bother to remove the AI artifacts in "your" text?
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Yeah. Legibility markers. Of course.
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Sure, buddy.
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Skimmed the article.. (Score:5, Funny)
They created stuff by using a strong force to ram a Hardon to into a tube ?
I'm no physics guy, but how is that new?
Re:Skimmed the article.. (Score:5, Funny)
They created stuff by using a strong force to ram a Hardon to into a tube ?
I think this comment would also apply in the previous story about the declining birthrates.
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Re: Skimmed the article.. (Score:2)
I read that as Tensor Casino at first, and assumed for a minute that there was some kind of math/physics joke here, and I just didn't take enough math course to get the joke.
And now I'm thinking that there really is some potential here for Tensor Casino humor.
Re: Skimmed the article.. (Score:1)
Vacuum energy (Score:2)
Vacuum energy has been known for quite a while and has been observed experimentally. In the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] there's a reference to Arthur C. Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth, where he referenced actual papers. Smashing protons together in colliders is always done in vacuum, as otherwise they'd collide with the particles from gases and thus not achieve the high energies wanted, among other issues. This writer doesn't seem to have much of a grasp of physics.
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If it's got anything in it, is it really a vacuum? Maybe Vacuum doesn't exist. As soon as you introduce something it is no longer a vacuum. A vacuum is the absence of matter , matter is defined as something of mass, a proton has mass according to the Interweb.
Even space is not true vacuum by this definition, it's got planets and stars in it and the odd molecule, atom in the spaces in between. Photons can have mass in some of the sums.
Did vacuum ever exist, if the start of the universe was a big bang, perha
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We don't! Physics doesn't really deal with ontological questions like "what is it really?" It's all predictive models.
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A vacuum is the absence of matter , matter is defined as something of mass
A vacuum can have lots of massless stuff in it. In this case, kinetic energy. Energy can be converted into mass.
Higher dimmensions? (Score:1)
If particles "seem" to emit from empty space, they could be emitting everywhere only to be drowned by existing particles? Also could that mean that there could be a higher dimension and that we are in living in a projection?
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Yes, but we could also be living on the shell of a giant tortoise. Ok seriously yes, it is happening everywhere like all the time. However these particles pop into existence as pairs (particle-antiparticle) so they (usually) annihilate each other and disappear.
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Which was the basis for the fictional Zero Point Module (ZPM) in the Stargate Atlantis franchise. Would be cool if those were real, but it's probably impossible to harness that energy.
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Great shows though, right? Well, SG-1 and Atlantis anyhow. Universe didn't really work out.
And you're probably right that it wouldn't work. I suspect that even if you could access t
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Thanks, that's really interesting.
I liked Universe, it's a shame it got cancelled.
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The problem with Universe was that it tried to be a CW drama right up until about the middle of the second season. The plot started to move but the execs had already moved on.
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That said, I'd have preferred that they kept it going at least a little longer to see if it could find its footing and pull an audience. I
God knows. Maybe literally. (Score:3)
The problem is that quantum mechanics appears to be hitting the upper bounds of human intellect as far as understanding is concerned. Its been around 100 years but no one understands WTF is going on under the hood. Physicists can explain the what but not the how and why.
Re:God knows. Maybe literally. (Score:5, Funny)
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QT has been comprehensively tested, the results are not in question. But find someone who says they can explain the double slit paradox and you'll have found a liar.
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Then one day we had cameras and telescopes that could identify a tiny shift in the location of a distant star as the moon eclipsed the sun, making the tiny star visible. A new test proving a new theory under which the baffling movement of Mercury made perfect sense. Before van Leeuwenhoek, medicine was not hampered by the limits of our understanding, but the l
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" If we don't understand it, it is because we haven't figured out how to perform the necessary experiments."
A good remark to put on a motivational poster but its simply not true in all cases. There are no further experiments that can be done in the case of the double slit and people have been trying to think them up for a century. Its not a case of better equipment will reveal something as this is a discrepency in the fundamental nature of reality.
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And now IRS... (Score:2)
What's the big deal? (Score:2)
I do this kind of magic on the toilet every morning. :shrug:
Dumb question (Score:2)
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Until I get free unlimited pizza (Score:1)
...I'll consider this fake news.
Other Dimensions (Score:3)
I feel the vacuum producing particles from nothing is from there being another dimension at play that we cannot observe. This other dimension similar to a 4th spacial dimension would be empty until something in that dimension passed near the vacuum upon which we would observe it as suddenly appearing.
The extra stuff about inserting lots of energy is simply due to interactions with that 4th dimension making it more disturbed thus raising the change of a particle in that dimension moving into the vacuum.
I think this is just confirming a 4th spacial dimension that we cannot directly observe.
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Just because a 4th dimension is mathematically possible, doesn't mean it must also exist in the universe.
For that matter, mathematically, 1 and 2 dimensions are possible, but these also do not exist in the universe. In the real universe, there are just 3. Not 1 (there are no physical points), not 2 (there are no physical planes), not 4. Dimensions are simply how we mathematically measure space, not a characteristic of space.
It's tantalizing to imagine a multiverse, but no evidence has been found for such a
Electron-positron pair production (Score:2)