After 50 years, physicists confirm the presence of an infectious quasiparticle

Through detailed work, scientists have found evidence of a quasiparticle that was first imagined as a hypothesis almost 50 years ago: the odderon.

The odderon is a mixture of subatomic grains rather than new basic particles – but it works like the latter in some ways, and the way it fits into the basic building blocks makes the discovery in real time for physics.

The odderon was finally revealed through a detailed analysis of two groups of data, hitting the 5 sigma chance that probability researchers use as a threshold.

“This means that without the odderon, we would be more likely to see such an effect in the data with a chance of 1 in 3.5 million,” says physicist Cristian Baldenegro of the University of Kansas.

Items such as proteins and neutrons are made up of smaller subatomic grains: placed simply, quarries are ‘linked together’ by the force-carrying gluons. Smoking proteins together in a substance accelerator allows us to get a glimpse of their gluten-free gannets.

a typical model of a grain physics card

When two proteins are broken down but somehow come across the situation, this interaction – a kind of elastic scattering – can be explained by the proteins exchanging either an even number or strange of gluons.

If that number is even, it is pomeron quasiparticle function; the other option – which seems unlikely to happen much more often – is quasiparticle odderon, a fertilizer with an odd number of gluons.

Until now, it has not been possible to find strange scientists in experiments, even though theoretical quantum physics has suggested that they should exist.

Here, researchers performed the numbers on a large set of data from the Particle accelerator Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland and the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in the US.

Millions of data points were studied to compare proton-proton or proton-antiproton collisions, so scientists were convinced that they had seen results – a gluonic aggregation with strange numbers – that would only be possible if the odderon ann.

The comparison between the two types of accidents showed a marked difference in exchanged energy – that difference is evidence of the odderon. The team then put together more accurate measurements from a previous test in 2018 that eliminated some of the uncertainties, allowing them to reach the high test level for the first time.

This finding also helps to fill some of the gaps in the modern notion of quantum chromodynamics or QCD, the hypothesis of how quarries and gluons interact at a minimum. . We talk about the state of affairs at the smallest scales, and how everything in the Universe is put together.

In addition, the specialized technology developed to help detect the odderon in the future could have a number of other methods, the researchers say: in medical instruments, such as for example.

While this research does not answer all the questions about the odderon and how it works, it is the best proof that it exists. Future grain acceleration tests will be able to add further evidence, and no doubt raise a few more questions.

“Finding the odderon’s signatures is a very different task compared to what is traditionally done in particle physics,” Baldenegro said.

“For example, in finding the Higgs boson or the quark above, one is looking for a ‘bump’ over an invariant large smooth rotation, which is already quite challenging. On the other hand, the odderon has much quieter names. it has been so challenging to hunt the odderon. ”

The paper was submitted for publication in Corporate Review Letters and is available as an introduction to arXiv; linked research was published in the European Corporate Journal C..

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