Triple Quarky

I noticed that a number of us are into writing and reading poetry. So below is a little poem I would like to share with all of you. (It's about particles... who would have thought?! ;P)

Enjoy!


Triple Quarky

There are times when one dislikes who they are,

wishing perhaps on a star,

to change their shape or form,

or perhaps from whom they were born.

To some this might seem strange,

to others, only the need to rearrange.

But is this really odd or out of character for matter?

to merely desire for your glass to shatter?

Afterall, flavors change, neutrinos oscillate, quarks morph,

and the large blinding object in the day’s sky, is merely a dwarf.

It’s no wonder why everything is triple quarky.

[(Dedicated to a certain quarky butterfly.)]

Galactic Geometry

Symmetries of all sorts fascinate me. I often contemplate small scale and large scale symmetries, from isospin symmetry of the nucleon, to the eight-fold way in particle physics, to snowflakes, to geometric transformations, to galactic geometry.

Being this is technically suppose to be an astronomy and astrophysics blog, I decided to post about one of the most obvious symmetries of modern cosmology, which lucky for us, occurs in our own galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy as we know it.

"The plane of the Milky Way galaxy is tilted at almost exactly 60 degrees to the ecliptic of plane of our solar system. What is more, every year the Sun crosses the galaxy through the galactic center, and being alive in these times means this happens on midwinter's day." (Martineau, John, "A Little Book of Coincidence" 2002.)

Antimatter

To understand antimatter, Let's quickly revist my previous post where I defined what an antiparticle was. For those of you just joining, I'll quickly outline it again and also add some useful information.

An antiparticle is similar to a particle in that it has the same mass and spin. The difference is opposite charge.
The famous example, the antiparticle of the electron is the antielectron, better known as the positron.

When particles and antiparticles collide, they annihilate, however, they don't just simply vanish. Instead, due to conservation of energy and momentum, they annihilate to create different particles. In the case of the electron and positron, they annihilate to produce two identical gamma ray photons both with an energy of .511 Mev/c^2 speeding off in opposite directions. Which is precisely the mass/energy of the electron/positron. Of course, the lifetime of the gamma ray photons are short lived. The lifetime of the positron is also short lived. This is due to 1) matter dominating the universe and 2) since all things are made of matter, it isn't very difficult or very long before a positron collides with an electron.



Above, is an image I found online outlining fundamental particles and their antiparticles. Of course they skip the gauge bosons. But I can outline them quickly and in a simple way.

Photon: due to its charge, it is its own antiparticle. "A photon is a photon is a photon" famous words of someones... but referenced from whom I heard it said, Professor Claire.

Z: Is also its own antiparticle.

W+: Its antiparticle is the W- boson.

W-: Its antiparticle is the W+ boson.

Gluon: the gluons are the more complicated guys. As it turns out, all gluons carry color flavors or rather, color charge. There are three types of color charges, red, blue and green. Therefore, there are three anticolor charges, anti-red, anti-blue and anti-red. Color charge of gluons involves a more in depth explanation and understanding. The following link, explains it very well and way better than I can.. Theory: Color Charge

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Note: I just wanted to point out an important thought regarding anti-hadron configurations. We know that the proton (which is a hadron and Baryon) is made up of two up quarks and one down quark. The correct way to think about an antiproton would be as follows: two anti-up quarks and one anti-down quark.

(the WRONG way would be to say two down quarks and one up quark. That would actually be a neutron!)

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Now that we know what antiparticles are, Let's talk about antimatter! For starters, did you know that certain radioisotopes are natural positron emitters (specifically, Beta-plus decay)? This means that these radioisotopes are emitting anitparticles during their decays. Interesting enough, recall what I mentioned above regarding the fact that we have only known about antiparticles for approximately 85 years? Well, this indicates that even though the periodic table was practically fully developed and radioactive materials had already been discovered, we had no idea that radioactive decays involved antiparticles.

With that being said and tons of new particles being discovered, it is no wonder why particle physics boomed. I read somewhere, that "The next people to discover a new particle should be fined rather than given award money."

Efforts are currently being made to analyze the properties of antimatter, more specifically antihydrogen (An antiproton and a positron), and to trap/contain it. Current projects such as ATHENA, ALPHA and ATRAP at CERN have pioneered cold antihydrogen, accurate hydrogen spectroscopy, first observed hot antihydrogen atoms and own the record for trapping anti-hydrogen for the longest amount of time, less than 16 minutes the last time I checked, which was just last year. (I may do an additional post on traps and how antiparticles are contained if I have time or if someone would really like to hear about it.)

I sometimes allow myself to envision a periodic table of antielements. A professor of mine told me that was silly. However, the funny thing is, I'm not the first and definitely will not be the last. Charles Janet had this vision long before I did, circa 1929. Before the positron was even observed.

Before I conclude this post, I would like to propose some questions for everyone to think about and perhaps discuss or comment on. :)

1) Why the apparent asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the visible universe?! (Look up Baryogenesis)

2) "Antimatter may exist in relatively large amounts in far-away galaxies due to cosmic inflation in the primordial time of the universe. If antimatter galaxies exist, they are expected to have the same chemistry and absorption/emission spectra as normal-matter galaxies, and their astronomical objects would be observationally identical, making them difficult to distinguish."

How then can we confirm whether or not they do or don't exist?!

3) What are the main techniques in trapping antimatter and more importantly, how can they be improved?!

4) Does antimatter fall up or down via the force of gravity?!

(I had so many questions but now cannot remember them all. Don't worry, when they come to me, I will update this post. Perhaps 5 is more than enough!)

The Standard Model of Particle Physics

Lately, I have been wanting to blog about antimatter. However, before I jump right into the middle of things, let's start from the beginning, shall we? For those of you that have already had the pleasure and/or pain of experiencing my particle rants, bear with me. :) For those of you who have yet to experience my enthusiasm, let's go!!! :)

The majority of us know what matter is, after all, it makes up everything around us. We are even physically made up of it. Protons, neutrons, electrons ... we know of these "particles" that we are made of... we've heard of the periodic table in Chemistry. Looking a bit closer (well not literally right?! I mean can we actually see an electron? Or better yet, has anyone ever observed an electron... go on... think about it?!), we have found that some particles, such as the proton and neutron are in fact made up of smaller particles. Trying to understand how many particles there are, how to classify them, or which are the fundamental particles (i.e. which are the smallest building blocks of matter) can get chaotic very quickly. So let's take a look at the classic image below.



As you can see from the picture, there are three generations of matter. Basically what that means is that the first column existed first, then column 2 came into existence and lastly column three.

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Starting with the Leptons, we see that there are three generations and along with each generation, a neutrino. Leptons are easy to understand. We know of the first generation of Leptons, right? Electrons?! So let's add a little side kick to our electron friend and name it the electron neutrino. Next we have the Muon and its side kick, the Muon neutrino, it's a lepton just as the electron only it is greater in mass and/or energy. Lastly, we have the Tau and its side kick, the Tau neutrino, it's a lepton just as the electron and muon only it is greater in mass and/or energy than both the first and second generations. That wasn't so bad, right?! :)

Moving on to the quarks, we can easily see how fun these guys are. I mean, just read their names... up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. Originally top and bottom were named truth and beauty, but those names didn't stick. We call these the six quark flavors. (Doesn't flavors make you feel like you're in an ice cream parlor... trying to decide on which one you really want on your cone. Luckily with quark flavors, there are only six! You know what that means? If you were in a quark parlor, you could easily have all six... well not quite. You'll understand why soon enough!)
Quarks evolved in three generations along with the leptons. As it turns out, quarks are the particles that make up the particles we are more familiar with, such as the proton and neutron.

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Now before I get to the Gauge Bosons.... I need to explain a couple of important things.

1) Antiparticles : An antiparticle is the same as a particle except it has opposite charge.
For example: The antiparticle of the electron is the positron. It has the same mass and spin, but has a positive charge instead of negative charge. (There are some particles, that are in fact their own antiparticle. This comes about typically for particles with zero charge. For example, the photon. This we will see when we discuss Bosons.)

2) The are three classifications of particles, excluding Bosons. These three categories are the Leptons, Mesons and Hadrons. The easiest way to think of these categories is as follows:

Leptons: Little particles - Electrons, Muons and Taus (and of course their side kicks.)

Mesons: Medium particles - these are quark-antiquark pairs. - Ex: up quark anti-up quark, etc.

Hadrons: Heavy particles - these are particles that are made up of 3 quarks. - Ex: the Proton, which is made up of two up quarks and one down quark.

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Now for the Gauge Bosons:

There are technically six gauge bosons and Bosons are the force carriers.

Photon: Electromagnetic force carrier.

Gluon: The strong force carrier.

Z: A weak force carrier.

W+ and W-: Weak force carriers.

Higgs: According to wikipedia, "the Standard Model's explanation of why some fundamental particles have mass when 'naive' theory says they should be massless, and - linked to this - why the weak force has a much shorter range than the electromagnetic force."

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One thing that I will add, which perhaps you're wondering or will eventually be wondering, is how are the quarks bound together?! The simplest answer is via the gluons. In reality, it's more complicated than my simple answer. However, think of it like this, the gluons are the glue that hold the quarks together. :)

So there you have it, The Standard Model of Particle Physics.


Below, I have included a link of a website sponsored by the Particle Data Group and NSF. This site offers information regarding particles, accelerators, mysteries in physics and then some. It's an awesome site, do take a peek.

The Particle Adventure

Diffraction Limits of Telescopes and Blackholes

Question number 4 from last week's homework (WS 4), really had me thinking. For starters, who doesn't find blackholes interesting?! Don't you?! I ended up realizing, as I'm sure the rest of you did, that building a telescope to resolve the event horizons is a difficult task. Then getting the telescope to be able to resolve both event horizons is another task.

I ended up writing a simulation in Mathematica to demonstrate how large of a diameter the mirror of the telescope would have to be to resolve both event horizons at the same wavelength.

In order to view and mess with the simulation, you will need to download the Wolfram CDF player. You can download it here!

Here is a little preview...

Enjoy!