Neutrino shape-shift points to new physics - physics-math - 20 July 2013 - New Scientist

Neutrino shape-shift points to new physics - most experiments measure the rate of neutrino oscillation by starting with one neutrino type and seeing how many of them disappear by the time the particles reach a detector, rather than seeing the transformed neutrino arrive anywhere...
They have detected a total of 28 electron neutrinos, when fewer than 5 would be expected if the neutrinos were not oscillating. Odds that the result is a fluke are less than one in a trillion...
Now that we have seen the muon neutrino morph into the electron neutrino in normal matter, physicists can run the T2K experiment with a beam of anti-muon neutrinos. Subtle differences in the way neutrinos and antineutrinos oscillate could have skewed the ratios of matter and antimatter production in the early universe...

Tabletop accelerator shoots cheap antimatter bullets

Tabletop accelerator shoots cheap antimatter bullets

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23748-tabletop-accelerator-shoots-cheap-antimatter-bullets.html?cmpid=RSS%7CNSNS%7C2012-GLOBAL%7Conline-news&

A tabletop device just 10 square metres in size can spit out energetic bursts of positrons as dense as those kicked out by the giant particle-factories at CERN...

Instead, Gianluca Sarri at Queen's University Belfast, UK, and colleagues used rapid laser bursts to make positrons in their smaller, budget device. The laser pulse ionises inert helium gas, generating a stream of high-speed electrons. This electron beam is directed at a thin metallic foil so that it crashes into metal atoms, releasing a jet of electrons and positrons. These particles are separated into two beams with magnets...

Giant, Heavy and Hollow: Physicists Create Extreme Atoms

Giant, Heavy and Hollow: Physicists Create Extreme Atoms: “If you tune your X-rays properly, you can pick which shell you want to empty out first,” says Young. “Being able to control the inner-shell dynamics is very cool.” The current record for this kind of atom-hollowing was reported last November by a group at the Center for Free-electron Laser Science in Hamburg, Germany, which used the SLAC laser to strip away, from the inside out, the 36 inner electrons of a 54-electron-strong xenon atom...

In 2008, researchers led by Dunning reported that they had managed to squeeze the normally spread-out electron into a tight packet that briefly orbited the nucleus. Last year, they added radio waves that enabled that motion to be maintained indefinitely. “It only took a century, but we recreated Bohr's atom,” says Dunning proudly...

By 2002, two collaborations had been able to make as many as 50,000 atoms of antihydrogen, but the atoms quickly annihilated on the walls of their container. It took until 2010 before researchers at ALPHA showed how to trap the atoms using three magnets with a combined field sufficient to restrain antihydrogen, with its tiny magnetic moment. At that time, the antimatter was held for just 170 milliseconds, and only about one atom was trapped for every eight times the group ran the 20–30 minute experiment, says Hangst. But the team has improved its equipment to trap one atom per experiment, and hold it for about 1,000 seconds...

Twist in dark matter tale hints at shadow Milky Way

Twist in dark matter tale hints at shadow Milky Way: In 2008, when the PAMELA satellite found a similar excess of positrons, Neal Weiner of New York University and colleagues suggested that WIMPs are drawn together under a force of their own...

Observations of the orbits of stars around galaxies suggest that all galaxies, including the Milky Way, are surrounded by a spherical cloud of dark matter (see diagram). But if a fraction of dark matter particles interact with each other, they would combine into atom-like structures and eventually collapse into a spinning disc. This is how ordinary matter formed the Milky Way. The resulting shadow Milky Way could be spinning right along with the visible one, or it could end up tilted at a slight angle, she adds.

Peaceful matter-antimatter pairing looks more real

Peaceful matter-antimatter pairing looks more real: The first signs of these Majorana fermions came last year in the form of a current that appeared at zero voltage in a nano-size wire...
They created a similar set-up but this time ramped the voltage up and down and shortened the wire. The plan was to cause the quantum waves associated with each fermion to overlap and constructively interfere, creating two extra peaks in current. Sure enough, the team saw two more blips...

Scientists Find Signal in Space That Could Be Dark Matter

Scientists Find Signal in Space That Could Be Dark Matter: Though they rarely interact, scientists think dark matter particles should occasionally hit one another, annihilating into positrons and electrons, which AMS detects. A dark matter signal would see the ratio of positrons relative to electrons rise at higher energies and then sharply drop off...
The AMS experiment has observed that the positron excess, whatever its source, seems to come uniformly from all parts of the sky. This indicates that the signal has one particular source and is not many different phenomena...

Predicted state of atomic collapse seen for first time - MIT News Office

Predicted state of atomic collapse seen for first time - MIT News Office: What the new Science paper reports is that atoms sitting on a sheet of graphene — a two-dimensional structure composed of carbon atoms linked in a chicken-wire-like mesh of hexagonal bonds — exactly mimic the properties of atomic nuclei, and can be manipulated to recreate and observe complex atomic phenomena. The key is that while electrons move through graphene as relativistic particles — as though they were massless, even though they actually do have mass — their motion is 300 times slower than that of true massless particles. As a result, the expected phenomenon of collapse should take place at one-three-hundredth the normal nuclear charge — putting it well within reach of experimental observations.

To simulate atomic nuclei, the researchers used pairs of calcium atoms on the graphene surface; they were able to manipulate these pairs (called dimers) on the surface using the probe tip of a scanning tunneling microscope. As soon as three dimers were pushed close together, the surrounding field of electrons showed a specific spectrum of resonances that precisely matched the decades-old predictions of atomic collapse. The observed resonances persisted in a four-dimer and five-dimer artificial nucleus.

Physicists propose factory to spew out Higgs particles

Physicists propose factory to spew out Higgs particles:   Muons are particles similar to electrons, but 200 times more massive. That means a muon-antimuon accelerator could reach the necessary energies over a far shorter distance.

With the putative Higgs checking in at about 125 gigaelectronvolts, you would need to bash together a muon and an antimuon with each having just over 60 GeV of energy. "That should be doable with a machine 100 times smaller than the LHC," says Rubbia. The result would be a "Higgs factory" producing the particle and little else.

First ever measurement on atom of pure antimatter

First ever measurement on atom of pure antimatter:  In the latest work, the ALPHA team trapped an atom of antihydrogen using magnetic fields. By shining microwave radiation tuned to a specific frequency on this captive, the team were able to flip the anti-atom's magnetic moment, liberating it from the trap and allowing it to be detected. This process enabled the first spectroscopic measurement of antihydrogen.

Original spin: Was the universe born whirling? - space - 17 October 2011 - New Scientist

Original spin: Was the universe born whirling?: All other things being equal, you would have expected these galaxies generally to be spinning in random directions, according to local conditions when they formed. And that indeed was the case. In most sectors of the northern sky, equal numbers of galaxies were rotating to the right, or clockwise, and to the left, anticlockwise. But along one direction, at about 10 degrees to our own galaxy's spin axis, there were more left-handed spirals than right-handed ones...
"If this asymmetry is real, it means the universe has a net angular momentum..."
It is too early for him to have incorporated the details of the galaxy asymmetry into his work explicitly, but he sees a suggestive thread: an initially spinning universe brought on a parity-violating asymmetry in gravity that allowed matter to triumph over its antimatter rival. And that process left two marks behind: the axis of evil in the cosmic background radiation, and the inconspicuous alignment of galaxies that Longo has spotted.

Magnetic Fields Turn The Vacuum Into A Superconducting Superlens, Says Physicist� - Technology Review

Magnetic Fields Turn The Vacuum Into A Superconducting Superlens, Says Physicist� - Technology Review: Now Smolyaninov has turned his attention to the superconducting behaviour of the charged ρ mesons generated in a vacuum by a magnetic field. He points out that this superconducting state behaves exactly like a metamaterial, focusing light in exotic ways.

If this magnetic field varies in space in the right kind of way, it's quite possible for this superconducting state to focus light like a superlens. Equally it could also trap light like a black hole.
Nobody has created a magnetic field powerful enough to observe this effect on Earth but such fields must have existed elsewhere. Both Smolyaninov and Chernodub say that in the early Universe, just fractions of a second after the Big Bang, the fields must have been powerful enough to generate these superconducting states.

Blog - Antiproton Radiation Belt Discovered Around Earth

Blog - Antiproton Radiation Belt Discovered Around Earth: Now the PAMELA team has analysed the 850 days of data, looking only at the times when the spacecraft was in the South Atlantic Anomaly (about 1.7 per cent of this time).

Lo and behold, these guys found 28 antiprotons. That's about three orders of magnitude more than you'd expect to find in the solar wind, proving that the particles really are trapped and stored in this belt.

Asymmetric Quarks Defy Standard Model of Physics, Suggest New Gluon: Scientific American

Asymmetric Quarks Defy Standard Model of Physics, Suggest New Gluon: Scientific American:  In some superconductors, electrons pair up, bound by particle-like vibrations in the material. The bound electrons limit the range over which the electromagnetic force can act within the material, an effect that in turn imparts an effective mass to nearby photons -- particles of light, which carry the long-range electromagnetic force and are normally weightless.
 In a similar way, Hill suggests, top quarks and anti-top quarks might pair up throughout the cosmos, bound by a force carried by an as-yet undiscovered particle dubbed the top gluon. "It's as if the entire universe was a special kind of superconductor..."

Could the Big Bang have been a quick conversion of antimatter into matter?

Could the Big Bang have been a quick conversion of antimatter into matter?: ...Hajdukovic imagines the existence of a matter-antimatter repulsion that is significant only at short range; specifically, inside a black hole’s event horizon, or smaller than the Schwarzschild radius. Immediately after the gravitational Schwinger mechanism produces particle-antiparticle pairs, the repulsion force would cause a black hole to violently repel the opposite particle type. The result would be the conversion of nearly all matter into antimatter (or vice versa) in a very short time that depends on the size of the black hole.
Through calculations, Hajdukovic shows that the amount of matter that can be converted into antimatter (or vice versa) in one second could be up to 10128 kg, which is several orders of magnitude greater than the entire mass of the universe, about 1053 kg. If correct, it would mean that all of the matter in the universe could be converted into antimatter in a fraction of the Planck time...
... in his paper titled “Is dark matter an illusion created by the gravitational polarisation of the quantum vacuum,” he obtains a “striking equation” in agreement with observations and without invoking dark matter.

Galaxy sized twist in time pulls violating particles back into line

Galaxy sized twist in time pulls violating particles back into line: Dr Hadley’s paper... suggests that researchers have neglected the significant impact of the rotation of our Galaxy on the pattern of how sub atomic particles breakdown...
There is a clear left right asymmetry in weak interactions and a much smaller CP violation in Kaon systems. These have been measured but never explained. This research suggests that the experimental results in our laboratories are a consequence of galactic rotation twisting our local space time. If that is shown to be correct then nature would be fundamentally symmetric after all.

Magnetic properties of a single proton directly observed for the first time

Magnetic properties of a single proton directly observed for the first time: The proton has an intrinsic angular momentum or spin, just like other particles. It is like a tiny bar magnet; in this analogy, a spin quantum jump would correspond to a (switch) flip of the magnetic poles. However, detecting the proton spin is a major challenge. While the magnetic moments of the electron and its anti-particle, the positron, were already being measured and compared in the 1980s, this has yet to be achieved in the case of the proton. "We have long been aware of the magnetic moment of the proton, but it has thus far not been observed directly for a single proton but only in the case of particle ensembles..."
The real problem is that the magnetic moment of the proton is 660 times smaller than that of the electron, which means that it is considerably harder to detect.

Stick Up: Antimatter Atoms Trapped for More Than 15 Minutes: Scientific American

Stick Up: Antimatter Atoms Trapped for More Than 15 Minutes: Scientific American: "'We think we're in a position to start measuring something,' says ALPHA spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University in Denmark. Initial studies will involve irradiating the anti-atoms with microwaves to try to engage them in a resonant interaction, flipping their spin like a compass needle swinging from north to south.

Critically, the confinement times achieved by ALPHA imply that the antihydrogen atoms have had time to decay into their lowest-energy, or ground, state."

Fleeting antimatter trapped for a quarter of an hour - physics-math - 03 May 2011 - New Scientist

Fleeting antimatter trapped for a quarter of an hour: The ALPHA team want to keep antimatter intact long enough to study it, so last year they worked out how to hold a cloud of antihydrogen in a magnetic trap. Not for long, though: collisions with trace gases would have either annihilated the anti-atoms or given them the energy to escape, so the team opened the trap after 170 milliseconds and observed the resulting annihilations, verifying that antimatter had been made.

Now they have repeated the experiment, this time waiting much longer before opening the trap. They also cooled the antiprotons used to create the antihydrogen much further, which lowered the energy of the antimatter, allowed more to be squeezed into the trap and raised the chance that some would last longer

Antimatter gravity could explain Universe's expansion

Antimatter gravity could explain Universe's expansion: As Villata explains, the current formulation of general relativity predicts that matter and antimatter are both self-attractive, yet matter and antimatter mutually repel each other. Unlike previous antigravity proposals – such as the idea that antimatter is gravitationally self-repulsive – Villata’s proposal does not require changes to well-established theories. The study is published in a recent issue of EPL (Europhysics Letters).
“The significance of this study is actually twofold,” Villata told PhysOrg.com. “On one side, that of physics in general, it is to have shown that one of the most heretical concepts debated in the last several decades, i.e., that of antigravity, can be found as a prediction of the coupling of two of the best-established theories of the last century, providing the extension of general relativity to antimatter, considered as space-time-reversed matter, as requested by CPT symmetry. On the other side, the cosmological implications of this finding have shown antigravity as an alternative to (or explanation of) the wooly concept of dark energy for the accelerated expansion of the Universe.”

First Observation of Antihelium� - Technology Review

First Observation of Antihelium� - Technology Review: What's important about this observation is that antihelium-4 seems to occur at exactly the rate predicted by thermodynamics. So unless there's some other mechanism for making it in vastly greater quantities, we're unlikely to see a naturally occurring version, no matter how hard we look.

So "any observation of antihelium or even heavier antinuclei in space would indicate the existence of a large amount of antimatter elsewhere in the Universe," say the STAR collaboration.