Evidence Found for a New Fundamental Particle
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
[1]https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.58...
It seems to usually be visualized as 2d plane-like sheet that can oscillate, and those oscillations represent particles. In reality it should be 3d, but that is much harder to draw.
[1]Unless it's a constant field, in which case you'll feel the same pull no matter where you go.
The air temperature on earth is a field, a function that takes a position on the ground, a height above ground, and a time and returns the temperature at that point and time. And so is the wind velocity, just that the value of the function is not the temperature, a single number also called a scalar, but a vector pointing in the direction of the wind and with a length proportional to the wind speed. Temperature is therefore called a scalar field, wind velocity a vector field, and there or other kinds of fields like tensor fields, for example, which are a generalization of scalar and vector fields.
No, particles are particles [1], those fields in quantum field theory are just mathematical tools to deal with many particle systems in a manifest local and unitary way. There might of course actually be fields in the real world, but we have no evidence for that and those fields would not be the fields that appear in quantum field theory.
[1] Obviously not classical particles like tiny billiard balls.
Here is Nima Arkani-Hamed giving the Salam lectures 2012, a five day series on the state of fundamental physics. I marked [1] about 30 seconds where he is very clear about this. You can also start here [2] and watch about 10 minutes of this lecture where he quickly redevelops the ideas of quantum field theory.
http://www.science20.com/tommaso_dorigo/miniboone_confirms_n...
Author's take:
"The simple collecting more data and making the result stronger from a statistical standpoint in these cases does not help convince your peer: as I said, this is systematic in nature, so the problem has to be attacked by other means."
On one side he is "an experimental particle physicist who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC" but also writes "I am not a true expert in these matters so my comments would probably be deceiving or plain fallacious."
For him, it seems there is still a need for some other kind of approach before something more specific than "the apparent excess was consistently measured through the years" can be claimed.
Wow. How could this be significant? (Not arguing).
> The existence of a sterile neutrino would revolutionize physics from the smallest to the largest scales. It would finally break the Standard Model of particle physics that has reigned since the 1970s.
"Whenever physicists don't understand something - they invent a new particle"
An apparent consistent failure of conservation laws in a collision experiment could be described as a "particle" if the failure has a quantitative regularity that's consistent with an un-detected particle.
Particles can be proposed to identify a way that a new theory can be tested -- the Higgs and the graviton are in this category. Given a choice, physicists prefer to explore theories that can yield experimental predictions, and particle detection is an area where theories can be tested with decent sensitivity, albeit at some cost.
“All models are wrong. Some models are useful.”