Decades-Long Quest Reveals Details of the Proton’s Inner Antimatter
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
There's no bullshit. There's no more glossing over details than needed. The key finding is explained in as close to a layman's terms as you can get, given it's deep physics, yet with some human elements to it. And both sides of any debate are given a chance to give their side of the story.
Science writing will never please everyone, but this has exactly the level of detail I enjoy.
"Carlo Broggini grew up in the lazy suburbs of..."
Second, eRHIC will generate ion beams as well a proton beams. This is a key distinction as protons and neutrons are modified by being inside a nucleus so their internal quark distributions are modified as well. These differences will shed light on some of the key properties of the strong nuclear force.
Third, the detectors and collider will be designed to probe further down into the low-energy tail of the sea quark distribution than HERA and other previous e-p colliders did. This will include designing the beam and detector to allow for very forward instruments which would measure small deflections due to extremely low-energy particles.
It's like if Oumuamua[1] was thrown at us and some giant gas cloud entity that wanted to see if we had planets by measuring the trajectory anomalies as it came out. Or if meteor showers were to probe atmospheres.
Alright, back to work.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/interste...
[1] Kleenex introduced the facial tissue in 1924
It also mentions "household towels" which doesn't make sense to me, surely they don't mean what I am used to.
In my area of the US, however, "tissue paper" out of context doesn't imply any of those, I don't think, rather it's the stuff used to wrap gifts or maybe to crumple up to pad them in a box. The stuff is also crumpled and put in new shoes, for instance.
It doesn't strike me as that odd to call toilet paper and facial tissues "tissue paper" although I don't think it's common; however calling paper towels or other towels "tissue paper" seems strange.
Also how many different levels of scale there are, from giant structures in space, to our solar system, to our human experience, to cells, atoms, quarks and I wonder if there are more such levels down to the planck scale.
The product of the uncertainty in each is always at least some constant. They can still be point-like without you knowing where they are; and also knowing exactly where they are regardless of if they are point-like or extended means there is no defined momentum rather than it is defined as infinite.
That said: (a) you can’t pick a number from the set of Reals with a continuous uniform distribution, so I guess you can’t ever have perfect knowledge of the location ever even in principle, and (b) I’m self taught so likely only have a half-understanding.
Classical is R^3, quantum is R^3 -> C. (Sort of; this glosses over a lot.) Objects don’t really have a concrete location; they have complex-valued distributions.
Pontryagin duality of position/momentum (which comes from both QM and Relativity, depending on your perspective) rules out the physical existence of point particles. It would require infinite momentum to have zero extent.
Unfreezing new DOFs at high energy densities is the modus operandi of accelerators like the LHC. Everything that happens there can be seen as doing that for different purposes.
Truly awe inspiring on a grand scale. Its no wonder the ancient greeks attributed gravity to Aphrodite‘s magic .. i honestly find it so fitting; its love all the way down!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaQuest_DSV
There are some fun episodes but the show is not very good and has not aged well.
I would expect neither model is "right", and instead each is better at capturing slightly different aspects of the true behavior.
"All" protons we see are the same because the exotic configurations decay. (While protons are not yet known to decay.)
Would antimatter make a good energy storage medium?
There's a certain tension between the idea that something is composed of parts, yet it can't be separated. How is that fundamentally different from composite things which can be separated?
That's a rhetorical question; I just mean there ought to be a more satisfying way of describing the dichotomy.
Perhaps it can be described without math per se but in terms of visualizable fields?
left half band is red rubber
right half is blue
as you stretch the rubber band, it resists more and more
when you pull hard enough, it breaks on the red/blue divide. a new red/blue half spontaneously appears for each.
now you have two rubber bands
My point is, that when you consider that sort of explanation, and let's suppose it vaguely seems to make intuitive sense, then what about the things/particles that don't act like that?
If the explanation of "A" doesn't distinguish between "A" and "not A" then it isn't in fact an explanation.
Antimatter would make a great energy storage medium, if we could create it efficiently and in bulk.
Now where did I leave that dilithium?
https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/49v7ik/requ...
What if baryons are electrostatic black holes? No quark can escape. Any infalling particle would slow down and never cross the event horizon as far as an outside observer could tell. Stuff like that...
They can't be the equivalent of black holes because things can escape from them in nuclear reactions.
What would the predicted diameter be?
Of course. Experimentalists have been shooting electrons and muons and other things inside hadrons since the 1960s (hence the "Decades-Long Quest" in the title of the article). That's how we gained pretty much all of our knowledge of the internal structure of hadrons and how the current theory of QCD was developed.
> What would the predicted diameter be?
A hadron is roughly a femtometer (10^-15 meters) in diameter.
It's the ultimate in energy density, though.
There is already gobsmacking amounts of energy available to us in the atomic nucleus in the strong force, and we’ve been working for ~70 years to extract it (via fusion).