This is your informal guide to the subatomic ecosystem we’re all immersed in. In this series, we explore the taxa of particle species and how they interact with one another. Our aim is give us all a better foundation for understanding our place in the universe. The guide starts with a host of different particle species. We’ll talk about their masses, charges and interactions with other particles. We’ll talk about how they are created, how they decay, and what other particles they might be made of.
The Reason for Antiparticles.The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 3. Episode 8.https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The eBookThe Field Guide to Particle Physics eBook is now available! If you're looking to support the show, we've got some fun options for you here, or you could buy us a coffee!ReferencesThe definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov. This episode also pays tribute to Richard Feynman's 1986 Memorial Dirac Lecture.Terrell-Penrose rotation can be viewed from a human perspective in at "A Slower Speed of Light" by MIT's GameLab. That demo also includes the relativistic doppler effect. Some other great videos by Ute Kraus and Corvin Zahn at spacetimetravel.org. See in particular their dice demo.The Reason for Antiparticles.Antimatter is uncommon, but it's not exactly rare. Antiparticles - especially those generated by cosmic radiation - are all around us, all the time. But just what is it doing here?Antimatter is just like MatterIn a lot of ways, antimatter behaves just like matter does. Quarks make up protons? Antiquarks make up antiprotons… and antineutrons, too!Antiprotons and antielectrons - that is, positrons - combine to form antihydrogen atoms.The Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus - the ALPHA Experiment at CERN - studies the spectroscopic properties of antihydrogen. That is, it uses photons to give a little extra energy boost to those positrons. As those positrons relax to their ground state, they emit distinct wavelengths of light.Just like regular hydrogen atoms.Photons, you see, are their own antiparticles. They interact with matter and antimatter in precisely the same way.If there were any difference between hydrogen and antihydrogen - any difference in mass, spin or the magnitude of their electric charge - those wavelengths of emitted light would also be different. And the ALPHA experiment would be able to detect those differences.But no such differences have been observed.So again, what exactly is antimatter doing here in our physical reality?Antimatter annihilates MatterThe one thing antimatter does *not* do is hang around.Antimatter annihilates with ordinary matter. Electrons and positrons annihilate to form a pair of gamma rays, a pair of photons.If the universe were balanced between matter and antimatter, we wouldn't be here. Or… perhaps worse… we'd rapidly disintegrate into a bursts of gamma radiation as our particles and those antiparticle partners annihilated.So if antimatter is so uncommon - why is it even here? What is the point, the reason for antimatter? Why does the universe need antimatter?To understand that, we need to talk about time travel.The Light ConeOur reality has four dimensions. Three space and one time. Famously, Einstein's special theory of relativity tell us that these four dimensions are related.That relationship is nature's conspiracy to make sure that nothing travels faster than the speed of light.One way to think about how this works is time travel. Literally traveling through time. When we are still, we are traveling forward, through time. When we spring up to go for a run, we're still traveling through time, but we *rotate* our perceived motion through time into space. This is a four-dimensional sort of rotation. Sometimes this is called a Terrell rotation. There are some stunning visualizations of Terrell rotation linked in the show notes.The amount of Terrell rotation varies without speed. In a sense, we exchange some of our speed in the time direction to travel through space. The faster we go through space, the slower we go through time. There is a limit to this kind of rotation. We cannot rotate our motion so deep into space that we travel backwards in time. The most we can do is cause time to stand almost still, which happens when we travel just shy of the speed of light.Light of course always and only travels at the speed of light, in the absence of matter anyway. And because everything that must travel slower than light - everything that has mass - like protons, electrons, atoms and US - is subject to the ultimate cosmic constraint: the light cone.To visualize this four-dimensional cone, think of a camera flash. It's a sphere of light moving outwards from a point. The tip of the cone is us snapping the photo, and the vertical part of the cone corresponds to the dimension of time.At any moment, our reality can be cut into two regions: inside or outside the light cone. All those points that light can touch - and those that it can't. Inside the light cone represents everything we can possibly hope to effect later in time. Outside the light cone is outside of our agency to do so.The light cone - in other words - represents the boundary of causality.Because we cannot travel faster than the speed of light, any Terrell rotation we experience inside our light cone retains a positive flow of time - however slow.But outside the light cone, that same rotation can cause our perception of time to reverse. Outside our light cone, if we are traveling fast enough, we can perceive time as flowing backwards.It's a fun thought exercise to figure out how we might perceive an event outside our own light cone - I'll leave that one for you to figure out - but here's a hint: “wait and see”.If you're curious, check out our instagram account in the coming days for the answer.Time flowing backwards might seem terrible for cause an effect. It would literally reverse the two! But time flowing backwards outside our light cone - outside our sphere of influence - has no bearing on our physical reality. As long as our causal influence is restricted to inside the light cone, the observable universe makes sense.Now let's tie this back to particle physics. You'd see, the relationship between the world inside and outside the light cone is intimately related to the relationship between matter and antimatter.The Feynman-Stückelberg Interpretation of Negative EnergiesThe celebrated Dirac equation - the mathematics which describes particles likethe electron - suggests that positrons are just electrons with negative energy. But what is negative energy? This interpretation was confusing for quite some time.But energy you see is intimately related to time. As time is to space, energy is to motion through space. Energy, in other words, can be thought of as motion through time.So an antiparticle with negative energy can be thought of as a particle with positive energy moving backwards though time.In his 1986 lecture commemorating Dirac, Feynman - who is credited with formalizing this interpretation - gave a concise, technical and frankly satisfying explanation for this phenomena.It went something like this:Quantum Theory also predicts that particles tend to smear out like a wave. In atoms, electrons smear out to form standing waves, which we call electron orbitals. In modern language, we say that these waves are really probability distributions for a particles position and momentum.Left to their own devices, quantum mechanics tells us that these probability distributions spread out in space.For example, when an alpha particle's smeared probability distribution spreads outside the nucleus, there is a nonzero chance that it will tunnel through, and escape as radiation: alpha radiation.So you might ask. Can the probability distribution of an electron spread outside the light cone?Unfortunately, the answer is yes.And if you've studied quantum mechanics, this is probably no surprise. The path integral formulation requires us to consider every conceivable motion of the electron - including those moving faster than the speed of light.So it might seem that Quantum Mechanics and Einstein's theory of special relativity are fundamentally incompatible. If true, this would be a huge problem. Anything moving faster than the speed of light - even by means of quantum mechanics - could mess with our notion of cause and effect. Causality is central to our ability to perform experiments - to make sense of our physical world.And yet. Quantum Mechanics is compatible with relativity.You see, the smeared probability distribution for the positron can also leak through the light cone.Taken together, fortunately, the probability amplitudes for particle and antiparticles to be outside the light cone cancel each other out exactly. Why exactly? Because matter and matter are identical - at least up to that overall minus sign.It's just that what we call reality - sometimes - occasionally splits into particle / antiparticle pairs - or not - depending on how fast we're moving.In short. The reason for antiparticles is causality. The Alpha Experiment, RevistedThis is a simplification, to be sure. There are plenty of details to discuss about so-called virtual particles, parity and particle-antiparticle annihilation. Perhaps another time.If you're interested in more of the details, a good place to start looking would be Feynman's 1986 Dirac Lecture at Cambridge, linked in the show notes.With any mature scientific theory, there are nuances and details that are exciting to explore. We'll see more soon enough. But for now, let's just say that the ALPHA experiment - that experiment at CERN looking for differences between Hydrogen and AntiHydrogen - has searched for violations in causality - that is, violations to the CPT theorem - and has excluded them at the level of 200 parts per trillion.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.
Update! Best place to find associated references are linked in our substack essay:This is an essay that we originally posted on our substack page:https://pasayteninstitute.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-science-communicationA Bonus Episode for The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 3https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.A History LessonIn the film “Einstein's Big Idea”, French Scientist Antoine Lavoisier is portrayed just as he discovers how to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas, thereby realizing the conservation of mass in chemical reactions.Lavoisier is generally credited with disproving the phlogiston theory of combustion and reframing Chemistry as a quantitive science.This shift from the qualitative is emphasized in a specific scene where Lavoisier meets with an excited young man who is pitching his apparatus for observing heat. Lavoisier assertively dresses down the man for failing to meet the modern, quantitative standards of scientific experiment.This man is later revealed to be a revolutionary, and Lavoisier's final act of the film ends with an escort to the guillotine.While dramatized, the message was clear:Science needs popular support, and clear communication is not enough. We need to do more than educate. We need to build community with inspiration, excitement and respect for Science. We also need to share with folks how Science works1.Respect for Science is a value we share as Scientists. But it's not universal. Whether or not Science is morally entitled to respect is irrelevant. Without constantly striving to earn and refresh that respect from Society, it can be lost.The Siren Call of the OutsiderScience Communication is a rapidly professionalizing field that encompasses a spectrum from dynamic professional speakers to university department media managers to science-minded journalists. From journalists like Natalie Wolchover, to Professors like Tatiana Eurikhamova, there's a lot of great work being done by people I admire.The line between #SciComm and marketing is extremely thin, and unfortunately, the internet's content treadmill incentives their confluence.Journals and university departments alike publish heroic press-releases about recently accepted scientific publications by department staff as if they were breakthrough results. But more often than not, these results are merely slow, incremental progress.How is anyone but a specialist supposed to understand the difference?The SciComm ecosystem, in other words, is full of noise. Especially for the general audience.Cutting through that noise is tough. But content editors have had a tool for this as long as humans have printed newspapers: headlines.Here's a recent one:“No one in physics dares say so, but the race to invent new particles is pointless.In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the particles they are paid to search for exist – they do it because their colleagues are doing it”Sabine Hossenfelder - the Guardian Opinion (26 Sept 2022)As a lead generator, this headline and its subtitle are incredible. Given the current intellectual climate around distrusting experts, it hits all the high points: All these experts have no idea what they're doing, there's some structural conspiracy and they're wasting your money.Taken with the author's antagonistic, “outsider” persona2, it's direct aim at an established field of study. It's a recipe for clicks, likes and angry shares.Unfortunately, the piece willfully and violently mischaracterizes the current state of particle physics. It's so flagrant - and so short - that it's worth a read. A Reading Guide to Hossenfelder's ComplaintHere is a highlighted list of rhetorical and factual errors which both discredit the thesis of Hossenfelder's piece and demonstrates its disservice to the endeavor of Science Communication.Broadly, high energy or “particle” physics is the study of what constitutes matter and energy, as well as the forces that govern their dynamics. Like any good science, it involves the study of both what particles we see as well as how those forces work.Hossenfelder's piece begins with a collection of names of physical models at various stages of generality. As written, it conflates them with concrete models for actual, physical particles. Doing so betrays such a misunderstanding of how Particle Physics works in practice that it was almost certainly an editorial decision.Let's consider some examples.The SfermionThe sfermion is a very broad class of particle, a collective noun akin to saying “cats” or even “mammals”. They are particles associated to fundamental fermions - particles of matter like the electron, muon or up quark - by a general class of models related to the idea of Supersymmetry3. Whence the name s(uper)fermion.The Magnetic MonopoleMagnetic monopoles are another broad class of particle. An electric monopole is a particle like an electron, proton or even an alpha particle. It's something with an electric charge. We have not seen sufficient evidence for the existence of magnetically charged particles4, although we do typically see that electrically charged particles enjoy magnetic diple charges - those with both north and south poles. However, the existence of magnetic monopoles would help us understand why all electric charges seem to exist as discrete multiples of only a single, fundamental charge, which is something we see in nature5 and have no a priori explanation for. Most models of observed particle physics that include magnetic monopoles suggest they should be quite heavy - outside the current reach of collider experiments. If they did exist - and there is no reason to expect that they should not - we'd expect to see more of them on cosmological grounds. The fact that we don't gave rise to the modern theory of inflation, which has enjoyed tremendous observational success6.DyonsDyons are simply magnetic monopoles that also carry an electric charge. They are often used in simplified models of particle physics to understand how the nuts and bolts of the mathematical machinery works7.WIMPsThe WIMP is actually an acronym. It stands for weakly interacting massive particle. That is, a particle with a large mass that interacts exclusively8 with the weak nuclear force. They would be akin to heavy neutrini. Wimpzillas are just an example of kind of WIMP. This class of models has been used to study dark matter, as the observed strength of weak nuclear force appeared to naturally coincide with a parameter needed to explain the production of dark matter particles in the universe9. SkyrmionsFinally, Skyrmions are complicated configurations of the fields that define individual particles that are often used to describe phenomena in the physics of solids. And they do exist. And have been observed.Hossenfelder's argument that these are worthless particles used to describe some statistical anomaly is a classic fallacy of its own, a straw man. These models - or classes of models - study open problems in physics. They do this either directly - as for the study of dark matter, or indirectly - as for the study of how nuts and bolts of gauge theory works.This line of straw man argumentation hinges on a factual error in essays' main thesis:For example, the currently accepted theory of elementary particles – the Standard Model – doesn't require new particles; it works just fine the way it is.Sabine Hossenfelder - the Guardian Opinion (26 Sept 2022)The Standard Model doesn't work “the way it is”. It works pretty well, but there are holes. It doesn't explain the mass of the neutrini. It doesn't explain dark matter10. It doesn't explain the near absence of antimatter in our universe. Relatedly, and perhaps more pragmatically, it fails to explain the missing electric dipole moment of the neutron, as pointed out by Dan Hooper in his response. It also raises more questions about physics of the Higgs boson.To say the standard model works “just fine” is antithetical to the aims of particle physics and Science broadly. We're looking to understand how it works. The work is to improve that understanding.There are other errors in the piece, for example:The positron wasn't proposed by Dirac to solve a problem. If anything, it was a problem with his original work. It wasn't observed until 1932 after he published his 1928 paper combining special relativity with a model for the electron. His problem was an attempt to factor the Klein-Gordon equation.The Schrödinger equation describes the electron “just fine”. It's good enough to still be taught to undergraduate students in physics today. Science can progresses both by looking for better precision models as well as happy accidents. Dirac's pursuit for the former led to the latter. With this historical context in mind, Hossenfelder's thesis would hold that the positron was the grain for Dirac's “blind chicken”.Since we now use “holes” as Dirac original called them in the study of semiconductors or “positrons” more appropriately in medical imaging, perhaps we can dispense with the notion that the act of doing Particle Physics is a waste of time?On FalsificationAll this leads to the main rhetorical failure of the piece:But I believe the biggest contributor to this trend is a misunderstanding of Karl Popper's philosophy of science, which, to make a long story short, demands that a good scientific idea has to be falsifiable. Particle physicists seem to have misconstrued this to mean that any falsifiable idea is also good science.Sabine Hossenfelder - the Guardian Opinion (26 Sept 2022)Hossenfelder fails to offer any insight into what “good science” is. In particular, where is the line between good and bad science? How does “ambulance chasing” and “inventing new particles” cross that line? The entire piece is a rhetorical red herring.Clickbait, in other words. The Trouble with Particle PhysicsParticle Physics is a complicated field of study, with little a priori affect on our daily lives. It only gets press when something big happens - like finding the Higgs boson. The excitement around Weak Scale Supersymmetry and the associated dark matter candidates, followed by the absence of evidence at the LHC naturally raises questions about costs and resource allocation.Weak Scale Supersymmetry was a very good idea that just didn't pan out. Nature is mysterious! This, presumably, is the germ of Hossenfelder's critique - an imbalance of resources and incentives within particle physics itself. This is a serious conversation that the community has already devoted much effort towards. And continues to.In this context, we see the seething, unfounded critiques of the particle physics as wasteful by Hossenfelder jumps the line from thoughtful policy criticism as science communication, deep into the realm of internet marketing. TL;DRParticle Physics is doing okay. Our job as Scientists is not only to do Science, but also to communicate it. To teach it. To show the public not only what Science is capable of, but how evidence-based argumentation works. Without focused effort, we risk public support for Science and its ecosystem of technological advancement.Without that public understanding and support, our budgets - or worse - may soon face the guillotine.
The rest of season three is still under development! We wanted to improve the clarity before publishing. Parity violation just isn't that easy to talk about! In the mean time, here is the second episode in a short bonus series about the state and future contemporary particle physics. I hope you enjoy it!This is an essay that we originally posted on our substack page:https://pasayteninstitute.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-muon-collidersThis is a follow up to our 4 Reasons to Build a New Particle ColliderYou can also get the bumper sticker version here!A Bonus Episode for The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 3https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.
The rest of season three is still under development! We wanted to improve the clarity before publishing. Parity violation just isn't that easy to talk about! In the mean time, here is the second episode in a short bonus series about the state and future contemporary particle physics. I hope you enjoy it!This is an essay that we originally posted on our substack page:https://pasayteninstitute.substack.com/p/we-should-build-a-muon-colliderFour Reasons we should build a new particle collider:1. We still have more science to do!2. Technology transfer to Medicine and Industry3. Institutional memory is valuable4. Even more science comes with it!Share these reasons with someone, especially if they doubt the need for more Scientific funding!You can also get the bumper sticker version here!A Bonus Episode for The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 3https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.
The rest of season three is still under development! We wanted to improve the clarity before publishing. Sphalerons just aren't easy to talk about! In the mean time, here is the first in a short bonus series about the state and future contemporary particle physics. I hope you enjoy it!This is an essay that we originally posted on our substack page:https://pasayteninstitute.substack.com/p/do-we-really-need-new-particle-physicsA Bonus Episode for The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 3https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 3https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Positron ExcessSpace is not a safe place. Matter and energy take on a totally different form than is familiar from our planetary lifestyle. Radiation is everywhere, and with it we find high energy particles flying all over the place. One of the biggest challenges in a voyage to Mars is shielding the travelers from all that radiation. Our magnetosphere and atmosphere do an outstanding job of filtering out the most of the high energy particles flying at us from all directions.Many energetic particles come from the sun. Fast moving protons and electrons that boil off our friendly plasma ball get trapped in the van Allen belts of our earth's magnetic field. Way above the atmosphere, we can see them sometimes as the Aurora.Other energetic particles come to us from inside the Milky Way galaxy. Exploding stars, neutron stars and other monsterous astrophysical objects can shed or accelerate their own high energy particles. Often these particles have more energy than those put off by the sun, but it's the same story: A lot of protons, a few electrons, and also some heavier nuclei: like alpha particles. Much less often, we see cosmic rays made up of even bigger things, like the nuclei of Carbon, Silicon or even Iron!Some particles come from outside our galaxy. These can sometimes have outrageously high velocities, and are observed as miles-wide particle showers by large, ground based detector arrays. They aren't common. One of the biggest of these was observed by the Fly's Eye camera back in 1991. It had over 50 J of energy packed into a single particle - probably a proton. That's about the same kinetic energy as baseball being thrown around… in a single particle.Fast moving high energy particles - the ones flying in from outside our solar system - are typically called Cosmic Rays. A tiny fraction of these Cosmic Rays are actually antimatter. Antiprotons and positrons, specifically. Understanding where all these cosmic rays come from is an important scientific question in its own right, but understanding where the antimatter comes from - and how much of it there is - has been a truly fascinating question. Especially of late.Where does the cosmic antimatter come from?The ratio of matter to antimatter in Cosmic Rays is small, and varies with particle speed. Typical numbers are 1 or 2 antiprotons for every ten thousand protons. The ratio of positrons to electrons is higher, closer to a few parts in a hundred. One thing we haven't seen? Bigger antiparticles. No antideutrons or antialpha particles have been observed - at all - let alone bigger antinuclei. But of course, we see big nuclei in Cosmic Rays all the time.Because Cosmic Rays come from other parts of the galaxy - or even outside of it - these ratios are basically consistent with our typical assumption that all observed antimatter is secondary. It is created - in other words - through collisions or decay of so-called “normal” matter.Really fast Cosmic Rays occasionally interact with other particles in our galaxy: the tiny, sparse bits of gas and dust in the large voids between stars, sometimes called the interstellar medium. Those collisions often generate more particles, and just like in our own atmosphere, antiparticles are part of that collision debris.Just like the proton and the electron, to the best of our knowledge, the antiproton and the positron are stable particles. So unless they annihilate, these particles of antimatter just hang around. The collective effect of all these Cosmic Rays bounding around our galaxy is a very small - but measurable - population of antiprotons and positrons flying at us as secondary cosmic rays.If we were to assume that all antimatter is secondary - that is, if antiprotons and positrons are created only from collisions in the interstellar medium - we can use that assumption to calculate how much of it we expect to see. In these calculations, the number of antiprotons pretty much lines up expectations. While on the high side, the population of antiprotons in our galaxy essentially agrees with what you'd expect from collisions of other cosmic rays in the interstellar medium.While it is possible that antideutrons and antialpha particles can be also created in these collisions, they are rare. The expected number of them is currently far below current experimental sensitivity.Positrons are a different story. What's fascinating astroparticle physicists these days is that the number of positrons observed in Cosmic Rays is noticeably higher than we expect from these calculations. In particular, the number of positrons at higher energies is much bigger than we'd expect if they were only created in collisions, upwards of 10 percent or more!In short, we see too many positrons flying at us as Cosmic Rays and we don't know why!What we do know about Cosmic RaysEarth's atmosphere is much denser than interstellar space, so Cosmic Rays that make it to Earth typically collide dramatically with molecules in our upper atmosphere. With land-based detectors, we can see the resulting showers of particles down on Earth. We can calculate how much energy they had, but we can't exactly say what kind of particle they were.To assess the species of particle that's slamming into the Earth, we need to capture, identify and count them before they strike the atmosphere. We need, in other words, particle detectors on satellites.Older experiments like the Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope and the PAMELA detector were put in orbit around the earth on satellites. The current state of the art, the AMS-02 Cosmic Ray experiment is literally in a box attached to the side of the International Space Station.All these experiments agree: Cosmic Rays follow a somewhat predictable pattern. Most particles come equally from every direction in space, so as a population of particles, they're very likely diffused around the entire galaxy. The number of particles we see depends on their energy. Roughly speaking, the more energy a particle has, less common it is to see. But this trend is also true by particle species. In aggregate, simpler particles are also more common than complex ones. And of course, antimatter is far, far less common than matter.There are a few minor exceptions to these rules, and they have all been explained by various physical phenomena: like the distinction between lower energy cosmic rays from inside our galaxy to higher energy cosmic rays from outside our galaxy. Each of these minor bumps on the otherwise clean plots of counts of cosmic rays is a fascinating story in its own right. But today, we'll focus on one, massive, glaring irregularity:Again, the number of positrons observed as cosmic rays at higher energies is much higher than we'd expect.The Positron “Excess”Check out this plot from a 2019 publication by the AMS-02 Collaboration, Towards Understanding the Origin of Cosmic-Ray Positrons:Fig 4. from the above paper, https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.041102Per the most recent AMS-02 data analysis, the spectrum of positrons in cosmic rays can be cleanly represented with a two-component model. The first component, valid at lower energies, is the usual, expected effect of interstellar media collision debris with higher energy cosmic rays. It peaks at about 5 to 10 GeV with a slightly long tail towards higher energies. The second component, valid at higher energies, appears to be associated with a different and stronger source of positrons, whose peak is closer to a few hundred GeV. This model for an as-yet-unknown source of positrons, is skewed in the other direction, with a longer tail towards lower energies, and a sharp cut-off estimated at about 800 GeV.Now, this two component model is just one interpretation of the data. An agnostic, best fit model. The essential point it captures, is the positrons in Cosmic Rays very likely come from multiple sources. The data associated to the second source term in the model is what we refer to as the “excess” of positrons.As noted in the aforementioned publication, there are few possible explanations for that excess. Pulsars - fast spinning husks of recently desceased stars - may well lose some of their rotational energy to radiation and the production of particle/antiparticle pairs. They could be a source for these positrons (see also this).Another, more intriguing explanation, is that the positrons are created as a byproduct of dark matter/antidark matter annihilation. [1] Dark Matter is a theoretical framework for explaining a vast array of astrophysical phenomena, which are all basically consistent with a new kind of stable or very long lived particle. Such a particle would not interact with light at all, hence the name, Dark Matter.Of course, we don't know if Dark Matter really is made up of particles, and if so, we don't know what those particles would be. They would represent new particle physics, a further extension of the Standard Model. Because many such models of new particle physics include particles that could act like Dark Matter, the positron excess serves as a consistency check or constraint on such models.If the annihilation of a new kind of Dark Matter particle were responsible for the excess of positrons [2], the AMS-02 data already highly constrains its properties. In particular, it has to be heavy, like around a TeV or more, and it has to decay through some intermediate state before producing any of those excess positrons. This scenario is at least qualitatively consistent with the fact that we haven't yet seen any evidence for Dark Matter at the LHC or in direct detectionexperiments [3]. In SummaryAntimatter is out there. It's coming in from outer space. Like the antimuons and positrons that appear in our atmosphere from collisions with these high energy particles, antiprotons and positrons are occasionally formed by tiny collisions all over our galaxy.The number of positrons we see are inconsistent with our understanding of how these secondary Cosmic Rays form. In certain energy ranges, we see far too many positrons. Something is definitely going on. Something we haven't yet accounted for.Something, perhaps... perhaps, like Dark Matter.Footnotes[1] Dr. Rebecca K. Leane, the author of that recent review on these kinds of Dark Matter Indirect Detection results, remarks that pulsars are currently favored to explain the excess. Of course, particle physicists remain excited until its ruled out! See also the following footnote.[2] It's worth pointing out that the as-yet statistically insignificant, slight overabundance of antiprotons could come from Dark Matter annihilation, too! Such antiprotons in cosmic rays also present constraints on Dark Matter annihilation models.[3] The usual disclaimer, with a twist! The DAMA/LIBRA collaboration has been claiming the observation of Dark Matter for years now, although it remains unconfirmed by any other experiment. Convention wisdom remains that Dark Matter has yet to be identified. To bolster that conventional wisdom, a recent, second-party analysis of the DAMA/LIBRA data has suggested their signal may result from a kind of systematic, statistical error.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 3https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.Also check out the links embedded this description. Or also check out those same links at:https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics/antineutrinoThe Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The AntineutrinoThe neutrino is a curious particle. As fundamental as the electron or the muon, but rarely interact with other particles. This makes the study of these neutrini quite challenging. But also quite interesting.Are there antineutrini? Yes, surely. But, a better question is what are antineutrini?Antiparticles with an electric charge are easier to identify. Positrons and electrons have opposite charges and behave oppositely in most respects. Photons and neutral pions do not have any electric charge. They are their own antiparticle partners! But this isn't always the case with neutral particles. As we have antineutrons and two distinct kinds of neutral kaons: the K0 and K0bar which are antiparticles of each other.Neutrini - those smallest of massive matter particles in the Standard Model - are electrically neutral. So it is natural to ask: are they their own antiparticle? Or are there distinct antineutrini? And importantly, how can we tell the difference?The short answer is, we don't know yet. End of story. But the short answer is boring.Neutrini are famously shy and interact only via the weak nuclear force - and gravity - so detecting them so detecting them is no small task.So without further ado, let's go ahead with the long answer.Beta DecayNeutrons decay to protons by emitting an electron. This is usually called beta decay, and is mediated by the W- boson. Other nuclei experience it as well. Detailed studies of beta decay suggest that the neutron should decay into two particles rather than one. That second particle was need to make sure that energy, momentum and spin angular momentum was conserved. As it should be.The neutrino - the small neutral one - was discovered nearly 26 years after their proposal.Now, electric charge is conserved in beta decay. The uncharged neutron decays to a positively charged proton and a negatively charged electron and a neutrino. The neutrino also has no electric charge, but carries away some of the energy and some of the momentum.So far as we can tell, energy, momentum and spin like electric charge, is always conserved. Such conservation laws are useful organizing principles for understanding the laws of particle physics. Some might argue they are foundational.Another thing that seems to be conserved in nature - usually anyway - is the number of leptons in the universe. There are actually quantum effects that can change the number of leptons, but in ordinary decays - like beta decay - they seem to conserve the number of leptons.Neutrini - like electrons, muons and taus - are leptons. Naively you might think that beta decay creates two leptons: a neutrino and an electron. The thing is, the neutron actually emits an electron and an antielectron neutrino. Like electric charge, antineutrinos count as minus one lepton.The math also works in reverse. If a nucleus absorbs an electron - which sometimes happens in certain isotopes of Vanadium, Nickel and Aluminum - it will convert a proton to a neutron, and spit out a regular neutrino. Conserving the number of leptons.Now, before your eyes glaze over, I know. Talking about weird conservation rules like lepton number is tricky, because it seems like a bunch of silly rules the details quickly spiral out of control. Neutrino physics is nothing if not complicated.So let's talk more about some of the reactions.Flavors of AntineutriniEach electrically charged lepton: the electron, the muon and the tau, has it's own flavor of neutrino. There's an electron neutrino. A muon neutrino and a tau neutrino. Each electrically charged antilepton also has its antineutrino partner: antielectron neutrino. anti muon neutrino. Anti tau neutrino.When a muon decays into an electron, it actually emits three particles: the electron, the antielectron neutrino and a regular muon neutrino.Given that there are so many cosmogenic muons around us, muon neutrinos - and anti electron neutrinos - are also fairly ubiquitous here on Earth.And of course you might remember the famous experimental result that neutrinos can change their flavor as they move. So neutrinos flavors can get all mixed up, just like antineutrino flavors can get all mixed up. But do neutrini get mixed up with antineutrini?They would if they were the same particle, wouldn't they? Let's think about it another way. In terms of annihilation. Do Neutrini and Antineutrini annihilate each other?When an electron and positron collide, a pair of photons usually comes out. The antiparticle partners annihilate into pure electromagnetic energy. What do you suppose happens when a neutrino collides with an antineutrino?A neutrino and an antineutrino - assuming it exists - would not annihilate to form photons. They have no electromagnetic charge and therefore no chance. They could potentially exchange a Z-boson, or even a Higgs Boson! Although the likelihood of the latter is proportional to the mass of the neutrini involved - and so very, very small.If a neutrino-antineutrino pair of the same flavor smashed against each other violently enough, a pair of Z-bosons could come out. And.. if the neutrino were its own antiparticle partner, well, then any two neutrini of the same flavor could do this!Such an annihilation of two regular electron neutrini would be strong evidence that the neutrino is its own antiparticle. But what a challenging experiment that would be! Where would you get dedicated, high energy neutrino beams?Instead, physicists are looking for a slightly easier measurement with a clear signature: neutrinoless double beta decay.Rarely, nuclei emit two electrons at time, converting their atomic number by changing two neutrons into two protons simultaneously. Germanium-76 and Xenon-136 are just a few of the many nuclei that undergo double beta decay.If neutrini are their own antiparticle partners, it's possible that those two electrons could come out, and the pair of neutrini would annihilate each other just as the decay happens.If no neutrini are produced, conservation of momentum suggests that the electrons will be emitted in opposite directions, and conservation of energy suggests that their energy should sum exactly to difference in atomic mass of the parent and child nucleus.To date, all double beta decays observed have been consistent with the emission of neutrini. Studies from experiments like EXO, NEMO, GERDA have shown that it takes nuclei over 10,000 times longer to decay without neutrini. But of course if it cannot happen - if the neutrino is NOT its own antiparticle in any capacity - then it never will.But the search is one. The CUORE and KamLand-Zen experiments are still taking data and nEXO is still be planned.Neutrino Masses and the SeesawFinally, we know that neutrini have tiny masses. Super tiny. A million times smaller than the electron, at least.If neutrini are their own antiparticle partners, they have a special kind of mass called the “Majorana” mass. If the antineutrini are distinct particles, then their mass might well be a “Dirac” mass - which is the usual kind mass that leptons pick up in the standard model. This distinction is of course reductive. There is no reason why they couldn't have both a Majorana mass and a Dirac mass.In fact, if they do have both, then there is a very natural explanation for why the neutrino mass is so small compared with all the other fundamental particles.If the Majorana mass is really, really big, say associated to some complicated physics we don't yet understand, and the Dirac mass is “normal” by comparison to other particles, like a few thousand electron volts, the combination of those two masses we experience actually appears as a ratio of the two, rather than the sum. This is the famous seesaw mechanism. Neutrini are the only electrically neutral, elementary fermions known to science. Quarks all have electric charges. Electrons, muons and taus all do too. It is perhaps no surprise that neutrino physics is uniquely complicated. And if there's one thing particle physics enjoys, it's being complicated.©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 3https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The AntineutronLike the antiproton, the antineutron is a composite particle made up of antiquarks. It looks a lot like the neutron, and that's pretty interesting because both of those particles have no electric charge!The antineutron is made from two antidown quarks and an antiup quark. The antineutron's mass is a bit over 939 MeV, and the mass difference ratio between the neutron and the antineutron is essentially consistent with zero.Because it's electrically neutral, it is really hard to measure properties of the antineutron. You can't really use electric or magnetic fields to confine, shape or cool collections of antineutrons in any meaningful way.We don't have a working measurement of the antineutron's magnetic dipole moment. We haven't really studied their decay. Left to its own devices, the neutron decays in about 15 minutes to a proton, and electron and a neutrino. We'd expect the antineutron to decay similarly, but with a positron. But again. It's a serious experimental challenge. We barely have a handle on the antineutron's mass! But there have been experimental antineutron beams and there is still plenty of interesting physics that can be done with them.Antineutron beamsAntiproton and antineutron technologies are linked. The antiproton was discovered in 1955 , and the antineutron was found in 1956. In the 1980s, The Low Energy Antiproton Ring at CERN fired a slow beam of antiprotons at liquid hydrogen to create a secondary beam of anti neutrons.Low energy proton-antiproton collisions proceed by the exchange of a single pion. Because the hydrogen was kept super cold, and the antiprotons had such low energy, the two particles exchanged a single, virtual neutral pion, which afforded a conversion of the proton antiproton pair to a neutron antineutron pair.This secondary beam of neutron/antineutron pairs was aimed at an iron slab for a target. The neutron and antineutron interact with iron differently, but expecting to find both particles simultaneously made the measurement pretty tractable.Again. Antineutrons are hard to work with, so any trick you can find to help is welcome!AntinucleiOf course, there's more.Antineutrons have been created in atomic nuclei. Or antinuclei, if you like. Deuterium - a hydrogen atom with a bonus neutron in the nucleus has a theoretical antimatter cousin, antideuterium. The nucleus of anti deuterium was created in experiments way back in the 60s, although cooling those nuclei down enough to accept an orbiting positron has not yet occurred. But hey, ,antihydrogen was only really successfully studied in 2016!The relativistic heavy ion collider has observed the anti helium-4 nucleus. In other words, there's also an anti alpha particle!All these discoveries point to to the fact that there is very little difference between matter and antimatter, which makes the overall dearth of antimatter in our observed universe even more confusing.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 3https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.AntiprotonsAntiparticles are everywhere. They're just part of life. The electron has its positron partner. Muons and antimuons are both routinely created in the upper atmosphere. They're so familiar that we often just call them mu plus or mu minus. The antiparticle nature of mu plus just isn't that big a deal.If you've been paying attention to our series, you know we've talked about antiparticles quite a bit, at least in passing. Up and down quarks sometimes associate with anti-up and anti-down quarks to form pions. Other mesons like kaons form similar quark-antiquark pairs.It's fun to see composite particles made up from particles and antiparticles. The neutral pion - for example - is a bound state of particle/anti particle partners - uubar & ddbar - not unlike positronium: where an electron and a positron orbit each other like an atom. Of course, all these composite particles are unstable.Arguably what separates antimatter from antiparticles is finding a composite particle that is stable. Or at least really long lived. Something that looks and behaves like ordinary matter. Something like atoms.Enter the antiproton.Just like the proton, the antiproton is a tiny bag of subnuclear goo. Virtual pions and gluons and other quantum effects are all dressed up in the antiproton package around three valance antiquarks. That's two anti-up quarks and one anti-down quark. The antiproton looks virtually identical to the proton - except that it has a negative electric charge.Like the proton, the antiproton has a mass of about 931 MeV. In fact, it's difference from the proton's mass has been measured, and at present it looks like they're the same up to less than one part in a million!In fact, everything they measure from the antiproton seems to to line up exactly with the proton. The magnetic moment - a measure of a little dipole magnetic field generated by the anti proton - still appears to be equal and opposite to that of the proton.AntihydrogenAnd yes, the negatively charge antiproton can pick up a positively charge positron and form an atom. Like hydrogen. You know, Antihydrogen! Antihydrogen has been studied and confirmed to look and behave exactly like hydrogen. The positron energy levels of thes anti atom and the associated electromagnetic spectra are all the same. Even the fancy, hyperfine splitting of those energy levels have been experimentally shown to be identical with ordinary hydrogen, at least up to experimental precision.Antiproton decayBy all observations so far, the proton appears to be a stable particle. If the proton did decay, it would be big news and a boon for folks looking to study physics beyond the standard model.The antiproton - so far as we can tell - is also stable. Which is good - our theory is self consistent - but it does present the question: if they don't decay, then where are all the antiprotons in nature?!Sources of antiprotonsNobody knows why there's so little antimatter in the universe, but there definitely is some.Antiprotons impinge upon the Earth's upper atmosphere all the time. They're secondary cosmic rays that currently appear to be associated with super high energy protons smashing into gas and other material sitting in between the stars in our own galaxy. It's a by-product - in other words - of cosmic ray collisions. We can make them here on Earth too. The ALPHA experiment at CERN has an antiproton source made by smashing protons into iridium. The Tevatron at FermiLab had an antiproton source that used Nickel instead.The Tevatron was an interesting particle accelerator in that - unlike the LHC, which colliders protons together - the Tevatron collided protons against antiprotons, to give it a little extra boost in energy from quark-antiquark annihilation when those two, composite particles collided.The fact that there is so much more matter in the universe than antimatter means that antimatter is simply going to annihilate against any matter that it runs into. But how protons and antiprotons annihilate is a complicated issue.Antiproton annihilationElectrons and positrons annhilate cleanly into a pair of gamma rays. The antiproton and the proton do not cleanly annihilate. There is no easy, super clean signal when they annihilate. They're composite particles. Worse, they're both really messy composite particles.Typically what happens when a proton meets an antiproton is that one of the quarks meets up with one of the antiquarks and interacts from there. All kinds of particles can come out, things like pions, more protons, and other emissions from the subnuclear goo. The details all depend on how quickly those particles are moving when they meet each other.If they're moving slowly, their quantum clouds of subnuclear goo might overlap, and a pion might be exchanged. If they're moving quickly, like they were at the Tevatron, those antiquarks - who carry the highest fraction of the antiproton's momentum - will collide with the quarks in the proton, and all kinds of things can - and have! - come out.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 3https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The PositronThe positron is the antiparticle partner to the electron.Ostensibly, positrons have the same mass as the electron, around 511 keV. They also have the same electric charge - at least up to a minus sign. The positron is of course positively charged.Positrons also carry equal and opposite magnetic dipole moments to the electron: that little magnetic field carried often carried by elementary particles.Like the electron, positrons are stable. They do not decay. But of course, we don't see may of them around. When electrons and positrons collide, they annihilate each other! That is, they convert into a pair of photons, each with 511 keV of energy. Because it is *extremely* rare for photons to interact with each other, this reaction almost never goes in reverse, which explains why positrons don't accumulate here on Earth.As you might be aware, the matter to antimatter ratio of our universe is way out of whack - which is great for us! - but makes it a little hard to study antimatter particles like the positron.Sources of PositronsSome positrons are produced by the decay of cosmogenic muons - or antimuons, more precisely - that are formed when the pi-plus - the positively charged pion decays. Those pions are in turn produced in collisions with cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. Sometimes positrons are produced in nuclear decays, like an antimatter version of beta decay. Fluorine-18 - which has 9 protons and 9 neutrons - is one such unstable nucleus. Oxygen-15 - which has 8 protons and 7 neutrons is another. A more exotic case is Rubidium-82, which forms when a strontium-82 nucleus absorbs an electron, converting one of its 38-protons into a neutron. Rubidium-82 then decays by positron emission, converting another proton to a neutron, resulting in the noble gas Krypton-82.Because the mass of the neutron is higher than that of the proton, positron emission is a form of radioactive beta decay that requires *extra* input energy, which is typically supplied by the remainder of the nucleus. It's a curious concept that we'll come back to in a future episode.In medicineBecause the photons emitted by the annihilation of a positron-electron pair have a very specific energy, scientific instruments can be calibrated to detect them. Positron Emission Topography is an imaging technique that specifically looks for these pairs of 511 keV photons - these gamma rays if you like. By injecting a radioactive substance that decays by positron emission, PET devices back calculate the gamma ray trajectories to build a three-dimensional model of whatever that tracer was injected into. Typically the human body!Fluorine-18, oxygen-15 and rubidium-82 are manufactured by particle accelerator for direct use in medical PET imaging. Sometimes those accelerators are RIGHT INSIDE THE MEDICAL FACILITY. That's right. Particle physics isn't just for lab rats or abstruse aloof theorists. It's crucial for medicine too! You can be a medical doctor AND study particle physics.PositroniumFinally, electrons and positrons can form a bound state - an atom if you like - called positronium. Positronium doesn't last very long - typically it decays by annihilation into an assorted number of gamma rays in a time that's measured in nanoseconds .The precise dynamics of positronium decay is a well studied science used in precision tests of quantum electrodynamics. We'll learn more about positronium later this season!
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.Introducing Season 3 : Antimatter!I hope you enjoyed Season 2, and the bonus episodes on cosmic rays that followed shortly after. This is just a short note to let you know that we're still hard at work on developing Season 3, and the Season 3 will be all about ANTIMATTER.We've mentioned antimatter in brief before, for example, how the positron and the electron can collide, annihilating each other to turn into a pair of photons. In seasons one and two, antimatter was used for taxonomy; it was used to organize the particles we know. This season, we're going to dig much deeper. We'll explore what it means for a particle to have an antiparticle partner.Questions we'll discuss include: Where does antimatter come from, and what's with that name? Why is there so little of it in the universe? Does antimatter always annihilate matter? What does it mean to be your OWN antiparticle partner? Finally, what can we USE it for? We'll finish season 3 with what we DON'T YET know about antimatter. Like just who, exactly, is the antiparticle partner of the neutrino.At the Pasayten Institute, antimatter fills our minds with wonder - and a little bit of terror. By the end of next season, we hope to fills yours with curiosity to explore more.We're excited to share these ideas - and a few stories - with you!
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Primary reference for this piece on the Lunar Surface:https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70034108Dr. Jean-Philippe Combe's professional website at the PSI.The asteroid 4-Vesta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_VestaA video on the basics of sputtering as applied to nanotechnology:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgD6G3B-2WUA note on the creation of Lunar SoilsMicrometeorites - incident space rocks that are less than 1 millimeter in size, and discussed by Dr. Combe below - play a large role in the formation of lunar soils. They play the role grinding and melting rocks and minerals into a dusty material that set the stage for particles from the sun and deep space to impact.Below is Dr Combe's full essay.Interaction of the solar wind with the surface of the MoonPlanetary science contribution to the Paysayten Instituteby Jean-Philippe Combe, PhD, Winthrop, Washington StateSenior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, ArizonaApril 1, 2022The coming narration comes largely from one scientific article entitled “ Sources and physicalprocesses responsible for OH/H2O in the lunar soil as revealed by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3).“by Thomas. B. McCord, Lawrence. A. Taylor, Jean‐Philippe Combe, Georgiana Kramer, Carle M.Pieters, Jessica M. Sunshine, and Roger N. Clark published in 2011 in the JOURNAL OF GEOPHYS ICAL RESEARCH PLANETS, VOL. 116.The Solar WindThe Solar Wind was postulated in the mid-19th century, as a flow of particles and energy (photons) traveling away from the Sun into the Solar System. The observations that led scientists to this theory were aurorae in the upper Earth's atmosphere terrestrial magnetic storms their correlations with solar flares and comet's tails always pointing away from the Sun . The solar wind was first observed directly by the Soviet satellite Luna 1 in 1959 and verified by measurements from Luna 2, Luna 3 and Venera 1, and then it was observed by a U.S. spacecraft, Mariner 2, in 1962.The solar wind is composed mostly of protons and electrons, with about 4% helium and smaller amounts of heavier element ions. The flux at the Earth is about four hundred thousand particles per square centimeter and per second, with average energy of around half of a kilo-electronvolt per atomic mass unit, and a flux energy half width between 300 and 1500 keV as measured in 2009 by the Indian lunar orbiter Chandrayaan‐1. For this energy range, protons (H+) have a penetration depth in the surface grains of 5 to 10 nm. The solar wind plasma is almost completely absorbed by the Moon's illuminated surface. However, up to 20% of the impinging solar wind protons are reflected from the lunar surface back to space as neutral hydrogen atoms.The solar wind impacts the lunar surface, and the resulting i nteraction depends largely on the nature of the lunar soil exposed to space at the molecular level. Most known minerals of the solar system are made of molecules that contain large amounts of oxygen, mostly in oxides. The lunar surface has two major types of terrains that can be distinguished with the naked eye: the bright ones are called the highlands, and the dark ones are called by the latin word mare, which means seas, although they are not made of water, but are instead made of volcanic rocks, with various types of minerals rich in iron oxides and magnesium oxides. The lunar soil surface consists in a layer of crushed rock, minerals, and glass called “regolith”.On the Moon, regolith formation results from combination of all the physical and chemical factors that occur on airless bodies, and that is called space weathering . This is unlike the processes that occur on Earth, and that are largely driven by tectonic activity and erosion due to the water cycle and atmospheric circulation. On the Moon, the agents of space weathering include a wide range of types and sizes of impactors, such as meteorites, micrometeorites (
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Particle Data Group's write up on cosmic rays. See Figure 29.8 for a representation of the "ankle" feature in the spectrum.https://pdg.lbl.gov/2019/reviews/rpp2019-rev-cosmic-rays.pdfAnother representation of the power laws can be found in Professor Peter Gorham's Coursework on Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~gorham/UHECR.htmlNatalie Wolchover has written two great articles in Quanta on Cosmic Rays, both which talk about what might accelerate these particles.The Particle That Broke a Cosmic Speed Limit and Cosmic Map of Ultrahigh-Energy Particles Points to Long-Hidden TreasuresColussi & HoffmannIn situ photolysis of deep ice core contaminants by Çerenkov radiation of cosmic originGephysical Research Letters: https://doi.org/10.1029/2002GL016112Guzmán, Colussi & HoffmannPhotolysis of pyruvic acid in ice: Possible relevance to CO and CO2 ice core record anomaliesAtmospheres: https://doi.org/10.1029/2006JD007886A quick primer on Cherenkov Radiation: https://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/Cherenkov_Effect.htmTheme music "Sneaking Up on You" by the New Fools, licensed by Epidemic Sound.Cosmic RaysPart 4 - Paleoclimatology and MuonsOur atmosphere is one giant filter for cosmic rays. The sparse molecules near the top of our atmosphere begin the process of catching the energy of those energetic particles from space and transferring it into heat or muons. These cosmogenic muons that typically make it all the way down to the surface.Near the surface, the atmosphere is a lot thicker, but it's still just a collection of ballistic molecules bashing into each other at 1000 miles per hour. Some of those molecules hit us, and some hit the ground. We perceive these molecular impacts as air pressure. By contrast, cosmogenic muons are moving through this mess at over 600 million miles per hour. To those muons, the surface of the Earth is barely noticeable. They fly through a lot of things: hundreds of meters of rock, oceans, plants and animals before colliding or decaying. By contrast, those particles of atmospheric gas typically reflect off the surface of the Earth. Rocks just aren't that permeable to most gas. As we explained in the ALPHA particle miniseries, helium gas generated from radioactive decay deep within the earth collects underground, trapped by rocks.One thing gas can permeate is surface water.Quite a bit of our atmospheric gases get dissolved into the ocean. Oxygen in the air allows the fish to breathe too, once dissolved into the water so it can be picked up by their gills. Increased carbon dioxide levels also imply more CO2 gets put under water. When the water on Earth's surface freezes, as it might do near the polar ice caps, it traps some of that dissolved gas with it. This has been happening for millions of years, and until somewhat recently at least, that ice has been compounding. New ice forms above, pushing old ice down. This has resulted in a LOT of ice.In Antarctica there are areas where the ice is over four kilometers deep! That's miles of ice! Greenland also carries massive glaciers, two to three kilometers deep, built up in same fashion.The gases trapped in that glacial ice is a frozen relic of an older atmosphere. The deeper the ice, the older the dissolved gases. As the mixture of molecules in our atmosphere changes over time, it sets down a record in the glacial ice. The deepest ice, millions of years old, can tell us what the atmosphere was like millions of years ago.Extracting that ice is quite the scientific adventure!This all easy to say in theory - but the practice of Science requires a lot of gory, technical detail. Different measurements from different samples of ice at different depths from different parts of the world need to be calibrated. Ice can form at different rates in different places under different conditions.But, at least averaged over a given year or decade or so, the atmosphere should be well mixed. Huge weather patterns around the world mix the air, ensuring should be about the same. And so the Scientific logic goes like this:Assuming older ice is usually below the younger ice and the atmosphere is well mixed, then given any two ice sheets on earth, there should be a way compare them. The concentrations of different gases dissolved at different times should sequentially be the same. Like multi-colored stripes on a pole. The stripes may be different sizes, but they should be in the same order. If we can find the same sequences in gas concentrations across different ice sheets then we can start to put together a history of the Earth's atmosphere.Near the turn of the 21st century, geophysicists were working on exactly this problem. They were trying to calibrate the gas concentrations trapped in ancient ice samples by comparing ice from Antarctica with Greenland. And things just weren't adding up. The sequences didn't align. The gas concentrations were just too different. There was some kind of missing variable in the data.As it turned out, that variable involved cosmogenic muons.The Speed of Sound and LightTo understand how muons resolved this Paleoclimatology puzzle, we need to go back to the source. The source of cosmic rays.In episode two of this series we talked about Fermi Acceleration - the process by which electrically charged particles like protons get accelerated to outrageous velocities by SHOCKWAVES in astrophysical plasmas.And shockwaves occur in glacial ice too.To understand shockwaves, let's think about sound waves.Sound usually travels in the atmosphere like a wave. A wave of air pressure. Those atmospheric particles slam against each other in an organized and oscillating way, spreading out away from source.The speed of those waves depends on the amount and types of molecules present, as well as the overall temperature of the atmospheric gas. The sound waves we experience travel at around 343 meters per second, which is about 767 miles per hour.Here's the thing, humans routinely fly supersonic jets that travel faster than that.Supersonic jets - like fighter jets - travel faster than the speed of sound. They travel faster than noise they make. You can't hear them coming until they're already past you. And when you do finally hear them, it's a tremendous noise.It's a shockwave, actually, that you hear. The particles of air are being disturbed faster than speed of sound. In some sense, the sound waves that are produced all kind of pile up on each other, forming the shock front or wall of pressure that some folks call a sonic boom.It's a wall of energy collected by atmospheric particles moving far from equilibrium. This wall is similar to those plasma shockwaves that accelerated the cosmic rays deep in outer space.The important point is that the shockwave was generated by something moving faster than normal waves could. The jet was moving faster than speed of sound.As we'll now see, another kind of shockwave - one driven by cosmogenic muons - is responsible for disrupting the gases dissolved in that ancient ice.Quasi Particles of LightSo fighter jets move faster than the noise they make. That's a nice trick to try to sneak up on folks, but we have radar. Radar works by using radio waves - electromagnetic or light waves with really long wavelengths - and reflecting it off of objects. Unless the fighter jet is moving faster than the speed of light, we can still see it coming.But this whole idea presents a fun riddle. Question: When does the speed of light not equal the speed of light?Answer: When it is SLOWER than the speed of light.Wait. What?!Question: When is the speed of light SLOWER than the speed of light?Answer: When light moves through water. Or glass. Or. You guessed it. Ice.Wait. What?!Glass, like water, reflects and refracts light. You can typically tell when there's water in a glass, or when you're looking through a window. The light coming through them behaves in a funny way. Things just look different. A straw inside your glass of water usually looks disconnected from the part of it that is outside.We usually say that water “bends” light. In physics class we say it refracts it. And this happens because light SLOWS DOWN A LOT when its inside water. Or glass. Or Ice. By a lot I mean like 30 percent.Microscopically, at the level of photons, of course that notion is silly. The speed of light is a constant. It's not LIGHT that's moving through the water, it's not a pure collection of photons per say. It's something else, something that connects with light, and it is light that comes out the other side.If that sounds a little wild, don't panic. It has a very simple physical analogy.Imagine being inside your home when a supersonic jet flies by. The shockwave of that sonic boom slams into your walls, shaking the windows and rattling your doors. Did the sound you hear come from molecules in the air? Sure. But the air inside your house. The molecules from the sonic boom slammed into your walls and windows, which in turn shook themselves. They vibrated in place. They vibrated in such a way that it shook the air molecules in your room, and the sound made it to your ears.Inside or outside, the sonic boom sounded basically the same. A bit muffled sure, but otherwise the same. Those sound waves from the air outside where transferred to the air inside through the physical materials of your house.Inside that glass of water, the electromagnetic energy is still moving. It's just tangled up now with all the electromagnetic fields of all the molecules moving around inside the fluid. The resulting excitations - the slower light waves if you like - aren't really made up of photons, they're collective excitations of an electromagnetic disturbance passing through. But once out the other side, they spit out photons again. The air of course also has an index of refraction so this is something of a simplification, but hopefully the point is clear. It's not pure photons that are traveling through the water, the glass or the ice. It's something else. And that something else - those quasiparticles - don't quite move as fast as light. They move a lot slower. 30 percent slower.Cherenkov RadiationCosmogenic muons travel at 99.4% of the speed of light. But light - or the quasiparticles that appear as light anyway - moves 30% slower in water or ice.So in water you cannot see those cosmogenic muons coming. Effectively, they're moving faster than the speed of light. And that's trouble because they carry an electric charge.As you might recall from our earliest episodes, electrically charged particles transfer energy with each other by exchanging photons. Therefore, cosmogenic muons moving through an electromagnetically dense medium like glacial ice are creating distortions in that electromagnetic field faster than those distortions can propagate as waves.In short, cosmogenic muons create electromagnetic shockwaves in water, and glass and ice. Just like with the fighter jets whose sound waves all piled up into a sonic boom, the cosmogenic muons create electromagnetic disturbances in the ice that pile up to create a shockwave of light. Or you know, quasi-particle light inside the ice. Or water.Traditionally, those electromagnetic shockwaves are called CHERENKOV RADIATION.Cherenkov radiation is famous for the eerie blue glow it gives to the water inside of radioactive cooling ponds near nuclear reactors. It appears blue but the shockwaves are mostly in the ultraviolet or UV spectrum. UV photons - or their associated quasi particles - have a bit higher energy than visible light.And if there's one thing we know about ultraviolet light, it's powerful enough to burn our eyes and skin. That's because it's powerful enough to break down chemical bonds between organic molecules.Given that, can you guess what the different is between Greenland Ice and Antarctic Ice?The PaperOrganic Molecules. Frozen plant matter. Greenland's got it. Antarctica doesn't. Surrounded by water and much closer to life as we know it, Greenland ice has much more contaminants that the center of antactiac, which though covered in ice, is effectively a desert.In a 2003 paper published in Geophysics Research Letters, entitled “*In situ photolysis of deep ice core contaminants by Çerenkov radiation of cosmic origin*, the authors Augstin Colussi and Michael Hoffmann argued that an unexplained excess of carbon monoixde gas trapped was consistent with the disintegration of the tiny bits of plant matter present in the Greenland ice by Cherenkov radiation induced by the flux cosmic rays.Remember, that's over a hundred cosmic rays per square meter per second!In 2007, those authors, together with Marcelo Guzman, now at university of Kentucky, published a follow on study describing concrete chemical mechanisms that could generate carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide from cosmic rays.While protected from the sun's natural ultraviolet rays by layers upon layers of ice, atmospheric gases from over a 1000 years go are still exposed to the penetrating flux of muons from cosmic rays. And the electromagnetic shockwave of those ridiculously fast muons - their Cherenkov radiation - constantly exposes organic matter to tiny bits of ultraviolet radiation. Just enough, as it turns out, to rip a few carbon atoms off of some big, frozen organic molecules to mix with the otherwise trapped, historical atmospheric gas.Like adventure, elementary particles are everywhere, my friends. Go seek them out.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Particle Data Group's write up on cosmic rays. See Figure 29.8 for a representation of the "ankle" feature in the spectrum.https://pdg.lbl.gov/2019/reviews/rpp2019-rev-cosmic-rays.pdfAnother representation of the power laws can be found in Professor Peter Gorham's Coursework on Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~gorham/UHECR.htmlNatalie Wolchover has written two great articles in Quanta on Cosmic Rays, both which talk about what might accelerate these particles.The Particle That Broke a Cosmic Speed Limit and Cosmic Map of Ultrahigh-Energy Particles Points to Long-Hidden TreasuresMIT's GameLab has a fun example of how Special Relativity works. See also Gamow's popular science book on Special Relativity. CERN's DIY Cloud Chamber DesignCloud Chamber without Dry Ice (see also references within)Other References:Measurement of muon flux as a function of elevationICRP Paper on Aviation and RadiationRadiation Exposure During Commercial Airline FlightsRadiation from Air Travel as per the CDCCalculate Your Radiation Dose (EPA) Cosmic RaysPart 3 - Cosmogenic Muons and Special RelativityMuons - those heavy, unstable cousins of the electron - are all around us. All the time.On average, every square centimeter of Earth sees a muon about once a minute. While that might not seem like a lot, if you consider your personal space. Say, about square meter around you - you know, 10 square feet . Over 160 muons pass through your personal space per second! Per second!Those muons coming form the upper atmosphere. They are the debris left over from the constant bombardment Earth experiences from high energy cosmic rays.If only there was a way to see them.Do you remember when I said that a particle physicist will look for particles WHEREVER they can find them? Well, before weather balloons, before particle colliders, there were cloud chambers.Cloud chambers are boxes full of super saturated vapor or some kind. Any little disturbance will cause that vapor to condense, as clouds do up in the sky.High energy particles blasting through a cloud chamber leave tracks. Little clouds form around the path of the particle, just like the contrails of a jet flying through the sky.The muon and the positron were both discovered this way!Cloud chambers are fun because you can build them yourself at home! The main thing you need is a sustained temperature gradient and tiny bit of very pure isopropol alcohol.We'll link to two great examples of DIY cloud chamber designs in the show notes.Building a cloud chamber at home is a great way to come face to face with the fact muons - the debris from cosmic rays - are passing through us all the time.The Atmosphere as a Muon FilterThe magnetic field generated by the Earth's core protects us from many incident particles from space. Especially all that plasma in the solar wind.But those high energy cosmic rays blast straight through the magnetic field. It's just not strong enough to contain them.Our upper atmosphere is our next layer of defense. Cosmic rays collide with its molecules tens of miles above the Earth, creating a shower of debris that itself can be miles across. In some sense, the atmosphere serves as a filter, converting all those particles like protons and pions into muons. Muons comprise the bulk of what we see down here at the surface. Muons are unstable particles. They decay to electrons after about 2.2 microseconds. This means that while many muons make to the ground, not all of them do. The higher you are above sea level, the more muons you're likely to see.At 10,000 ft above sea level, this number can triple! Given that commercial airline flights typically occur above 40,000 ft, it's important to realize that flying exposes you to more Cosmogenic Muons.Fortunately for you frequent flyers, the extra does radiation exposure is still a very small amount of radiation exposure! The International Commission on Radiological Protection has well established professional limits to protect even commercial flight crews from exposure to all those cosmogenic muons.Long Lived MuonsDespite the atmospheric filter, those Cosmogenic Muons are still traveling really, really fast. Like 99.9 percent of the speed of light fast. Muons moving that fast don't behave like you'd expect. For one thing, they take far longer than they should to decay.How do we know that?As you might recall from their eponymous episode, muons only live for about 2.2 microseconds. That's 2.2 millonths of a second. Even traveling near the speed of light, that's simply not enough time to get from the upper atmosphere to anywhere near the surface of the Earth. That's a bit over 9 miles - or 15 kilometers. It takes light about 50 microseconds to travel that far.Muons that make it to Earth, then, live over 22 times as long as they should.Why that happens - what causes the muons to live so long - requires a small digression on the theory of relativity. On Special RelativityAs they say, Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Which is true, at least, in outer space and to some extent in the air around us. You see, it's not so much that LIGHT is the fastest thing around. It's that the universe itself has a maximum possible speed - a speed limit, if you like - which is just shy of 300 million meters per second.When left to its own devices, light - or any particle with zero mass - travels at that speed.That universal speed limit is just a fact of life, but we don't notice is much because a typical human moves at about 1 meter per second. Not 300 million meters per second.But having a speed limit like the speed of light leads to some pretty strange paradoxes.For example: you cannot race a photon. Photons, you might recall, are particles of light.If you ran towards a photon, the photon sill still move away from you at the speed of light.If you drove towards the photon at 100 miles and hour, the photon will still move away from you at the speed of light.If you jumped into a supersonic fighter just and chased a photon, the photon will still move away from you at the speed of light.Even if you built and launched in a rocket ship so fast you were traveling at 200 million meters per second - you know, 67% of the speed of light - and chased that photon, the photon will still move away from you at the speed of light.At least in the vacuum of space, light always moves at the speed of light. No matter how fast you are going. Frustrating, huh? Maddening even. But that's how the universe enforces its speed limit. No matter how hard you try, you can never catch up.But how could this be? What weirdness could explain this paradox?Well speeds don't really add like normal numbers do. This is Einstein's famous theory of Special Relativity. There's re some technical details and nuances of course, but essentially, relativity says that light always moves at the speed of light, relative to you.The implication is that EVERYONE, ANYONE sees light moving at the same speed, no matter how fast they're moving.That same universal speed limit, just shy of 300 million meters per second.The way the universe affords this is by exchanging your perception of time for a perception of distance.The faster you go, the LONGER the distance you have to travel. Your perception of one meter is LONGER than someone going slower than you. That's why is so hard to get up to light speed. The faster you go, the further you have to go to catch up. Of course, to account for this cheat, the universe also shortens your sense of time. So yeah you have to go further, but you don't really notice that because time has slowed down for you. But the net result is even “doubling your speed” only really inches you closer to the speed of light.In a VERY real sense, motion trades TIME for SPACE. At least that's how the mathematics of special relativity work out. In some sense, trading time for space is literally what it means to be in motion.If that's too heavy to take in, don't worry about it. If it excites you, AWESOME. I'll link to some further reading on special relativity in the show notes. But in either case, all you need to know at this point is that those cosmogenic muons, those particles screaming in at over 99% of the speed of light, have traded a LOT of their sense of time for space. So their internal clocks ticks much, much, much slower. Well over twenty times slower! Which is why they take so long to decay.In other words, the cosmogenic muons all around us near the surface of the earth - the things you can detect with your own cloud chamber at home - are a testament to the peculiarity of Einstein's theory of special relativity.ConclusionMuons, borne of debris from cosmic rays collisions in the upper atmosphere, travel at outrageous speeds to surround us here on the surface of the Earth. They travel so fast that Einstein's theory of special relativity directly manifests itself in the very existence of those muons.Other particles created in those cosmic rays collisions - like pions or lambda baryons - are also moving at outrageous speeds, but since they contain quarks, they communicate via all of nature's forces. They are much more susceptible to not only decay but collisions with other particles. Far more susceptible than the muons are.Even the humble electron, when traveling at relativistic speeds, will quickly lose much of its energy via the brehmstrahlung radiation, which depends inversely on its small mass. Muons, being heavy, don't have this problem. So this is what we mean when we say the atmosphere behaves like an energy filter, catching all that cosmic ray collision energy, all except for those muons. They're fast, heavy and don't interact as frequently.But they do eventually interact. With the molecules in our body. In the rocks. Or even, in the snow and ice the covers the high mountain tops and polar regions of our Earth. In our concluding episode in this mini-series, we'll explore how cosmogenic muons have helped scientists understand the history of Earth's atmosphere and the associated implications for its climate.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Particle Data Group's write up on cosmic rays. See Figure 29.8 for a representation of the "ankle" feature in the spectrum.https://pdg.lbl.gov/2019/reviews/rpp2019-rev-cosmic-rays.pdfAnother representation of the power laws can be found in Professor Peter Gorham's Coursework on Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~gorham/UHECR.htmlNatalie Wolchover has written two great articles in Quanta on Cosmic Rays, both which talk about what might accelerate these particles.The Particle That Broke a Cosmic Speed Limit and Cosmic Map of Ultrahigh-Energy Particles Points to Long-Hidden TreasuresCosmic RaysPart 2 - Plasma PhysicsWhat might you say is the most insightful law in theoretical physics? E = mc2? The general theory of relativity? The quantum nature of the atom? The debates could rage for days. Looking back on my own education, I'd isolate two really important ones.The first is Newton's FIRST LAW of motion:A body at rest will stay at rest or a body moving in a straight line with a constant speed will not change in its motion unless acted upon by a force.The second is probably Dalton's Law of Multiple Proportions, otherwise interpreted as the modern theory of atoms. You know, that everything in nature is made of up individual molecules and those molecules are made up of atoms.These ideas run counter to much of our direct, daily experience. At least that kind of experience we've had in common with our ancestors for thousands of years. So please don't ask me to pick between the two. Both Newton and Dalton's laws are crucial.Putting those ideas together - which involves a lot of mathematical work - physicists arrived at the modern, kinetic theory of gases.There are LOTS of details and lots of implications, but one way to understand it goes like this:Gases - like the air we breathe - is made up of molecules and those molecules move at different speeds. Their average speed tells us the temperature. The higher the temperature, the higher the average speed. But also - and importantly - the higher the temperature the wider the spread on molecular velocities.In other words, all around you there are gazillions of tiny molecules. At room temperature, they're moving at 1000 miles per hour, on average. Of course, some are moving really very slowly, and some are moving quite fast. A tiny fraction of those molecules are moving, really, really quickly, more than twice as fast as average. But we can't see any of it because they're just too small.PlasmasWhen gases get really hot, the individual atoms inside the gas begin to break down. Their collisions have too much energy. The impacts are too powerful. The electrons and nuclei split apart and form separate components of the gas. Perhaps not surprisingly, this often - but not always - coincides with a very low density of atoms.When a gas has its charged particles ripped apart, we call that gas a plasma. Plasma's are kind of a BIG DEAL in astrophysics.If you've stood around a bonfire, you've seen a plasma. Those tongues of fire are little pockets of air whose atoms have been ripped apart by the intense heat. The intense speeds of electrically charged particles zipping past each other is what causes those tongues of fire to give off electromagnetic radiation - otherwise known as light.We discussed another sort of plasma in our last mini-series on the ALPHA particle, where we discussed the solar wind and the Earth's magnetosphere. Of course, the outer bits of the sun itself are in a plasma, hence all the glowing we see every day. And that giant plasma ball we call our sun spits a constant stream of charged particles our way - the solar wind. The magnetic field generated by our Earth's spinning core captures much of those charged particles well before they hit the Earth's atmosphere. Thereby protecting both it and us.Those particles are confined so the so-called Van Allen belts which hold the plasma - a very low density plasma compared to what you'd see in a bonfire - thousands of miles above the Earth's surface.Magnetic fields contain that solar wind by bending the trajectories of the individual particles - it curves their motion. That's just what magnetic fields do. The strength of the magnetic field means that those particles can - at best - move in circles. The faster the particle, the bigger the circle. Approximately anyway. Like any gas of particles, the van Allen belt plasma has particles moving at very low speeds and very high speeds. Very small circles and very large circles. The average speed - in part - determines the approximate size of those van Allen radiation belts.Particles moving stupidly fast through a magnetic field - like cosmic rays from space - will also bend, but not enough to get trapped. Instead they fly through the magnetosphere and into the upper atmosphere. Breaking apart by spreading their energy around, leaving us to content with that debris of particles.Plasmas in SpaceYou might wonder where those high energy particles from space - those cosmic rays - come from.Well, there's a lot of stars in space and subsequently a lot of plasmas. Stellar winds blow off particles all the time. But that's not really enough energy to generate cosmic rays. But sometimes, when stars explode as supernovae, even more charged particles get ejected into space.Those astrophysical gases - plasmas - often give us beautiful photographs to look at here on Earth. But don't be fooled. The density of those gorgeous gas clouds - even in star forming reasons like the Horsehead Nebula - aren't really that visible to the naked eye. Even if you were right up on it, you'd probably have to leave the camera shutter open for a bit to capture all that light.That is to say, that astrophysical plasmas are pretty sparse. By comparison our atmosphere feels like a thick, pea soup. The particles inside those astrophysical plasmas don't really smash into each other like they do down here on Earth. Rather, the particles interact via the longer range, electromagnetic force.Astrophysicts will sometimes call them Colisionless plasmas to emphasize that fact. The gas behaves less like a game of billiards and more like… traffic… or a flock of birds.Fermi AccelerationIn a diffuse, astrophysical plasma there are really three components to worry about. The electrons with negative charge, the ions with positive charge and the magnetic field itself.The importance of the magnetic field can be felt even here in our solar system. Like the Earth, the sun has a magnetic field. A bit one. Unlike the Earth, the sun is constantly producing a large stream of energetic particles, so things are a little… hectic. Every once in a while, the sun's magnetic field gets so twisted up that a little bit pinches off. That's right. The magnetic field pinches off. It heads outward into space. Sometimes towards us. And a large chunk of the sun's outer plasma sometimes goes with it.These are called coronal mass ejections, and they're a big deal. VERY out of equilibrium, they say. Like a tsunami of plasma, a coronal mass ejection can wreck havoc on our satellites and other electronics.On earth, these kinds of events are experienced as a shockwave in the solar wind. And - so far as we can tell anyway - shockwaves, even bigger shockwaves, like you'd find in a supernovae - are the things responsible for accelerating cosmic rays out of astrophysical plasmas.Sources for Magnetic ShockwavesSo what causes these shockwaves to pass through interstellar clouds of electrically charged particles? Well supernovae for sure. Those exploding stars can be brighter than entire galaxies, so it's probably no surprise they're sending out a lot of sudden shocks during their expansion.There are a few other candidates.Neutron stars - city size nuclei left over from one of those supernovae - are really extreme objects. They're just on the cusp of becoming black holes, and the only thing keeping them from collapsing is the strong nuclear force: you know, gluons and pions and that kind of subnuclear goo.So they're very dense. So dense that the force of gravity on their surface is a couple of hundred billion times stronger than on earth. The gravity is so strong that we would be immediately crushed into thin layer of nothing but neutrons. Pretty extreme.Just like neutrons themselves have a tiny magnetic field, a neutron star - composed of a gazillion such neutrons - can have a really big magnetic field. A massive one, as it turns out, that spins as the neutron star does, sweeping our a huge wave of electromagnetic energy. That wild, sweeping motion together with those ginormous magnetic fields surely has a massive impact on any nearby plasmas. Fermi AccelerationShockwaves accelerate particles in a plasma into cosmic rays, but not all in one go. It's not like a baseball bat. It's more convoluted than that.The moral of the story is that some particles pass through the shockwave, back and forth, picking up an an enormous amount of energy as they go. That's the standard explanation - filed under technical phrases like diffuse shock acceleration or a first order Fermi acceleration.It's a funny thing to think about. Initiatively, its feels like a surfer passing through a wave, going faster each time. Which makes NO SENSE. Of course, that picture is wrong. The thing to keep in mind is that the gas of charged particles - the plasma - is VERY far from the normal, equilibrium thermodynamics we experience down here on Earth. The shockwave is by definition moving faster than the speed of sound in a gas. A shockwave will also very likely be spread out broadly with multiple fronts. Some a little ahead, some a little behind. This texture in the electromagnetic field can give electrically charged particles of the plasma a lot of shock fronts to bounce off of, picking up energy each time. Eventually they can get boosted to such a high energy that they shoot off into space - and eventually - towards us.Next TimeWhen those high energy cosmic rays smash through our magnetosphere and collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere. A cascade of particle debris is formed. But almost all of it decays before it hits the Earth.Indeed, down here, on Earth, the vast majority of those debris particles that we can see are muons.Those muons are moving really fast. Very close to the speed of light. Which makes sense given the outrageous energy the original cosmic ray had. But muons are something a curiosity. We don't normally see muons hanging around in other contexts, like chemistry. That' because they only live for an average of 2.2. microseconds. While extremely long lived by particle standards, the muon's life really isn't that long.Those muons are born way up at altitudes of nearly 30 miles above sea level, which is good because that's far above where human normally live - or even where we fly. If we were out there, being bombarded by cosmic ray and pions and who knows what else, we would probably get TOTALLY FRIED. But this also presents a puzzle. LIGHT can only travel about half a mile or so in 2.2 microseconds. So how it these muons can travel well over 10 times that distance without decaying?
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Particle Data Group's write up on cosmic rays. See Figure 29.8 for a representation of the "ankle" feature in the spectrum.https://pdg.lbl.gov/2019/reviews/rpp2019-rev-cosmic-rays.pdfAnother representation of the power laws can be found in Professor Peter Gorham's Coursework on Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~gorham/UHECR.htmlCosmic RaysPart 1 - Particles from SpaceWell before the gigantic particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN or the Tevatron at Fermilab, particle physics was studied with balloons.Well. It still is. I don't want to give an overly simplified take on the history of particle physics - but it's fair to say that physicists will study high energy particles WHEREVER they can find them. And it just so happens that a large number of really high energy particles are constantly bombarding us from space.In our prior series on the ALPHA PARTICLE, we learned about the solar wind and how the Earth's magnetic field catches much of that ionizing radiation, which we occasionally see displayed as the Aurora.Well. That magnetic field is no match for these cosmic rays, which come flying at us from deeper in space with much higher velocities than anything in the solar wind. These particles smash right though the magnetosphere and into the molecules of the upper atmosphere.From our perspective on Earth, these cosmic rays appear as showers of debris left over from those high altitude collisions. But they're happening all the time.There's so much debris out there that hundreds of particles - particles of that debris - have passed through you since you first hit play on this episode.### Cosmic RaysOn the 15th of October, 1991, a particle with enormous energy entered our upper atmosphere.A particle with this much energy had never been seen before on Earth. At least by humans. It had tens of millions of times more energy than anything produced at the Large Hadron Collider or FermiLab. All told. It had the kinetic energy of a baseball moving at around 60 miles per hour. All Packed. Into. A single. Particle. And it was heading right for us.The first thing it found upon arrival at Earth was the magnetic field. Traveling at such a high speed, it barely noticed the deflecting force and smashed through through into the atmosphere.Even in the rarified air of our upper atmosphere, tens of kilometers above the Earth's surface, there are plenty of molecules to go around. Way more than you'd find in outer space. And what do particles from space with a lot of energy do when suddenly surrounded by a bunch of molecules? They spend it.That poor first molecule it encountered didn't stand a chance. Whether it simply lost an electron or got completely blown apart is hard to say, but that incident cosmic ray quickly broke apart into a shower of particles high above the Earth. Pions were certainly created, but with that much energy - 50ish Joules of energy - all kinds of particles - from Lambda Zero to Kaons to the Cascades and Sigma baryons - could have been present. And all of them decayed as they usually do.The resulting shower of decays grew wider and wider, until the final, resultant charged pions decayed into muons. And the neutral pions decayed into photons. And any high energy photons decayed into electron-positron pairs who would in turn radiate the rest of the energy away.That final blast of radiation filled a circle kilometers wide that slammed into the US Army's Dugway Proving ground in Utah desert and - as luck would have it - right into the detectors of a physics experiment.The detectors measured resultant spray and were able to back-calculate the energy of the original, impinging particle from space.This aptly-named Oh-my-god particle was far and away the highest energy particle ever detected. To date, it's not entirely clear what could accelerate a particle to such outrageous speeds.And the current candidates are, frankly, terrifying.## The Power LawIn some respects, cosmic rays are kind of like earthquakes. There's a lot more little ones than there are big ones. For earthquakes, big ones with lots of shaking - magnitude 7 or 8 - are, mercifully, fairly uncommon around the world. Small ones, like magnitude 1's or 2's happen almost every day.Cosmic rays follow a similar law.Cosmic rays with an energies around 1000 MeV arrive almost continuously, from every direction, where as cosmic rays with energies a million times that might strike near you a few times per year. Those ultra high energy cosmic rays, a bit like the oh my god particle, whose energies can be measured macroscopic units like Joules? They might strike your whole TOWN maybe once a year, if that.As scientists would say, the frequency depends inversely on energy.More precisely, the frequency is derived from a POWER LAW. A power law for cosmic rays implies that the relative likelihood of two events, with energy E1 and E2 is proportional to their ratio, raised to some exponent. Power laws are simple enough to understand, but difficult to explain. Bigger cosmic rays are less common, sure. But what's difficult to explain about a power laws is that little number. The scaling exponent. Where does it come from?It's a collective effect. All the things inside and outside our galaxy that throw cosmic rays at us contribute to that effect. Other stars and planets sometimes get in the way and capture some of them. Cosmic rays in interstellar space sometimes decay or interact en route, turning into other particles with somewhat lower energy, muddying things a bit. Magnetic fields in space - like the one surrounding our Earth - deflect cosmic rays ever so slightly. It's a bit like studying Earthquakes. There are just so many moving parts and we don't know all the details.## The AnkleDespite all this complexity, the shape of the cosmic ray power law can tell us a LOT about the nature of cosmic rays.For example. At the highest end, for those particles coming in with the HIGHEST energies, the power law for cosmic rays actually changes a bit. It flattens out. It becomes slightly less sensitive to Energy. Ultra high energy Cosmic Rays aficionados call this change the “ankle”.The ankle represents a cut in the cosmic ray spectrum at about half a joule of kinetic energy. There's a pretty good plot physicists who study these things have made. I'll include links to a picture in the show notes.It's a small effect on a small fraction of the total number cosmic rays we see on Earth. But to astrophysicists who study these things, it says a lot.Namely, this “kink” or “ankle” in the power law suggests a possible change in where those cosmic rays are coming form. The leading explanation is that those ultra high energy cosmic rays - those cosmic rays with kinetic energy greater than half a Joule or so - are coming from OUTSIDE our galaxy.Which is just as well. Because it's hard to imagine anything inside our own galaxy capable of accelerating individual, microscopic particles up to macroscopic energies. The possibilities are just… too frightening.Next time, we'll explore what kinds of objects in space serve as particle accelerators millions of times more powerful than anything humans ever built on Earth.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 2https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Omega BaryonIntroductionThe Omega Baryon is the strangest particle we have encountered so far. It may also be the strangest particle known to Science, literally.With a mass of 1672.4 MeV, the Omega Baryon is heavy. As well it should be. It is comprised of three, strange quarks. The three strange quarks gives the Omega an electric charge of three times minus one third, or minus one. Those strange quarks also gives it the unusually long lifetime of about 8% of a nanosecond. While short by our standards - even a bit shorter than some other strange particles - a solid fraction of a nanosecond is an enormous lifetime for a particle with such an enormous mass.The Decay of Strange QuarksAs if on brand, this strangest of the strange particles lives for so long precisely because its made from only strange quarks. The strange quarks, you might recall, struggle to decay. They wouldn't decay- actually - if not for a mild identity crisis.The strange quarks talk to other particles both by photon, gluon and by W boson. That is, in addition to the electromagnetic force, strange quarks communicate via both the strong and weak nuclear forces. From the strong force's perspective, strange quarks are distinct. Just like the up and down quarks. Nobody is confused, all that that subnuclear gu respects their identity as strange quarks.The weak force hedges a bit. The W-boson in particular is a little confused on who is who, and from its perspective down and strange quarks are a little mixed. Just like North and West mean slightly different things to a compass or a cartographer, down and strange quarks appear slightly different to the strong and weak forces. They're almost aligned, but not quite.As a result, the strange quark decays by W boson as if it were a down quark. That decay is amplified by the strange quark's heavy mass, but its still a small effect. The weak nuclear force is… well… weak.Being made of three strange quarks, the Omega baryon decays once one of its constituents does.Omega Baryon Decay ChannelsThe Omega minus decays when one of its strange quarks throws out a W boson, changing its identity to an up quark. Typically the W-boson then decays to a pair of quarks itself, an antiup and a down quark. This all happens quickly inside the baryon itself, which subsequently explodes into a pair or triplet of particles. There there are a number of possible results.Two-thirds of the time, that anti-up quark SCORES and runs away with one of the Omega's other strange quarks, creating one of those tricky K minus mesons that we've discussed previously. What's left over? An up, a down and a strange quark, which manifests as a Lambda zero baryon.Twenty-three percent of the time, that anti-up quark isn't so lucky. It remains stuck so the down quark that came from W boson, which together run away as a negatively charged pion. The quarks that remain - two strange and an up - comprise the neutral cascade or Xi baryon, which of course leads to its own cascade of particle decays.Almost all the rest of the time - that's about 8% for you bean counters out there - the Omega baryon spits out a neutral pion, decaying to a Xi minus instead. For this to happen, that down quark has to hold on tight to that pair of strange quarks that didn't decay.On extremely rare occasions, instead of a neutral pion, the Omega decays to Xi minus by spitting out a pi+ pi- pair. This could happen, for instance, the resulting up and antiup quarks happened to find a down-anti down pair inside the subnuclear goo.Spin and the DecupletIn addition to having three strange quarks, the Omega baryon also has three times the angular momentum of most baryons we've encountered so far. Inside the baryon, those three strange quarks are all zooming around each other, extra fast.We've seen this behavior before, when we looked into the Delta baryons. The Delta Plus Plus baryon, you might remember had three up quarks. And the Delta Minus baryons, which had three down quarks.In a sense, the Omega baryon is the strange version of those beasts. Because of that simple, three strange quark arrangement, the Omega baryon was predicted to exist well before it was found. Well, that's… not exactly right. In fact, it's exactly backwards. Back in the 50s and early 60s nobody knew what a quark was, or how baryons were even organized. They just had all those wild names: Delta. Sigma. Xi. This zoo of strange particles was something of a mystery. The physicist Gell-Mann (and, independently Ne'eman) chased the patterns of all the particles and their decays and divsed the quark model to fit those data. There was only one problem: one particle was missing. The Omega baryon was discovered as a short stub of a line which appeared on a photographic plate at Brookhaven national Lab. It had essentially the same mass, spin and charge that Gell-Mann predicted, ushering in the first of many experimental verifications of the quark model of subnuclear physics.And that concludes our second - STRANGE - season of the Field Guide to Particle Physics! We've got a few bonus episodes, stories and other extras in store, including a bonus series on Gell-Mann's Eightfold Way and more details on how particles like the Down and Strange quarks mix. So please stay tuned and subscribe for more!
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 2https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Cascade ParticlesPrepare for trouble! And make it double! Today we confront the two Cascade or Xi /ksee/ baryons which each have a PAIR of strange quarks.Xi minus checks in with a mass of about 1322 MeV, making it the heaviest baryon we've encountered so far. This is just as well, as it comprised of two of those heavier, strange quarks. Together with a third, down quark, it also has a total electric charge of minus 3 thirds or… minus one.Xi 0 is just a little bit lighter with a mass of 13 hundred and 14 MeV. Its two strange quarks are paired with an up quark, which gives it an electric charge of twice minus one third PLUS one third, or… zero.Decays of the Xi minusLike many strange particles, the cascades take quite a while to decay. The Xi minus takes a solid fraction of a nano-second, the usual time it takes to convince one of those strange quarks to decay into an up quark. The result? The strange-strange-down bag of quarks converts to up-strange-down bag, otherwise known as the Lambda 0 baryon. As usual, that decay is accompanied by some other junk, and in this case the net result is a pi minus.As we've already seen, the Lambda 0 and the pi minus are both unstable themselves. The former converts to either a proton or a neutron and the latter typically decays to a muon and then an electron.If you tried to sketch that all out, you'd find a LONG decay chain of a LOT of different particles. This gives the cascades their name. Producing ONE Xi baryon results in a cascading SHOWER of particles all the way down to that familiar, stable stuff like protons, neutrons and electrons.Now the Xi minus ALMOST ALWAYS decays to the Lambda 0 with a pi minus. Like 99.8 percent of the time! The rest of the time we find some cuter decays, each incredibly rare, happening less than a thousandth of a percent of the time. These rarer decays shed some rather alarming light on the very identity of the strange quark. But BEFORE we get to that, we should talk about the Xi 0.Decays of the Xi 0The Xi 0 takes about TWICE as long as the Xi minus to decay, which is still, only a third of a nano-second. What's short for humans is a seriously overripe old age for an elementary particle.Like it's partner, the Xi 0 decays into a Lambda0 with a pion. This time a neutral pion. This happens 99.5% of the time. These decays are a little twisted.Its is the same thing we saw with those charged sigma baryons. We need to convince an a bag of of three quarks: up-strange-and-strange, to decay in something that looks like the up-down-strange bag of the Lambda zero. This is troublesome precisely because the strange quark ONLY EVER decays to an up quark.As with decays of the Sigma baryons, things just need to rearrange a little bit. The Sigma Plus you might recall decays into a proton and a pi zero thanks to a W boson. Similarly, one strange quark of the Xi0 decays to an up quark by emitting a W- boson. The W- decays to a down-anti-upquark pair so fast the rest of the quarks barely notice. The down quark runs away with the other “up and strange” quarks from the original Xi 0, and the anti-up quark leaves with the freshly minted up quark as a neutral pion.If that sounds convoluted, it is. It helps to have a diagram to look at, which you can do on our website, pasayten.org.Incidentally, the other, rarer decays of the Xi zero match up quite nicely what you'd expect from those rare decays of the Xi minus. More on those in a later episode.Spin Angular MomentumThe spin angular momentum of both Xi 0 and Xi minus is simply hbar over 2, just like the proton and the neutron. Well those and the three Sigma baryons AND the Lambda baryon. That's a total of eight distinct particles, which is a lot, but you can rest easy knowing there are NO other particles with that spin angular momentum made from combinations of those three quarks. And this is no accident. Any OTHER, three particle combination of up, down and strange quarks - like a baryon with three of the same quarks, like the Delta Baryons we've already seen - will have a higher spin angular momentum. You could think of that as if the quarks were orbiting each other inside that subnuclear goo at a faster and faster pace. And we'll meet some examples of these soon enough. The story behind WHY this should be is fascinating, nerdy and otherwise adds some useful scaffolding to an ever expanding ZOO of wild, subatomic particles.More on that, next time.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 2https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Neutral Sigma BaryonsIntroductionWeighing in at 1192 MeV, the middle-weight sigma baryon is also the the electrically neutral one.The Sigma Baryons are a trio of strange, slightly heavy cousins to everyday particles like the proton and the neutron. We've already talked at length about the charged Sigma baryons. Today, we're focusing on their electrically neutral sibling, Sigma Zero.While the decay resistant charged sigma baryons - with their unusually long lifetimes - certainly qualify as “strange” particles, the sigma zero feels far less strange. At least at first.The Sigma Zero decays rapidly. Tens of trillions of times faster than its charged siblings Sigma Plus or Minus. If you're into really small numbers, or just to measure time in seconds, that's a decimal point followed by 19 zeroes before you get 7 and then a four. 0.000000000000000000074 secondsThat's too short a time for us to fathom, but its about right for an unstable particle that heavy.Remember, it is STRANGE that the typical lifetime for strange baryons like Lambda Zero or the Charged Sigmas can be measured in nanoseconds. So why does the sigma zero baryon decay so quickly? OR why do we even consider it to be in the “Strange” family?DecaysOne reason to consider sigma zero “strange” is because it decays to a strange particle. Specifically, it decays, 100 percent of the time, to a lambda zero.In the process, the sigma zero throws out a photon - that is, a gamma ray - which itself might be hard to explain. You see, photons carry the electromagnetic force. Photons are passed around like baseballs between particles that have an electric charge. Photons can be thought of as building blocks for electric and magnetic fields. SO what business does the uncharged Sigma Zero - or Lambda Zero for that matter - have interacting with a photon?Electrically neutral pions, you might recall, decayed into a PAIR of photons. So perhaps it's not weird. But pi zero decays were something of an anomaly. Literally. You might recall that pi zeros decayed to two photons because of the chiral anomaly. It involved these wild, quantum mechanical beasts known as instantons. Very nonlinear, very intricate, unusual stuff. In some sense, the neutral pion just vaporized into the electromagnetic field.This is decidedly NOT what happens with Sigma zero. It doesn't vaporize. It just decays like any other particle. So what gives?To understand HOW an electrically neutral particle could spit out a photon, we have to look inside the baryon to that subnuclear goo of quarks and gluons.InnardsThe Sigma baryons are all bona fide strange particles, they all have a strange quark. Sigma Plus had two up quarks and a strange quark. Sigma minus shad two down quarks and a strange quark. Can you guess what a Sigma Zero has?One of each. Up, down and strange.But wait. Wasn't the Lambda Zero ALSO made up from an up quark, a down quark and a strange quark? Well yes. And that fact explains in fact, why the sigma zero decays so quickly. It decays to the lambda zero because they both share the same number and kind of internal or valance quarks. As it turns out, the Sigma Zero is something of an “Excited” version of the Lambda zero. Internally, you might say that the up and down quarks are buzzing around in a slightly different configuration. A configuration with slightly more energy. They're a little more spun up, as it were. That bit of spin energy gets released by the emission of a photon, leaving that bag of quarks and gluons with lower internal energy, otherwise known as the particle Lambda Zero.E = mc^2 after all just means that the MASS is proportional to ENERGY.Including PhotonsThe internal structure of the Sigma Zero also explains why an electrically neutral particle can throw out a photon. It's just electrically neutral on AVERAGE. The average value of the electric charges of all the quarks is zero. But individually, they each have a charge.This brings us back to the story of the neutron. While the AVERAGE electric charge of a neutral baryon is zero, the electromagnetic field need not be identically zero.Like the neutron or the earth, the Sigma Zero baryon has a nonzero magnetic dipole moment. It probably should also has an electric dipole moment. All this means is that the electromagnetic fields kind of averages out to zero, but are still smeared out, in a way.And it's these smeared out configurations that allow the Sigma Zero to throw out a photon and decay to a lambda zero. Or at least, that's another fun way to think about it.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 2https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Charged Sigma BaryonsIntroductionThe Sigma Baryons - that's a capital Sigma - are a trio of slightly heavy cousins to everyday particles like the proton and the neutron. With masses of almost 1200 MeV each, it may surprise you that the physics of Sigma baryons feels much closer to a comparatively puny trio of familiar particles: the pions.The pions form a triplet of mesons: pi plus, pi zero and pi minus. So too, do the Sigmas: Sigma Plus, Sigma Zero and Sigma Minus. The similarities are helpful for building an intuition, but the differences are stark. While the charged pions are antiparticle partners, the charged Sigmas are anything but.Today we'll focus on that fact as we explore the pair of particles Sigma Plus and Sigma Minus. Charged SigmasThe charged Sigma baryons are your typical strange particle. They live much longer than they should, given their mass. Their lifetime is a sizable fraction of a nanosecond. Like the Lambda Zero, the charged Sigma baryons live so long because they have to wait for their constituent strange quark to decay.The strange quark can only decay to an up quark, and while possible, it takes a while. It's a quantum bottleneck that in particle decays that has come to be known as the technical term “Strangeness”. While the down quark and the strange quark have separate identities as far as the strong nuclear force is concerned, they mix slightly under the weak nuclear force. That slight mixing is what gives the strange quark a chance to decay.And it always decays to an up quark. Keep an eye on this fact. It's what makes the Sigma baryon decays so tricky.What's fun about the charged Sigma Baryons - that is markedly DIFFERENT than the charged pions - is that they are NOT antiparticles for one another. ¿The ANTI sigma plus is NOT the sigma minus. Not even close.The Sigma Plus has two up quarks and a strange quark. That gives it's electric charge of two thirds plus two thirds minus one third or one. The Sigma Minus has two down quarks and a strange quark, which contribute a charge minus one third each. So, despite having opposite electric charges, they have very different quarks inside:up up and strange versus down down and strange. And with that constitutional difference comes more mundane ones: the Sigma Plus and Sigma Minus have slightly different masses AND slightly different lifetimes. They are, in other words, very different particles.Still. The Sigmas try their best to behave like pions. Isn't it nice how neatly organized Nature at least tries to be?At 1197 MeV, the Sigma minus is just a little bigger than the Sigma plus, whose mass is about 1189 MeV. Bigger masses usually imply short lifetimes, but the Sigma Baryons are strange in this sense too. The heavier, sigma minus baryon has a lifetime around 15% of a nanosecond. The lighter sigma plus baryon decays about twice as fast, living on average for about 8% of a nanosecond. Charged Sigma Baryon DecaysWhy does this slightly lighter, sigma plus baryon decay twice as fast?Sigma Plus has two major ways to decay whereas Sigma Minus has only one. Sigma Minus only really decays to a neutron and a pi minus. There are other options - including muons, electrons, neutrini and, rarely, a lambda zero-electron pair - which all together occur less than 1% of the time.Similarly, 99% of the time Sigma Plus will decay into a familiar nucleon and a pion. But here's a slight imbalance between these two options. The proton and pi zero appears just over 51% of the time. The neutron and pi plus happens a bit of 48% of the time.Amusingly, the other 1% of stuff looks exactly like the anti particle versions of the rare Sigma minus decays. You know, antimuons, positrons and neutrinos. Notably, there's also a rare Lambda zero with positron decay. Charge has to be conserved, after all.Because the sigma plus has two ways to decay - two decay channels, in the parlance of particle physics - it's not surprising that it decays twice as fast as its negatively charged sibling.Why the sigma minus only has one decay channel relates back to the fact that is NOT the anti particle partner of sigma plus. Despite its negative charge, it's made of QUARKS and not ANTIquarks. Because there is no negatively charged analog for the proton, there's nothing else for the sigma minus to decay into.Some Gory, Decay DetailsThe details of these decays are fun to examine.The sigma minus - down, down, strange - decays when the strange quark does. The strange quark emits a W boson and leaves behind an up quark. That essentially converts the Sigma minus into a neutron - down, down, up. The W boson promptly decays into a down quark-antiUp quark pair - that is, a negatively charged pion.Did you get that? Sigma minus decays to a neutron with a pi minus.The sigma plus - up, up, strange - is a bit more complicated. The strange quark again decays, but the final combination of quarks: up, up, up, down, anti-up, can be rearranged to form a proton: up, up, down and a neutral pion: up / anti-up. Because the W-boson lives for such a short time, that rearrangement all essentially happens at once.The other possibility for the sigma plus is even more wild. The strange quark decay as usual, laving behind an up quark, but the emitted W-boson is immediately absorbed by one of the other up quarks, which then converts it into a down quark. If a gluon just happen to be emitted at around the same time, it can convert to a down quark-anti-down quark pair, giving a final combination of quarks: up, down, down, anti-down, up. This can be rearranged to form a neutron (up-down-down) and a pi plus (up-anti-down).Was that complicated enough for you? Converting a sigma plus to a neutron is a little more complex so it doesn't happen quite as often. To get a better sense of visualization, check out our drawing on the website. But suffice it to say, gluons aren't hard to find given all that nuclear goo those quarks live with. It's not all that surprising things work out this way.We should say that these descriptions are something of a sketch or skeleton of what is actually going on. Physicists doing the full calculation using Quantum Field Theory would call it a tree-level approximation. Quantum effects can sometimes be dramatic, as we saw with the pi zero. Mercifully, not in this case.Particle physics is nothing if not messy.Why no Lambda Zero?If you're numerically minded - like you accountants out there - you might wonder why these charged Sigma baryons do not decay into a Lambda zero baryon. After all, the mass of the charged sigmas is around 1190 MeV, but the mass of the Lambda zero is only just shy of 1116 MeV. Energetically, it's more than possible! But the details matter.Both Sigma plus and sigma minus can and do decay to Lambda 0 with either a positron or an electron, respectively. But it's a needle in a haystack. For every MILLION charged sigma baryons you produce - say from cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere or at a particle collider - you can probably count the number of Lambda Zero's produced on one hand. Why is it so rare? Well the strange quark - slow as it is to decay - decays to an up quark much, much faster than the down quark does. Like a few parts per million times faster.So the statistics all wash out, in the end.ConclusionWhile the charge sigmas have trouble decaying into a Lambda zero, the sigma zero baryon does not. This leads to another fun story, which we'll visit next time.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 2https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Neutral KaonsBefore we can describe neutral kaons in the wild, we need to take a quick detour to the city.South of Downtown Seattle resides the historic Pioneer Square. Bricks line the sidewalks and the ends of metal, reinforcement bars stick out of the old, stone buildings. Approaching the iconic Smith Tower, you cross Yesler Way, and something happens. The direction of the streets change.South of Yesler, the streets all run north-south. The grid, in other words, matches the cardinal points of the compass: north south, east west. When you cross Yesler, confusingly, everything rotates by 45 degrees.The streets of downtown Seattle - between Yesler Way and Denny Way - all point Northwest. The rotation of streets is made to match the contour of Elliot Bay. The waterfront goes NW to SE. Streets run parallel and perpendicular to it.It's often easier for us to think in terms of north south east west, but sometimes the geographic features of the terrain forces a change. There are still two directions, it's just a shift in our frame of reference.This idea of a 45-degree shift in our frame of reference, mixing North with West and South with East, is very similar to how the neutral kaons behave.Introducing the Neutral KaonsThere are two, electrically neutral kaons. K0 and K0bar. Like the eta and eta prime mesons - which are also electrically neutral - these neutral kaons are mesons that include a strange quark.The strange quark is like the down quark, only quite a bit heavier. Because it's heavier, the particles comprised of them like the kaons, also tend to be heavier.Mesons - like the kaons - are quark molecules made from one quark and one antiquark. The strange quark is a heavy version of the down quark, and so both have an electric charge of -1/3. Neutral kaons are combinations of to quark-antiquark pairs: down-antiStrange and strange-antiDown. These two combinations are called K0 and K0bar, respectively.With masses just shy of 500 MeV, these neutral kaons are heavy. Unlike the heavy and short-lived eta and eta prime mesons, the lifetime of these neutral kaons is considerably longer. Like the Lambda zero baryon, the strange quark makes it difficult for the neutral kaons to decay. How they decay brings us back to the streets of Seattle.The Long and Short of itThe charged kaons presented a mystery because they could decay to both three pions and two pions. This confused particle physicists for quite some time. Neutral kaons also share this curious property, with nuance, of course.Like the street map of Seattle, K0 and K0bar mix. While moving through space, a K0 can spontaneously change into a K0bar and vice versa. This mixing is something of an artifact of an even stranger phenomena. Strictly speaking, neither the K0 nor K0bar mesons interact with Weak nuclear force. Only mixtures of them interact the W bosons. Just like North and East can combine to Northwest and Northeast, we think of these kaon combinations as K0 plus K0bar or K0 minus K0bar. It's like a rotation by plus or minus 45 degrees.How is the possible? In a word, Quantum Mechanics. You might say that the Strong nuclear force - the thing that binds quarks together into bigger particles - respects the individual identities of those quarks: up, down and strange. The Weak nuclear force, however, does not. These particle-antiparticle oscillations are similar to the flavor oscillations experienced by the three flavors of neutrini. The “minus” combination is sometimes called K-short, because it decays relatively quickly: just shy of 8 percent of a nanosecond. The “plus” combination is sometimes called K-long, which takes 50 nanoseconds,.Any nanoseconds is an eternity by particle physics standards, but it's remarkable that K-short decays 1700 times faster than K-long given that they're made of the same things.In some sense the K0-K0bar mixing occurs because the “K-short” combination wants to decay so much faster than “K-long”. Given a beam full of ONLY K0 particles, it will eventually turn into ONLY a beam of K-long particles. The K-shorts will all decay.K-short decays into pairs of pions, either two pi0s or a pi plus-pi minus combination.K-long decays into three pions: either one of each or three pi zeros. K-longs actually decays into electrons or muons too - or their associated antiparticles - along with a single charged pion of opposite charge.In SummaryThe number of fine details in the mixing of neutral kaons is staggering. I'll give you three examples. First: if a K0 decays into an electron-like particle, it's virtually always going to be the anti-electron with a pi minus. Second, and oppositely, if K0bar decays like that, it will always output an electron with a pi plus. Finally, there is an extremely small mass difference between K-long and K-short. 3 parts per trillion. The quantum mixing of the two neutral kaons is just the first hint that particle physics only gets more complex and strange as we delve deeper into it. So take a breath. Relax your shoulders. And then get excited. There's still plenty more to see.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 2https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Eta and Eta Prime MesonsThe Eta and Eta Prime particles are a pair of electrically neutral particles that were - for a moment anyway - the center of a fierce debate among physicists. That debate ended as quantum chromodynamics - the mathematical theory which describes how quarks and gluons interact - was enshrined into the standard model of particle physics.Those mathematical details involved in describing eta and eta prime are almost as fierce as the debate over how they worked. And those details are what we'll describe today.With the strange quark, three are three kinds of quarks that can combine into all sorts of particles: up, down and strange. Of course, they each have antiparticle partners: antiup, antidown and antistrange with opposite electric charge.Mesons are particles that mix quarks and antiquarks. The neutral pion is a pretty clean mixture of direct quarks/antiquarks pairs: up-antiup with down-anti-down.Nature can also make nice, clean, symmetric combinations of all three quarks: up-antiup, down-antidown, strange-antistrange. Actually, it can make two of them, because, you know, strangeness. Those two combinations are known as the eta and eta-prime mesons, respectively.Like the pi0, both eta and eta prime have zero electric charge, but these strange mesons are heavy. Eta itself weighs in at 547 MeV, a good four times the mass of the neutral pion. Eta prime's mass is an outrageous 957 MeV, heavier than both the proton and the neutron.The reason the eta mesons are so heavy is related to the fact that the neutral pions decay so quickly. You might remember that the neutral pions decay much faster than the charged pions. In some sense, the charged pions are protected from decaying by the conservation of charge. To be precise, pi0 mesons decay via the chiral anomaly. Quantum mechanics gives rise to sudden host of all the quarks appearing all at once which vaporizes into a pair of photons.Like the pions, the eta and eta prime mesons are electrically neutral. They have no electric charge to conserve and also decay through that quantum mess at at a much more reasonable 10^-19 and 10^-21 seconds , respectively. The lighter, eta meson typically decays just like the neutral pion, that is into a pair of photons. Sometimes it will decay into triplet of pions! Either all three pi0 or one of each, pi + pi - and pi0.The heavier, eta prime meson typically decay into the eta meson and a pair of pions: oppositely charged or neutral. Not infrequently, eta prime will decay instead to a photon plus an unstable, neutral rho meson, which is like the neutral pion, except its constituent quark antiquark pairs are orbiting each other.The same mess of quantum effects that causes all these neutral mesons to decay quickly has one more interesting effect on the eta and eta prime mesons. It explains their heavy masses.The cloud of quantum particles - all those quarks appearing all at once - collectively act to impede their physical motion through space. Physicists have a word for this phenomena. It's called a mass.Different particles experience this mess in different ways, which explains their different masses. The pions barely notice. The eta meson feels it a bit. The eta prime meson feels it the most, which is also why it is the heaviest of the bunch.The debate amongst particle physicists amounted to precisely how these masses came about, and how the Chiral Anomaly was involved. We now understand that the quantum mess of quarks which causes the pi zero and eta to decay to photons and which gives eta prime its enormous mass, are related to instantons - which are like kinks, wrinkles and textures in the quantum subnuclear goo we've been talking about. You know, that amorphous stuff that surrounds all these quarks inside particles.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 2https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.Charge KaonsStrangeness - as a property of particles - was an attempt to explain why some particles took a really long time to decay. By that measure, the charged Kaons are definitely strange.Weighing in at 493 MeV, the charged kaons are heavy. Three times as heavy as the pions. And yet, given their mass, it's surprising that they're lifetime is also measured in nanoseconds. About 12 nano seconds, actually. Quite long for such heavy particles.The charged kaons are composed of a strange quark and an antiup quark. Or an up quark and an anti-strange quark. Kind of like pions. Only STRANGE.Kaons are strange in more than the technical sense. Their decays confused everyone for quite some time.In the late 1940s, particle physicists discovered a few strange particles that all seemed to have about half the mass of the proton, but decayed very differently.Something physicists originally called the tau+ (a historical name, which should not to be confused with the tau lepton) decayed into THREE pions. A pi+ and two neutral pions. Something originally called the theta+ also decayed into pions, but only one pi+ and ONE pi 0. Confusingly, these taus and theta appeared to be IDENTICAL otherwise. They should have been the same, actually, except for those different decays. And up until that time, no particle had ever been seen decaying to BOTH two AND three pions.How could the tau+ and the theta+ be the same particle? It would be as if you were BOTH totally left handed AND totally right handed. Like you were literally your reflection in your mirror, but only sometimes. These ideas are captured by the idea of PARITY, nothing more than a twist on the idea of left and right handedness. Decaying to THREE pions suggested that the kaon parity was ODD. But decaying to TWO pions suggested it had even parity. Numbers can't be BOTH EVEN AND ODD, how could particles?This might seem like an abstruse problem to have, but to physicists at the time, conservation of parity seemed as vital as the conservation of angular momentum. We know better now, as kaon decay involves strange quarks which each via the weak nuclear force. The weak nuclear force - carried by W and Z-bosons - violates parity explicitly. Maximally, as it turns out.The charged kaons decay to muons about 63% of the time. Those two pion decays? That's just over 20%. The three pion decays? Just about 5.6%. There are crazy things too, like the so-called semileptonic decays which include BOTH pions AND electrons or muons. Things get complicated when the masses get large. But this is only the tip of the strangeness iceberg. There's plenty more to come.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 2https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.Strange QuarksQuarks make up baryons like the proton and the neutron. Or more exotic things like the Lambda0 or the Delta++. Previously, we've learned about the up and down quarks - those fundamental constituents of matter like protons and neutrons. Today we're learning about the third of the three light quarks - the strange quark!The stability of quarks against decay is a quirky thing to talk about because the context matters a lot. One of the down quarks in the neutron will decay - in about fifteen minutes or so - to an up quark, shooting out an electron and leaving behind a proton. But that's only if the neutron is alone. If its bound together with a proton in an atomic nucleus, it is stable.The strange quark will also decay - also typically to an up quark - and it's lifetime also depends on the context. The Lambda baryon - like the proton - is a big bag of nuclear goo with three quarks banging around inside. It has an up, a down and a strange quark.The thing about strange quarks is: particles that contain one tend to live longer than you'd expect.The reason for this? There are a few. First, it necessarily decays via the weak force, which is always slower to move. But it's worse than that. There's just not much for a strange quark to decay into. Heavier particles can only decay into lighter particles, and the strange quark is just not heavy enough to provide many good options. There is literally one option: the up quark. To decay into an up quark, strange quark must emit a W-boson. It must behave like a down quark. The window for that decay is small! It might be 13 percent the size of a down quark. But between us, it's kind of surprising that this happens at all! That 13 percent suppression is related to something astonishing called the Cabibbo angle, which we'll come to at the end of the season. In any case, getting the right window to decay to an up quark takes awhile, which is why strange particles tend to live so long.Just like it's awkward to talk about the lifetime of a strange quark, it's also awkward to talk about it's electric charge. Quarks always show up in groups - and its their collective, electric charge that matters - but for the bean counters out there, the strange quark has an electric charge of minus 1/3. Just like the down quark.In a lot of ways, the strange quark is just a heavy version of the down quark.How heavy? Fairly. Compared to the humble 4.7 MeV of the down quark, the strange quark's mass is around 95 MeV.It's possible - in some corners of our universe - that strange quarks could be stable. But this is probably only true at stupidly high pressure. For example, It's possible that they exist inside neutron stars. Neutron Stars are what's left over after a star goes supernova. A fragment. A tight ball of matter that fell in on itself. Without the constant outward pressure given by a star's normal nuclear furnace, what's left of star falls inward, pulled together by gravity. Neutron star matter so tightly bound it's basically like one titanic nucleus. These are stars that are just on the precipice of becoming black holes.In this context. It is possible that the strange quarks can exist stably. For the experts, the Pauli Exclusion principle creates an effective, statistical pressure - modeled say by the Lennard-Jones potential - on the up and down quarks in the neutron star that can be relieved - in part - by the inclusion of strange quarks to literally mix things up.At least, that's what the models say. Whether we'd ever be able to test those models directly, is another matter.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics : Season 2https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2022 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.For more technical details on the Lambda 0 baryon, including how why it decays to an up but not a down quark, check out this short, informal video.The Lambda 0 BaryonWith a mass of well over 1115 mega electron volts, about 20 percent more than the proton, the Lambda 0 is a rare, but historic particle to find.Inside the Lambda Baryons you'll find an up quark, a down quark and… something else. The first Lambda Baryon was first observed in 1950. In what amounts to a weather ballon. Way up high in the atmosphere. On a photographic emulsion plate. Particle physics was a different game back then!Physicists KNEW it was a baryon because it decayed into a proton. And it was heavy.Heavy particles decay quickly, and the Lambda was heavy. But it did not decay quickly enough. It stayed around for quite a while, a bit less than a nanosecond, which is rather long by particle physics standards. Especially for a baryon.Very strange. The long lifetime of the Lambda 0 was so strange that physicists knew there was something special about that particle. It had a special property. And in the 50's this new property of particles was showing up in more and more experiments. Because they had no idea what it could be, that called this property strangeness. For better or for worse, that technical name stuck.The new particle that makes up the Lambda 0 baryon is called a strange quark, and we'll visit them soon enough. Suffice it to say, a Lambda 0 baryon is composed of an up quark and a down quark and a strange quark.The Lambda 0 has no electric charge. It typically decays to either a proton or a neutron. If it's a proton - which happens about 63 percent of the time, it spits out a negative pion in the process. If it's a neutron - which accounts for most of the rest of the decays - it spits out a neutral pion instead.Using this quark model, we can explore the decay of the Lambda 0 in sharper detail.Inside the Lambda 0, the strange quark decays into an up quark, which converts that big bag of nuclear go into that proton or neutron. To do that, it must emit a W boson. Those familiar force carriers then decay into to a pion. As per usual.The Lambda 0 was just the first of the strange family of particles to be discovered. This entire season will be devoted to these strange particles.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.On StrangenessAs promised, season two of a Field Guide to Particle Physics is just around the corner. This time we'll focus on a family of particles that all have one thing in come: they are strange.You see, in particle physics, strangeness is a technical term. It arose in the 1950's to explain a class of newly discovered particles that took far too long to decay to be normal. Perhaps for the lack of a better name, physicists called them strange.In this season we'll explore the strange mesons and baryons - heavy versions of the pions and protons you've come to know - and learn how strange particle physics is both counts a new kind of quark and introduces all kinds of other trouble.Stay tuned in the coming days and weeks to learn about this collection of strange particles and the strange, physical ideas they present us.Ideas like: Neutral particle oscillations and regeneration Hyper nuclei Parity violation And the matter inside neutron stars We're so excited to share these stories you.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.A few References and Resources for you.Isotopes of Helium:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_heliumHelium Fact Sheet from NIST:https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/inchi/InChI%3D1S/HeCDC Fact sheet on Uranium-238:https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/isotopes/uranium.htmBerkeley National Lab Essay on Earth's Heathttps://newscenter.lbl.gov/2011/07/17/kamland-geoneutrinos/Space Weather Prediction Center and the Solar Windhttps://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/solar-windA couple of articles on the Dynamo Effecthttps://news.mit.edu/2010/explained-dynamo-0325https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo_theoryhttps://courses.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/Courses/EPS281r/Sources/Earth-dynamo/1-Wikipedia-Dynamo-theory.pdfThe Alpha ParticlePart 5 : The Solar WindIntroductionIn the past few weeks, we've learned that helium - that useful, noble gas, is created deep underground by the radioactive decay of heavy elements like Uranium and Thorium. Those decays generate quite a bit of heat - about half the heat inside the Earth is credited to these decays.As we've seen, that heat has tectonic consequences! The churning of molten rock not only drives volcanic eruptions, but also is responsible for all the moving and shaking of the continents on earth. Most of this movement is slow and imperceptible to us, but when we can sense major movement. It's usually as a violent earthquake.The collective impact of all those humble alpha particles literally shapes the world around us.We say humble in part because, alpha radiation is mostly harmless. Human skin is pretty good at stopping alpha particles emitted from a decaying nucleus. You wouldn't want to ingest any uranium, that's for sure, but having a tiny bit in room with you isn't necessarily a problem. This is NOT true for all radioactive materials, some of which can be extremely hazardous. This is because alpha particles come out with a characteristic velocity that - frankly - isn't very high. Remember, alpha particles are just little fragments of a nucleus that just kind of escaped. Other forms of nuclear radiation include beta and gamma rays, which are essentially electrons and photons. These decays are driven directly by the subnuclear forces and because they have less electric charge and far less mass, can penetrate much deeper into living tissue.And that's what makes them hazardous. They can mess with your insides.Nuclear decays are NOT the only radiation we are exposed to. They is plenty raining down on us from the sky. You see, the enormous nuclear furnace known as the sun does more than light up our skies. It is constantly streaming a LOT other particles, like electrons, protons, alpha particles, a bunch of other ionized stuff. Not the kind of stuff you want to be directly exposed regularly.As we'll see, the collective effects of the humble alpha particle inside the Earth protects us from a lot this “solar wind” of electrically charged particles.GeomagnteismThe Earth, like some of the other planets in our solar system, generates it's own magnetic field. It's a weak magnetic field - it takes the WHOLE EARTH to move your tiny compass needle just a little bit - but it's still big in size. It reaches out into space, well past our own atmosphere.As we discussed in part two of this series, magnetic fields are created by the motion of electric charges. Big magnetic fields require a bunch of electric charges working together, moving coherently. For the electromagnets used in MRI machines, many many electrons - otherwise known as the electrical current - are pushed through many, many loops of wire. To generate the Earth's magnetic field, something even bigger must be happening. Our best working type of model - one that best fits the data - is known as a magnetic dynamo. I'll sketch the idea for you here.For a plant like Earth to generate a magnetic field via the dynamo model, we need three things: 1. A conducting liquid inside the planet. 2. A large amount of coherent motion 3. And heat. Lots of heat.As to the conducting liquid:The outer core of the Earth is believed to be made of iron. Liquid iron. Heavy things - like iron - sink, remember? So there's a lot of it deep within the earth. The earth is so big and so hot inside that that there's a whole inner layer of that metal in liquid form, churning. As to the large collective motion:The earth itself is spinning - which we see as day and night. The rotational motion of the Earth itself stirs up that liquid iron coherently - like the loops of wire in an electromagnet. For the experts out there, it's the Coriolis Force - as sort of three-dimensional version of the centripetal acceleration you feel in the car when taking a turn too sharply. It's the same effective force that drives hurricanes to spin counter clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.And finally, As to the heat:Well. We discussed that in part four. About half of the Earth's radiant heat comes from the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. In other words, from the production of helium.All that collective motion of a hot, conducting fluid is what builds the coherent magnetic field - the dipole field - that surrounds the Earth. And it's a good thing that we have one. We're probably alive today because of it.The Solar WindBack to that issue of the solar wind. The atmosphere of the sun is hot. REALLY hot. Millions of degrees hot. Way hotter than the inside of the Earth. When matter is that hot, atoms can't exist in their familiar state. The nuclei and electrons separate into a PLASMA. The tongues of light emitted by a bonfire - or a bolt of lightning from the sky - are both examples of a plasma. They're hot, and because the electrons and nuclei are separated into a sort of electrically active gas, they cause a lot of electromagnetic disturbance. For us that mostly means they generate a lot of light.Given that, it might not surprise you to learn that the atmosphere of the sun is a plasma.But there is more to a plasma than just light. Each tiny particle - each electron or charge nucleus - carries with it an electromagnetic field. When they are bound together, the positive charges in the nucleus neutralize the negative charges of the electrons. That tight binding keeps the surrounding electromagnetic field pretty tame.When things get hot enough to separate the atoms in something as BIG as a planet or the solar atmosphere, all those tiny electromagnetic fields merge to form large, collective magnetic fields.Kind of like a SUPERCHARGED version of the magnetic dynamo we just discussed. Some of the charged particles in the upper atmosphere of the sun - the corona - escape into space. It's a constant stream. The further they get from the sun, the less of its gravitational pull they experience, and so the faster they travel. But it's not just the intense heat of the sun that drives them away. The collective magnetic field of all those churning, charged particles in the solar further accelerates those particles away from the the sun and… unfortunately… towards us.The Magnetosphere and the IonosphereThe magnetic field that surrounds the Earth is our shield from this solar wind. That shield extends way out into space, its a bit over five times as big as the Earth. At that distance, much of that incoming solar plasma get deflected back out into space. What isn't is caught up by the magnetic field and driven to the poles, where they eventually get focused into a donut shaped belt around the Earth. Occasionally, when that so-called space weather is REALLY bad, it literally lights up our skies as the Aurora.By keeping those charged particles away from the surface, the Earth's magnetic field protects us from direct exposure to that radiation. But the protection afforded by the dynamo magnetic field goes far beyond that.Neither Venus nor Mars generates its own magnetic field. Exposed to the solar wind, their atmospheres are literally being blown away by the impact of those charged particles. Venus still has a lot of its atmosphere left to give, but poor little mars has all but lost its protective atmosphere.That protective magnetic field - driven in part by the same radioactive, alpha decays that create helium - protects both us and our atmosphere.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.A few References and Resources for you.Isotopes of Helium:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_heliumHelium Fact Sheet from NIST:https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/inchi/InChI%3D1S/HeCDC Fact sheet on Uranium-238:https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/isotopes/uranium.htmUS Information Agency Facts on Energy Consumption:US : https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/World : https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49876Berkeley National Lab Essay on Earth's Heathttps://newscenter.lbl.gov/2011/07/17/kamland-geoneutrinos/The Alpha ParticlePart 4 : Inside the EarthDensityHelium, Neon and Argon are all noble gases. None of them react to form chemicals. As the chemists are fond of saying, their electron valence shells are filled.So why is Helium such a scare resource, while Argon in particular makes up a sizable fraction of our atmosphere?In a word, Density.Helium is much less dense a gas than Neon or Argon. With only two protons and two neutrons, helium is about ten times less dense then the air we typically breathe on Earth.Just like air bubbles under water, balloons full of helium rise in the atmosphere because they're less dense than the surrounding media.Something similar can be said about heavy things. Rain falls from the sky when water vapor condenses to form droplets of liquid water. That liquid is much more dense than the air around it, so it falls. All the way down. To Earth.A similar thing happens INSIDE the Earth. It's a little less intuitive because rocks and dirt are typically solid. But denser material tends to sink towards the center of the earth. Of course, that sinking takes place on geological time, not human time.Really heavy elements, like Uranium and Thorium aren't terribly common up near the surface of the Earth. But inside. There's quite a bit of both. And we're very lucky that is so.Helium CreationDeep in the Earth, Uranium and Thorium decay. They're radioactive, and as we discussed last time, they occasionally decay by spitting out an alpha particle. An alpha particle, you might recall, is nothing but a Helium nucleus.That alpha particle eventually soaks up a couple of electrons from the surrounding environment, turns to helium and begins to rise, literally, through the cracks. It eventually pools in underground wells, as discussed in part two of this series.This is a long process, and not just because it takes a while for the Helium atoms to migrate up to those subsurface wells. The real bottleneck is alpha decay. In some sense, its a pretty uncommon event. A typical Uranium-238 nucleus lives for about 4.5 billion years. And each event only produces ONE helium atom.Helium Production RateTrying to build an intuition for atoms and molecules is difficult because they're so small. They are so small AND there are so many of them. What does it mean to say that a typical MRI machine might go through a million billion billion helium atoms in a given year?Frankly, I'm not sure, but it's a lot. Especially considering how long it takes for a Uranium nucleus to decay. The reason we have any helium around at ALL is because we have SO MUCH URANIUM in the earth.Rather than attempt to wildly estimate the rate at which helium is produced deep underground, it's better to explain that uranium lifetime - that 4.5 billion years - a bit more precisely.In part three of this series, we explained that alpha decay was a random sort of thing. It was a “quantum tunneling event” - as physicists are fond of saying. It's not guaranteed to happen at any given point in time. But it happens at a typical rate. For uranium 238, that's about once every 4.5 billion years.But that framing is a bit misleading.When folks say that uranium-238 has a typical lifetime of 4.5 billion years, they are usually referencing its “half-life”. And the “half-life” is a technical term used by scientists to model the decays of radioactive elements. But it's pretty easy term to understand.The half-life of an isotope, like uranium-238, is the time it takes for HALF of the material to decay. So in 4.5 billion years - about the age of the earth - half of the uranium-238 present today will decay to thorium-234. For each one of those decays, we'll get a new atom of helium.You might see now, how helium is such a nonrenweable resource. In some sense, about HALF of all the helium we could ever get from uranium-238 has already been formed. And in the next 4.5 billion years, we'll only get HALF of that half, more.While we don't really know how much that is, it's still a pretty sizable amount. The really challenging part, which we discussed in part two, is getting the helium that's LEFT out of the ground.HeatEvery time a nucleus decays underground, energy is released. A good chunk of that energy goes into the motion of the ejected particle, like the alpha particle. Those particles bounce around in the Earth's mantle and crust, banging into all kinds of other atoms, distributing that energy around.Those kinds of atomic collisions are what we talk about when we talk about heat.Heat is nothing other than the motion of individual atoms. If it's a fluid - like helium gas - that heat amounts to the actual kinetic energy of the individual atoms. If it's a solid, its more of the vibrational energy of the individual atoms shaking together.Nuclear decays contribute a LOT of heat to the Earth.Physicists have estimated the annual heat radiated by all radioactivity of Uranium and Thorium to be about 20 trillion watts. It's a bit like comparing apples to oranges, but this value isn't that far from the 17.7 trillion watts of electrical power consumed by humanity in 2020.That's a LOT of heat, and we feel the effects of all that heat all the time. Geothermal PowerRadioactivity isn't really keeping you warm at night. Not unless you're sitting in a geothermal hot spring, perhaps near Yellowstone National Park. Light and other radiation from the SUN does most of the warming of our planet's surface and the atmosphere.But INSIDE the earth is another matter. Physicists estimate that about HALF of the Earth's internal heat is driven by radioactive decay. That's a tremendous amount of heat.Heat being heat, flows. It tries to warm up colder things. The heat from inside the Earth - where temperatures are measured in the 1000s of degrees - flows towards the surface. Sometimes it pops out: volcanic eruptions, geysers and steam vents are common all around the Earth.The intense heat inside the Earth is believed to liquify rock - the mantle - and cause a churning or convention of that fluid - just like you'd see in a steaming cup of coffee or tea - but on a planetary scale.The most apparent effect of all that churning has been a model for the evolution of the surface of the earth called plate-tectonics. All our known land masses on Earth are just bits of crust shuffling around on the Earth's churning, molten mantle.Reality is more nuanced than that, of course, but the analogy works well enough. How fascinating that the forces that create very surface of the Earth - the mountains, oceans and continents are driven by radioactive decay! Helium - the alpha particle - is in some sense the byproduct of the Earth's internal heat engine.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.A few References and Resources for you.Isotopes of Helium:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_heliumHelium Fact Sheet from NIST:https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/inchi/InChI%3D1S/HeWe've got fun details about Protons, Neutrons and the atomic nucleus on our Field Guide website.Some helpful links to ideas about nuclear binding energy:http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/NucEne/nucbin.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_binding_energy... and that famous plot.The Alpha ParticlePart 3 - Binding EnergyAt this point you might be wondering. This is all great, but helium is a chemical element. It's a gas. What on Earth does helium have to do with particle physics?! We're almost there. And when you see the connection, you might freak out. But let's briefly review what we know so far.Helium is a gas trapped underground and made up of Helium atoms. Each atom has a nucleus with two protons. Almost all of the helium on Earth also has two neutrons. The chemistry of Helium is rather boring. Helium is a noble gas. It doesn't usually form chemical bonds .The nuclear physics of Helium by comparison, is fascinating. So let's talk about some nuclear physics.Chemistry vs Nuclear PhysicsPart of what makes Chemistry so hard to understand is the diversity of the elements. With almost 100 possibilities, the number of combinations of elements - the number of molecules - is effectively limitless. Nuclear physics, by contrast, includes only protons and neutrons. Doesn't that feel a little more manageable?The nuclei of atoms are considerably easier to wrap your mind around. They're super tiny globs, made up of only protons and neutrons, bound together into a ball. That's it.Admittedly, it is weird that nuclei are so small compared to the rest of the atom. And it is weird that almost all of the atomic mass sits inside the nucleus. But at least it's organized neatly.Of course, the insides of those individual protons and neutrons is horribly complicated. Those particles are sloppy bags of subatomic goo that are extremely difficult to describe mathematically. Because all that madness is neatly organized in those tiny packages - those protons and neutrons - we won't worry about it here. But we will say that all that crazy internal subnuclear goo leaves a residual “stickiness” around the edges of the particles.That residual stickiness is still pretty powerful. Pulling apart a chemical bond might cost something like 5 electron Volts of Energy - or less! Want to pull a proton off a Helium atom? That'll cost you almost two million times as much energy.And that's a good thing. The nucleus only has positive electric charge. It's just protons and neutrons. If those nuclear bonds - that nuclear stickiness - weren't so strong, they might just blow apart!The nuclear force, is seams, it's much, much stronger than the electrical force. Nuclear physics might seem simpler to describe at first, but it is a VERY different kind of physics.Binding EnergyIt's not really possible to go in and just pull a proton out of a nucleus. But thinking about doing that - and thinking about how much energy is required - is a good proxy for thinking about how tightly bound the nucleus is.Those protons and neutrons like to be bound together. Especially those neutrons.We call the typical amount of energy it takes to pull one of those particles off the nucleus, the binding energy.If you lined up all the different nuclei by size, you'd see a stark contrast in binding energy.On the small side, you'd see things like hydrogen: A single proton with one or two neutrons. You'd also find Helium-3 and Helium-4. Lithium and so on. Their typical binding energy is pretty small, relatively speaking.On the large side you'd see bismuth and uranium. Thorium and all their various isotopes. They're binding energy is pretty strong.The generic trend is that nuclei become more tightly bound with more and more particles. It happens pretty rapidly, with Carbon - having only 6 protons - having eight times the binding energy of the smallest nucleus. That rapid growth in binding energy levels off soon enough, so that atoms like Iron-56 enjoy some of the most tightly bound nuclei around. At that point the nucleus becomes a little too crowded and the binding energy slowly declines a little bit. But there is one, major outlier in this pattern. Helium-4.For it's size, the Helium-4 nucleus is extremely tight. Alarmingly tight. It has well over double the binding energy of Helium-3, and is 20% tighter than those slightly heavier, Lithium nuclei.You're not gonna break up Helium-4. Even if it's trapped inside a larger nucleus. Radioactive DecayTo understand how special the Helium-4 nucleus is, it helps to go to the other end of the nuclear spectrum.Really big nuclei, some of the biggest naturally occurring, like Uranium and Thorium, are kind of a mess. They look a lot like blobs, but in a sense a bit disorganized. A little too big for their own good. They're still bound together, but if it you hit them with a neutron, say, they'd shatter. Sometimes, on rare occasion, they break apart on their own. Spontaneously. This is called radioactive decay.There are all kinds of ways nuclei can decay. There is plenty of room for nuance, but an easy way to think about it is to ask what kind of particles come out? This is essentially the way radioactivity was discovered.Typically, the nucleus just fires out a single particle. For historical reasons those kinds of particles were called: alphas, betas or gammas. Accordingly, we call those kinds of radioactive decay alpha-decay, beta-decay and gamma-decay.Beta rays turned out to be electrons, and Gamma rays are just photons. But what is Alpha?Alpha DecayHere's a way to think about the alpha decay of a big, honking nucleus. Sometimes clusters of protons and neutrons within that nucleus are bound just a little MORE tightly. That cluster might bounce around the inside of the nucleus, bouncing back against the surface from time to time. Until…A some point… accidentally… it finds itself just a little too far away from the edge of the nucleus.It's a random occurrence, but, at that point, it breaks from that residual, nuclear stickiness, and the electrical repulsion of all the OTHER protons in the nucleus takes over and that tiny cluster rapidly get pushed away. Another way to think of alpha decay is that it's just quantum mechanics at work, sniffing out the lowest possible energy for all the particles - or groups of particles - involved.That tiny cluster is an alpha particle. The alpha particle emitted by this process of alpha radiation virtually always has the same charge and the same mass. Can you guess what that isTwo neutrons and two protons. Yup. It's Helium-4. Finally. After all of this talking. Here we are. Helium-4 is formed by radioactive decay of heavy elements. And here on Earth, we have a LOT of heavy elements. We'll talk about what that all means for us, next time.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.A few References and Resources for you.Isotopes of Helium:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_heliumHelium Fact Sheet from NIST:https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/inchi/InChI%3D1S/HeSuperconducting Magnets from the National Magnetic Field Laboratoryhttps://nationalmaglab.org/about/maglab-dictionary/superconducting-magnetThe US Federal Helium Programhttps://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/helium/federal-helium-programThe American Chemical Society Podcast on the Helium Shortagehttps://cen.acs.org/business/specialty-chemicals/Podcast-helium-shortages-changed-science/98/web/2020/10The Helium Privatization Act of 1996https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/PLAW-104publ273Planet Money Episode on the Helium Shortageshttps://www.npr.org/2019/08/16/751845378/episode-933-find-the-heliumThe Alpha ParticlePart 2 - The Helium ShortageIt may have been a while, but have you ever been to a birthday party in a big auditorium? You know, lots of tables. Party favors. Screaming kids. Maybe a clown or a magician? And balloons. Helium filled balloons. Where do all the balloons that kids “accidentally” let go wind up? Yeah. Exactly. The ceiling. Last time, we pondered the question, where on Earth do you go to find Helium gas? Raw. In the wild. Hopefully, thanks to this party analogy, the answer is now clear.We can collect helium when it's trapped by a ceiling. Trapped Underground.Helium is mined with natural gas. While drilling into gas wells, through the capstone rock at the top of the Earth's crust, helium is released. Some wells have more helium than others. Some of the biggest sources of helium - apparently - come from natural gas wells near the biggest deposits of heavy elements like Uranium and Thorium. Like natural gas, there's a huge, international commodities market for helium. Because Helium does not interact with other chemicals, it is strongly preferred for numerous industrial applications.For example.Helium is used whenever you want to avoid exposure to reactive elements, particularly those in air. Welders use helium as a shield to keep the weld itself from exposure to reactive chemicals like oxygen and water vapor. Ship builders use helium to detect leaks in the hull of ships. It's not corrosive and unusual to find in the surrounding environment. If you fill part of a ship's hull with pressurized helium, and find some helium gas outside the ship - especially near a weld or some other joint - you probably have a leak.Rocket scientists and engineers use helium to clean and pressurize rocket fuel tanks. And of course, we use it for balloons: both of the weather and party varieties. Actually, that's something that might be surprising. Hundreds of weather balloons are launched every day - all over the globe - to collect data about atmospheric conditions for weather forecasting. I should say that these balloons are enormous, bigger than a typical human at launch. Many - although certainly not all - of those weather balloons are filled with helium gas. Some are filled with hydrogen gas, which though much cheaper is arguably much more dangerous to work with.So far, most of those applications are pretty intuitive. Helium doesn't form chemical bonds, so it's a good gas to use for physical, industrial purposes. But there is another application of helium that is far less intuitive: cooling.Modern air conditioning and refrigeration systems typically use a working fluid to absorb heat and carry it away, so it can be vented. If you've ever put coolant in the engine of your car, you're familiar with this idea. Liquid helium plays the role of coolant in devices that need to be really, really cold. Like minus -452 degrees F cold. That's like negative -269 C. By comparison, the average temperature on the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto is -387°F (-232°C). What on Earth would need to be kept colder than that?In a word, Magnets. MRI machines - magnetic resonance imaging - is a three dimensional, medical technology that lets us explore what's going on in inside of our bodies, noninvasively. MRI works by generating a huge magnetic field. The nuclei of all the atoms inside the machine - say the atoms in our bodies - all have tiny little magnetic fields themselves. The huge magnetic field of the machine causes those little atomic fields to line up and dance, returning a magnetic field signal that we can measure, and use to build images. Sort of like a three-dimensional X-ray, although without the potentially harmful dosage of high energy radiation.Since the chemistry of living tissue really only depends on the atomic electron clouds that surround the nucleus - no harm is done to the body by the MRI machines.MRI machines use helium to keep their superconducting magnets cold. Really cold. Colder than Pluto cold. Why?At such cryogenic temperatures, the electrical resistance in the wires completely vanishes. It's a phenomena from quantum mechanics known as superconductivity. And that TECHNOLOGY ALONE is fascinating and deserves a podcast in its own right. But for now, let's see how superconducting magnets work at really cold temperatures.Electromagnets are made by coiling lots and lots of wire in to lots and lots of loops. The more loops the better. The more loops you make - and the more current you can push through that looped wire, the bigger the magnetic field. Just ask any high school physics student. Now, big magnetic fields are useful for all kinds of things, for instance MRI machines.Electrical resistance limits the amount of current that an electromagnet can hold. The longer the wire, the more resistance that builds up. The more loops we wrap, the more wire we need. So unfortunately for those who want to build big magnets, electrical resistance gives us a trade off between lots of wire loops and lots of current.But as it turns out, when you cool some wires down far enough - like beyond sub plutonian temperatures - that resistance disappears completely. Not approximately. Completely. The current you put into such a cold wire can flow practically forever.This phenomena makes it practical build an electromagnet that can hold a lot of current - and therefore generate a huge magnetic field - for a long time. But we need to keep them cold. Liquid helium cold.Liquid Helium is the main, practical working fluid for these kinds of cryogenic conditions.Over the past twenty years, there's been at least three major supply shortages effecting the helium market. We're just coming out of one now. Trade, international disputes and development have all played a role. In the united states, the shift to hydraulic fracturing for natural gas locked in shale has meant drilling wells where there is no helium to be found. Historically, the US has been a dominant producer of Helium.The Federal Helium Reserve is a facility - a giant natural cave - outside of Amarillo, Texas where its strategic helium supply resides. Given how important helium is to rockets, much of the US production of helium was gobbled up and placed in the reserve.For whatever reason, In 1996, the US Congress reversed course and passed the “Privatization of Helium Act”, which directed the Bureau of Land Management to dismantle the supply, infrastructure and sell off the Helium reserve. This sale initiated a huge supply shock, with sales artificially deflated. This was amended in 2013 to ensure the sales were governed with market stability in mind, but not without stress and uncertainty to the market place. High prices. Short orders. Sleepless nights. The damage was done.Incidentally, the National Helium Supply was supposed to be dismantled by September 30th of this year. While it's not clear what the status of the Reserve is, as of today, the BLM's website has indicated what remains of the system has been transferred to the general services administration.The demand side of the market has responded as best as it could. Efforts on the consumer end - more efficient machines, helium recycling and recapture technology and, where possible, chemical substitutes, together with economic downturn associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has finally lowered demand enough to stabilize the market.These days, more and more wells have come online in Algeria and Qatar, with more on the way, for example, in Siberia. The Helium market is entering a new, diversified structure.Our lives are more bound up with Helium than ever before. You might ask, do we have to mine helium? Can't we just make more? That's a reasonable question. To answer it, we'll need to learn where helium REALLY comes from. And that, is question of Nuclear Physics. And it's a question for next time.Older MRI machines used to go through 2000 liters of Helium of month, although efficient machines might use 20 percent of that amount now. Other scientific research equipment that involves superconducting magnets - notably the large hadron collider (which is 27km in circumference!) are huge consumers of helium. Needless to say, there's a HUGE demand for helium out there.Now, there's a problem with these big, superconducting magnets. Once you cool a magnet down to working temperatures in a big machine like that, you have to keep it cold. Even when you're not using it.Even a controlled warming can irreversibly damage the machine. All that electrical current you've put into that superconducting magnet has to go somewhere. Once the wires warm just a little, electrical resistance reappears and things can get out of control quickly. It's a bit like driving on the freeway and suddenly running into stopped traffic. Not great. If hospitals can't supply their MRI machines with more helium when needed, they could very well be destroyed. You see, even besides cost, a shortage of helium is a really big problem!The demand for helium has grown with these new technologies, and the market for this commodity has been rocky. Helium as we've already seen, once used, just floats away. It is a VERY nonrenewable resource, and given that it comes from natural gas mining, it's also not a very ecologically friendly one.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.Isotopes of Helium:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_heliumHelium Fact Sheet from NIST:https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/inchi/InChI%3D1S/HeThe Alpha ParticlePart 1 - HeliumThe story of Helium - and why it's in short supply - is layered and worth telling in its own right. It brings together ideas in chemistry, technology, radioactivity, welding, rocket engineering, ship-building, geophysics and quantum mechanics.Helium is a major play in the story of ALPHA. By the end of this miniseries, you'll be able to answer these questions: * Where does Helium come from? * How does Quantum Mechanics lead to the formation of Helium? * What is the relationship between Helium and Radioactivity? * What exactly does Helium have to do with plate tectonics and the Aurora? Put differently, these questions are literally asking “WHAT ON EARTH DOES HELIUM HAVE TO DO WITH PARTICLE PHYSICS?!”Before we get to all that. I have a personal question for you. Do you remember your first experience with helium?Helium BalloonsWhen I was a small child, I remember being seriously confused by balloons. On TV and at the grocery store, they were all floating! Tied down with ribbons. And yet, all the balloons we had at home were…all kind of flat. The answer came one day, in a pavilion near my elementary school. I saw someone filling balloons - not from their lungs - but from a giant, metal canister. And all those balloons were floating.“What's that?” I asked the ballon guy. “Helium.” He said. “To fill the balloons.”“Helium.” I said to myself. “Helium.”Where does Helium Come From? It might seem like an obvious question for a child to ask, but it took me a long time to even wonder where Helium came from. That's the thing about modern life, so much stuff is just kinda “there”. Just as carbonation for the coke machine comes from little CO2 tanks, helium - as far as I knew or cared - came on trucks. In big tanks. Like at a dive shop or something.For a long time I just figured, “well they probably pull it out of the air or something”. But you see, that's the thing. Helium floats away. So… how exactly would you just “pull it out of the air?” Shouldn't it all just escape into space?It's funny thing to confront the questions you don't think to ask.Helium Quick FactsJust to get us all on the same page, let's review some basic facts about Helium.Helium is the element that has atomic number two. That is, it's nucleus as TWO protons, and because of that, the helium atom has two electrons in orbit around them.As it turns out, the helium nucleus also has neutrons. Neutrons are particles like protons, but they don't have electric charge. Helium comes naturally in two stable variants: Helium-3 and Helium-4. With 1 and 2 neutrons, respectively.Other isotopes of helium have been created in the lab, adding three, four, five , six SEVEN extra neutrons. Most of these decay almost immediately, but helium 6 and 8 take just under a second to decay.Virtually all the helium found on earth is helium-4. There is very little helium-3. Because they're both stable, it suggests very different origin story for each of those “isotopes”.They really couldn't be more different. Helium-3 is formed in nuclear fusion reactions, typically in stars. Helium-4 is formed by… well. That's the subject of today's whole video!Because chemistry depends almost entirely on electrons, Helium-3 and 4 share the same chemical properties. Helium is a gas at room temperature and pressure, and the density of that gas is pretty low. The air we breath is 10x more dense than helium, which accounts for the whole : breathe helium, sound like a chipmunk party trick.But as well see, being a gas with such a low density comes with all kinds of other problems.Helium floatsHeavy things sink. Light things rise. This is true in the water and in the air. Or both. Ask any swimmer, air bubbles are constantly rising to the surface of the water.The same is true for gases. Our atmosphere is comprised mostly of Nitrogen, Oxygen and Argon gases. As you can see, they all have a similar density. This is no accident. Helium and Hydrogen gas are less dense, and so tend to float away. Anyone who's held a helium-filled balloon has seen this in action.And therein lies the trouble for Helium. If it just rises above the air - if it just floats away - where do you go to find it in the first place? Shouldn't it all just float away? Out of our reach?Well yeah, of course it does. That's why there's a shortage
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Higgs BosonAs far as we know, there is no other particle like the Higgs Boson, but there probably should be.The Higgs is a difficult particle to describe because it almost always manifests in ways that don't resemble particle behavior. The relationship between the photon and magnetic fields comes to mind. We sometimes call the Higgs' amorphous presence the Higgs “field”.Just as magnetic fields can permeate space, so too does the field of the Higgs. Unlike a magnetic field, which usually requires some physical source - like a collection of iron atoms in a refrigerator magnet or a spinning particle like the neutron - the Higgs field is naturally always set to “on”.Every once in a while, a disturbance in that field appears as a particle, the Higgs Boson.When the Higgs does present as a particle, it's fairly heavy. With a mass of 125 GeV, it's one of the heaviest elementary particles around. Like many other heavy particles, the Higgs is unstable. It decays quickly, most often to a quark/antiquark pair, but has a lot of other options. It's mean lifetime is somewhere near 0.0000000000000000000001 = 10^−22 seconds. That is much longer than the W or Z bosons, but still far too fast for a human to have an intuition for.The Higgs does not have an electric charge. Or any charge, practically speaking. Although it does interact with the electromagnetic and weak forces. It's interactions with matter are more intricate.The field of the Higgs interacts with the quarks and the leptons, like the electron and its neutrino. Less like a field and more of a swamp, the Higgs field slows those particles down quite a bit. The added resistance to motion through the Higgs field is something we've come to call mass.In this way, the Higgs field give a tiny mass to many of the elementary particles. A related - but different - effect gives the mass to the W and Z bosons as well.But do not be fooled! The mass endowed by the Higgs mechanism has almost nothing to do with the mass we experience in daily life. Virtually all of that mass comes from interplay of quarks, gluons and the subnuclear goo that surrounds quarks inside of protons and neutrons.The Higgs Boson - the particle excitation of this field - can be found whenever the particles it gives mass to are colliding at high speeds. It's part of the shrapnel, if you like. The Higgs field and its associated boson is surely the odd duck of the subnuclear zoo. There are many questions physicists are still pondering about its nature, such as its mass and outsized role in the universe. One important question seems to be: why is there only one such field? Are there other fields out there, also switched “on” and having some impact on our history, or even our day to day lives? Models that describe the Big Bang and the very earliest moments of our universe - now a precision science - suggest that there should be.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Z BosonEvery once in a while, without warning, an electron is accelerated seemingly out of nowhere. Ripped from whatever atom, molecule or metal it had been associated with, it suddenly becomes it's own ballistic particle. When this happens, a Z-boson has almost certainly been involved.With a mass of 91.2 GeV, the Z boson is the slightly heavier cousin of the W-bosons. Together, W+, W- and Z0 all mediate the weak nuclear force. That is to say, particles with a weak charge toss them back and forth as a way to communicate that force. The W's are famous for radioactive beta decay. The Z's presence is more subtle. But all three are strictly left handed.Unlike the W's, the Z boson has no electric charge. Like the photon, the Z boson is its own antiparticle. In many ways, the Z-boson is very similar to the photon. They share a common origin. They are quite literally mixed up with the Higgs boson.The Z's don't hang around very long. Being so heavy, they decay into all kinds of things: quarks, muons, neutrini, you name it! Like the W's, they appear for something like 3×10^−25 seconds before decaying. A photon can't even get across a proton that quickly.In principle, the proton and the electron should be able to communicate by sending both photons and Z-bosons. Although the Z-boson's mass means that the strength of such interactions between particles dissipates quickly with distance, further diluting the already weak, weak nuclear force.That said, the Z can a have dramatic effect on everyday particles.Because the weak force is so weak, the humble neutrino almost never interacts with anything. This is probably good, because there are unfathomably many of them all around us, all the time. Given the sheer number of neutrini, it is a statistically inevitable that one will interact with something. A neutrino can push on an electron by the quick exchange of a Z-boson, a bit like throwing a bowling ball at an ice skater. Since we can't otherwise see the neutrino, and the Z decays so quickly, from our perspective it will appear that the electron suddenly was accelerated, seemingly out of now here.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The W BosonWith a mass of 80.4 GeV, the W-bosons are heavy particles. On paper, they carry the weak nuclear force and have much in common with the photon and the gluon. But look closely, these bosons are very different beasts.The W's most glaring difference is that heavy mass. The photon and the gluon are massless, and so in principle travel at the speed of light. The photon traverses the universe essentially impeded, while the gluons trap themselves into other nuclear particles.The W-bosons might similarly trap themselves, if not for the fact that they decay. Rapidly. On average they only appear for 0.0000000000000000000000003 = 3×10^−25 seconds, a mere blip that we can only really see because we know where to look. The W's decay into either quarks or leptons, they're so heavy there's a lot of room for diversity.There are other complications. Notably, the W-bosons also carry electric charge. The same values of charge that the electrons and protons have, plus or minus e. There are two W bosons, one with each charge, and they are antiparticles of themselves.The appearance of the electric charge in a seemingly unrelated force has deep implications for particle physics that we will uncover when we look to the Higgs. Being so weak, and carrying the charges of the much stronger electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force cannot bind its own charges together into little molecules like the gluons do. But it still tries! The results are explosive and typically observed in the wild as radioactive “beta” decay. Other opportunities to see tracks of the W-bosons include other particle decay: taus to muons, muons to electrons, or even charged pions to muons. K-capture, where a nuclei eats an electron, is also evidence that a W boson was present.One final oddity about the W-bosons is that they - like their cousin the Z - are all left-handed. This is technical fact mired in technicalities, but suffice it to say W-bosons can only communicate with particles are spinning clockwise relative to their motion. Under the right circumstances - as originally laid on in the famous Wu experiment - you can see the W bosons decaying to electrons that only go left, not right.Why the W's should prefer left handed particles remains a mystery, although it is almost surely related to the host of oddities involved with the neutrino's mass.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The GluonThe forces of nature are communicated by particles. Electric charges push and pull on each other with photons. Protons and neutrons communicate by pion. How this works involves a bit of mathematics, but a rough analogy often used is two ice skaters on a frozen lake throwing bowling balls back and forth.This is all well and good for particles zooming freely through space. But how to do the quarks locked inside those protons, neutrons and pions communicate with each other? The strong nuclear force - the fundamental force behind the subnuclear junk we find inside the nucleons - is communicated via a particle very similar to the photon. But you'll have to excuse their name, however apt. The particles that communicate between quarks are called gluons.Yes, as in glue.Like the photon, gluons have no mass. They're just little packets of nuclear force energy. Unlike the photon, gluon communication is a mess. Photons only communicates between particles with electric charge. Gluons communicate not only with quarks, but also amongst themselves!That's why nucleons are so messy. The quarks throw out gluons to communicate, but those gluons also through out gluons, who also throw out gluons who also throw out gluons. And any quark or gluon can also receive a gluon. Rather than a nice, orderly dialog between a couple of parties, that nuclear force is a boisterous mob! The force that binds that mob together is really quite strong, whence the name, the strong nuclear force. This is good, because it keeps all that gluonic madness contained inside those neutrons, protons and the pions.The strong force equivalent of electric charge is called color charge. If electric charges come in a spectrum from negative to positive, the color charge comes in three distinct spectra, each from negative to positive. For lack of a better name, these three color charges been called red, green and blue. As you might have guessed, subnuclear naming conventions are pragmatic to a fault.Atoms like hydrogen are electrically neutral combinations of positive and negative electric charge: one positively charged proton, one negatively charged electron. Pions are like this too, and come in pairs like red-antired, blue-antiblue and green-anti green. So are the anti-pions.Big hadrons like protons, neutrons and the Deltas are special. Here the three quarks each have a different color: red, green or blue. To join together, one of each color must be present. Like incandescent light coming from a lightbulb or the sun, sometimes we call this combination colorless. Antiparticles like anti protons have all three anti-colors, which are also colorless.To be clear, this has nothing to do with light. Or actual colors. It's just a mnemonic physicists invented to explain how a three-dimensional system of charges works.Color charge gives us a simple explanation for why protons and neutrons communicate by pion. These composite particles are all colorless! So their internal structures - all that infinite mesh of nuclear gluon goo - are essentially isolated from one another. In other words, that mess of color charge condenses to form colorless droplets, and those droplets happen to look like nucleons or pions.Like water, that condensation happens when things cool down. Unlike water, the temperature for quark-gluon condensation is extremely high. So high that the universe only really experienced it for the first few minutes after the Big Bang. It's a temperature that amounts to an average energy of 246 MeV per particle. That is, roughly speaking, twice the mass of a pion. Experiments have achieved these temperatures in the lab and have essentially observed the melting of nuclei.Finally, you might wonder why there are three colors and not four. Or five. Physicists also wonder about this, and so far we don't know the answer. There are plenty of models that could explain why we have precisely three subnuclear color charges, but all we know is three colors fit the data. A fourth color would mean that protons would have FOUR quarks. It is comforting to know that the basic results of the physics are mostly independent of the number of colors. A strong force with three, four or five colors are fairly similar. Particles would still condense into colorless combinations, although the precise details would depend on the number of colors. Nevertheless, basic quark-gluon modeling software like Pythia are essentially agonistic about the number of colors present.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Delta BaryonsThe Delta baryons are combinations of up and down quarks. They're like the proton and the neutron, only much more heavy and much less stable. They all seem to have about the same mass - around 1232 MeV, but we don't really have a good handle on it. That is mostly because the Delta baryons lives are so short. They decay extremely quickly, in 5.6×10^−24 seconds.There are four delta baryons, corresponding to all triplet combinations of up and down quarks: Δ++ = uuu, made from three up quarks, which has an electric charge of +2e Δ+ = uud, made from two up quarks and one down, which has an electric charge of +e Δ0 = ddu, made from two up quarks and one down, which has an no electric charge Δ- = ddd, made from three down quarks, which has an electric charge of -e What makes these combinations different from protons and neutrons is their spin. The uud of the Δ+ might look like a proton, but it has a higher intrinsic angular momentum. The quarks are zooming around each other - and all that subnuclear goo - with more energy than they do in the proton, which explains the higher mass. In other words, Δ-baryons are excited states of the proton or neutron. And excited states decay. They decay so quickly because the strong nuclear force - the same force that holds them together - is so strong.The electron cloud of an atom can be similarly excited: their electrons can bounce up to a higher energy orbital state, often with more angular momentum. When they decay, they tend to emit photons. If you've seen glow in the dark toys - or pictures that glow under UV light - you've seen electron cloud decays with your own eyes.The Δ-baryons decay similarly, although being bags of quarks they emit pions.Δ baryons play a crucial role in limiting the speed of cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are mostly comprised of protons flying through deep space - some at outrageously high velocities. Once those protons are accelerated up to enough energy - 5×10^19 eV - which is about the kinetic energy of a child walking (contained in SINGLE PARTICLE!) - they tend to collide with the photons left around from the Big Bang. Those collisions, from the perspective of those ridiculously fast protons, are extremely energetic, and Δ-baryons are produced. These of course decay almost immediately into proton, neutrons and pions, effectively converting that stupidly high kinetic energy into pion radiation. In other words, intergalactic friction in the universe is provided by Δ-baryon production and decay.Of course, we still see a few cosmic rays with energies far beyond that limit, so its not a perfect speed limit, but a pretty effective one.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Neutral PionIn many ways, the neutral pion - sometimes call the π0 meson - is closely related to the charged pions. In others, the neutral pion is a truly bizarre little beast.There are so many kinds of pions because there are so many ways to combine up and down quarks into particle/antiparticle pairs. The neutral pions are kind of a mixed bag of up quarks paired with antiup quarks, and down quarks paired with antidown quarks. The electric charges are always canceled between these antiparticle partners. The neutral pion is a great example of how antimatter isn't always a destructive thing.Owing to this special structure, the neutral pion is its own antiparticle. π0 mesons decay much, much faster than their charged siblings, a literal billion times faster. They only stick around for about 8.5×10^−17 =0.000000000000000085 seconds. Yikes! That's so small it probably doesn't mean anything to most of us! By particle standards, it's a properly fast decay.The charged pions decay via the weak nuclear force. The neutral pions decay via the electromagnetic force, which is much, much stronger. Which is why they decay much faster. However uninspiring their short lifetimes might be, how these particle decay is truly fascinating.Neutral pions decay into a pair of photons almost all the time. When they don't, its because one or more of those photons converted implicitly to an electron/positron pair. This decay happens because of the so-called chiral anomaly, which is an extremely subtle feature of the laws of our universe.The chiral anomaly emerges as an event - a blip or moment in time - where the quarks that make up the neutral pion quantum mechanically convert into all kinds of quarks - up down strange top bottom whatever - all at once. It's kind of reminiscent of the nuclear goo that's inside a pion or a proton. That goo collectively and cleanly self annihilates into a pair of photons - and it does so with remarkably efficiency.This is a purely quantum phenomenon - microscopic correction at that - which has a lot of real world consequences. Tthe chiral anomaly depends on all the quarks all at once, even ones that might be so heavy we haven't seen yet. As it turns out, to correctly compute the measured pion lifetime, the total number of quark species must be six. Precisely six.As it also turns out, we've already observed six different kinds of quarks which, on the one hand, is a bummer. On the other, in an amazing consistency check on the known laws of physics. It's how we know our understanding of nature is on the right track.Because these neutral pions decay to photons of a very specific energy, they are very easy to look for. Astronomers will routinely see them while looking into space! π0 decays are often associated with supernovae - that is, exploding stars - which suggests two things. First, exploding stars explode with such power that they act as gargantuan particle accelerators. Second, having giant, cosmic particle accelerators explains the large number of ultra high energy cosmic rays that are responsible for the cosmogenic muons raining down upon all the time.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Charged PionsQuarks make up more than big, triplet particles like protons and neutrons. Sometimes they come in pairs. A pair of up and down down quarks is called a pion.There are three kinds of pions: pi plus, pi minus and pi zero. Compared to the proton, they're quite small and a little quirky. They're certainly unstable. Today we'll talk about those charged pions, π±.Like the proton, pions are mostly comprised of nuclear goo. Unlike the proton, that goo surrounds only two quarks. Or, really, a quark/antiquark pair. A π+ has an up quark together with an antidown quark. That gives is an electric charge of 2/3 + 1/3 = 1, That is to say, π+ has exactly the same charge as the proton. Being the antiparticle, π− is made up of a down quark, with an anti up quark. And of course all that nuclear goo. Its electric charge is precisely the opposite.The charged pions have a mass of 139.6 MeV, making them just a tiny bit heavier than the muon. They are unstable particles, and given their mass typically decay into such muon, emitting a neutrino in the process. The muon, of course, is also unstable. It too decays to an electron and a pair of neutrinos. That's pretty typical. Pion to muon to electron. A π+ will decay to an antimuon, who has a positive charge, and an antimuon decays to a positron.When cosmic rays smash into the molecules of the upper atmosphere, creating the showers of muons we deal with on a day to day basis, pions are the first on the scene. They're some of the first particles produced, and they don't have around for too long. Charged pions decay within about 30 nanoseconds.Pions belong to a class of nuclear particles called mesons, which were originally thought up by Hideki Yukawa way back in 1934. To some extent, the play the role of communicating between the protons and neutrons. In that way, they are partially responsible for the residual nuclear force that binds atomic nuclei together. You can kind of think of them like photons, only for the nuclear force.Occasionally a bunch of pions are created together, and you can see little pion atoms - pionium - where pi plus and pi minus orbit each other for a short time. Curiously, the pionium atom typically decays not to the pair π+ π-, but to a pair of π0's. This is a kind of of matter/antimatter annihilation. Less frequently, pionium annihilates into a pair of photons.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The NeutronWith a mass of 939.565 MeV, the neutron is the second lightest baryon - that is, a particle made up of three quarks. The neutron's quarks include one up and two downs, so it is total electric charge is zero:2/3e − 2×1/3e = 0The neutron may be electrically neutral, but don't let that fool you, it still interacts with the electromagnetic field.Like the earth - and the proton - the neutron has a tiny magnetic field. It's a dipole field: with a north and south pole. Because moving electric charges generate magnetic fields, you might expect a spinning electric charge, like the proton, to have a magnetic field, but not the neutron. And yet it does.What's curious about the neutron's magnetic field is that its so strong. It's about 60% that of proton, although oppositely orientated. This fact was probably the first clue that the neutron wasn't a fundamental particle, but was made up of some other junk.The neutron is just a tiny bit heavier than the proton, which is fitting given that the down quark is just a tiny bit heavier than the up quark. Because the up and down quarks are related by the weak nuclear force, the neutron is unstable! Left to its own devices, one down quark will eventually decay to an up, emitting an electron and a neutrino in the process. This is all very hard to see, given that the neutron's quarks swim in a bag of nuclear goo, but the net effect is that an electron sails away with a negative charge, leaving behind a positively charged proton.Alone, the average life expectancy of a neutron is something like 15 minutes - which is an eternity by particle physics standards.Given that a neutron decays in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee, you might wonder why we have any neutrons left in the universe. Suffice it to say, neutrons are like cattle. When they're herded together in a nucleus, they're far more stable. In fact, the number of neutrons goes up as the size of the nucleus does too. Helium-4 has two protons and two neutrons, and it's pretty much stable. Iron-60 has 26 protons and 34 neutrons. It lives for millions of years. Uranium-238 has 92 protons and 146 neutrons. It lives for billions of years.Unstable alone, yet stable in packs, the humble neutron is all around us, and makes up a good chunk of our mass, too.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The ProtonWith a mass of 938.27 MeV, the proton is the lowest energy configuration of a trio of quarks. It has two up quarks and a down, but remember most of that mass is made up of subnuclear goo. You can find protons literally everywhere: from the nuclei of atoms on Earth to collisions at ultra high speeds from deep in outer space.From our accounting of electric charge, the proton has two copies of the up charge, and one of the down, which means that electric the charge of the proton is2/3e + 2/3e − 1/3e = e.So far as we can tell, the proton is stable. It's the only stable quark triplet or baryon because it has the lowest mass. Anything heavier would decay… to it. There are a host of experiments looking for evidence that protons decay, but so far all we can say is that it's average lifetime longer than 10^34 =10000000000000000000000000000000000 years. That's like expecting to find only a single proton decay out of all the atoms in one million people per year. There are a lot of reasons to expect the proton to decay - at lot of really compelling, interesting ones. But they're all hypothetical extensions to the standard model of particle physics. So again, as far as we know, the proton is stable. And all quark triplets - the baryons - eventually decay to the proton.Given that the down quark mass is slightly heavier than the up quark mass, one might think that the lightest baryon would be a triplet of up quarks: uuu. If it were, the electric charge would be 3×2/3e = 2e.But it is not. Again, it is important to remember that a baryon's mass is made up almost entirely by its internal energy. The uuu-baryon does exist - its called a Δ++ , but its internal energy - and therefore its mass - is quite a bit larger than that of the proton.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Up and Down QuarksThe nuclei of atoms are made up of protons and neutrons, which you can think of as tiny bags of nuclear junk: heavy, condensed slimeballs that are hard to describe mathematically. All that said, those nucleons do have structure: they each are comprised of three subatomic particles known as quarks.There are all kinds of quarks, but the two most relevant for everyday life are the up and the down quarks. The proton has two up quarks and one down quark. The neutron has two down quarks and and up quark. Don't read too much into those names.It's probably silly to assign electric charges to quarks because they're never found alone. They're always found in clumps of two or three or sometime five. But if you insist on the bean counting, you can give the up quark 2/3 of the proton's positive charge. By that accounting, the bottom quark must have an electric charge of −1/3. The neutron, having two down quarks and an up, has a total electric charge of zero.Unlike the heavy nucleons, these quarks are rather light, with far smaller masses than even the electron. The mass of the up quark is somewhere around 2 MeV, and the mass of the down quark is closer to 5 MeV. This presents a mystery, as the mass of the three quarks in the proton and the neutron sum only to 9 and 12 MeV, respectively. Considering how both nucleons weigh in as almost 1000 MeV, we've got some serious accounting left to do.Quarks are surrounded by - and constantly buzzing around with - all sorts of other particles. Heavier stuff. The reason for all that heavier junk - the reason the quarks are surrounded by all that nuclear goo is that they are strongly attracted to one another. The aptly named strong nuclear force - the fundamental force of nature that binds quarks into bigger particles - is very strong indeed.The rest of proton's mass is all that subnuclear slime, all that buzzing around and other odd quantum effects. It's kind of like a bit of wild internal, kinetic energy, like a beehive in a box.This odd feature of nucleon masses is noteworthy because almost 99% of the mass of the nucleus is that subnuclear goo, and the nucleus itself makes up well over 99% fo the mass of the atom. In other words, the mass we experience in day to day life comes from that quantum, nuclear slime.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The NeutrinoThe tiny, neutral one - or neutrino - has caused a lot of consternation since its discovery.As the positively charged proton has the neutral neutron, so too does the electron has a neutral partner, the neutrino. Unlike the proton or the neutron, which both interact via the all of nature's forces, the neutrino only interacts via the weak force and gravity - making it truly hard to measure. They just don't interact very often.Vast swarms of neutrinos - or neutrini - are passing through the earth - through us! - all the time.We can measure neutrini only because there are so many of them out there. Like electrons, neutrini are stable particles, and are generated all the time in nuclear reactions. Fusion in the core of the sun is a huge source of neutrini. So are the radioactive decays of heavy elements deep within the Earth. So is the nuclear fission in power plants. Even outer space is chockablock full of neutrini!The neutrino comes in three flavors, each partnered with a charged lepton. The electron has its electron neutrino. The muon has its muon neutrino. The tau has its tau neutrino.The neutrino is far and away the lightest, massive particle ever discovered. Its mass is so small experiments haven't even been able to pin down its value. Their mass appears to be less than an eV. It's not even known which neutrino is the heaviest. The neutrino is so light it was originally thought to be massless. Some rather clever experiments have now ruled that possibility out. How can it be that we know the neutrino has a mass, but not know what that mass is? This fact has a curious - if convoluted - explanation.There are three kinds of neutrinos, each with its own mass. But here's the thing: the electron neutrino is a combination of all three. So is the muon neutrino. and so is the tau neutrino. In short, a neutrino's identity is a total mess! This was a major confusion for a long time. What we now understand is that there's a difference between the mass of the neutrino and its flavor - you know, electron, muon or tau. One of the few known particle species with this propertyTo make things even more confusing, we don't even know if the neutrino has a distinct, antiparticle partner, like the positron or if it is its own antiparticle, like the photon.Untangling the identity of a neutrino is a tricky business, mostly because they can change from one flavor to another without changing their mass. This means the lightest neutrini don't decay, they oscillate between flavors.To measure neutrini you need huge experiment. Literally. A big target to hit, with lots and lots of nuclei. Neutrino collisions are just so rare. One particularly ambitious experiment uses a large portion of the the glacial cap of the Earth's South Pole as a detector!
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The TauThe tau is a very heavy species of elementary particle that aren't quite as common as the electron or the muon. Nevertheless, just as the muon shares many of the properties with the electron, so too does the tau.Like all elementary particles, taus have no known size. But they do have a known mass. At 1776.86 MeV, it's a pretty big mass. That's well over 3000 times the mass of the electron, or just shy of 17 times the mass of the muon. That large mass is key to understanding the tau, especially how it decays.Taus are not stable. Heavy particles rarely are. Taus decay to all kinds of other stuff. Generally, heavier particles can decay into lighter particles so long as things like electric charge are conserved. Muons aren't terribly heavy, and so decay primarily to electrons because there's not much else to decay to. Taus by contrast, are so heavy they can decay into all kinds of things.Because taus are so heavy, they can decay to hadrons - a fancy name for all that nuclear junk - and those decays happen quickly. Very quickly. There are just so many options. On average the taus only live for about 2.9×10^-13 seconds. Forget nanoseconds. That's less than a picosecond! That's why taus so rare, they just don't survive very long.Taus, like electrons, also have antiparticle partners. The antitau, which comes complete with a positive electric charge.Eighty-six percent of the time, taus decay to nuclear junk. There are so many possibilities. The other twenty-four percent of tau decays go to muons. Given the large mass of the tau, there is a lot of rest mass energy - E = mc^2- to go around. Cataloging all the different options is a precision science that lets us study the minute details of particle physics. Those details can tell us a lot about other kinds of things. The tau is the heaviest in the family of charged leptons: Electron. Muon. Tau. So far as we can tell, that's the end of the pattern. Calculations have shown that another, even heavier version of the electron would throw off many of the precise relationships between other particles, and lead to predictions that are already ruled out by experimental observations.Like I said, those precision details of tau decays - together with other precision measurements in particle physics - can tell us a lot about our universe.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The MuonMuons are a lesser known species of elementary particles that are extremely common, at least on Earth. They're falling all around us, all the time. Muons are created by the collision of particles from outer space smashing into the molecules of the upper atmosphere.Like all elementary particles, muons have no known size. But they do have a known mass. At 105.7 MeV, its a moderately sized mass. Its about two hundred times the mass of the electron. The muon's electric charge is identical with that of the electron. Indeed, the muon and the electron share many of the same properties.Like the electron, the muon interacts via the electromagnetic, weak and gravitational forces.Unlike the electron, muons are not stable particles. Heavy particles seldom are. They're heavy, and because they otherwise act like electrons, they decay to electrons. That's a pattern we will see in particle physics, over and over again.Muons also have antiparticle partners. Like the positron they're also positively charged. Since muons and antimuons decay, we don't usually worry too much about who's who, unless we're counting charges.Muons decay courtesy of the weak nuclear force, which of course, is a very weak force. So that decay takes a long time. Muons, despite being unstable, are relatively long lived particles, hanging around just over a couple of microseconds. By particle physics standards, a microsecond is an eternity.Muons typically decay into electrons and a pair of neutrini: very light, electrically neutral particles we will meet soon. That decay process is mediated by a heavy, photon like particle, the W boson.Schematically, the muon transforms into that W-boson and a muon neutrino. The W-boson itself then transforms into the electron and an anti-electron neutrino.Life is complicated, of course, and there are a few other alternative scenarios. You see, E=mc^2, and the mass difference between the muon and an electron is pretty sizable, so much of that extra energy gets converted into velocity. But conservation of energy still allows for a few other options.Occasionally - far less than one percent of the time - the muon's decay will create a bonus pair of particles: an electron/positron pair. Rarer still, an extra photon will be produced. Muons, electrons and the W-bosons all participate in the electromagnetic force, so while rare, it isn't totally unexpected.You might be surprised to learn that muons make up a pretty sizable chunk of your annual exposure to radiation. Especially if you fly.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The ElectronThe electron is arguably the most famous of the elementary particles. They are the business end of the atom, and their dynamics give rise to virtually all of chemistry. They're also the basic working particle of electricity, and their presence or absence in the silicon transistors correspond to the digital 0's or 1's of modern computers.Like all elementary particles, they have no known size. But they do have a known mass. It's fairly small, at 0.511 MeV. The electron's electric charge sets the standard for particle physics. With only a few rare exceptions, all known charges are multiples of the electrons electric charge, e.Electrons interact with other particles primarily via the electromagnetic force - photons - but they also feel the weak nuclear force and, of course gravitation.So far as we can tell, electrons are stable particles. They don't decay, and that's good news! A decaying electron would either mean that a lighter particle with the same charge should exist - which we haven't seen - or that electric charge would simply disappear. Any violation of the conservation of electric charge would contradict the very root of our understanding of how the forces of nature work.The electron has an antiparticle partner - which looks almost identical except that its electric charge is positive. It's common practice to call the anti electron a positron. If an electron and a positron meet, sometimes they're orbit each other for a bit, but usually, they just annihilate into a pair of photons.If there's one particle in nature to study, it is definitely the electron.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The PhotonLight is made up of particles: quirky, counterintuitive particles, but particles nonetheless. This fact was a surprise, and is still difficult to internalize, because light is also made up of electromagnetic waves.We call particles of light photons. Photons have no mass, but they do have energy. How could that be, if E = mc^2? Well, Einstein's most famous formula only holds for particles at rest, but photons are never, ever at rest. They're always moving. Worse, they're always moving at the speed of light. Unlike the electron, the proton or other matter particles, the photon doesn't abide by the exclusion principle, which is why so many are allowed to exist in the same configuration. Those collective configurations are something we would call a light wave, or an electric field, or even a magnetic field! If anything, it's quite the opposite of the exclusion principle: photons prefer to hang out in groups. Photons are the messenger particles that communicate the electromagnetic force. Electric charges exchange photons, like just like mobile phones. Photon exchange is the definition of electromagnetic force. Indeed, all the known forces of particle physics involve exchanging similar particles, and we'll visit them all in turn.The details of photon exchange can be intense, mathematically, but we see it all time. Literally, as it turns out, for many of us. That's how our eyes work. They absorb photons.Atoms and molecules exchange energy by emitting and absorbing photons. That's the basic job of the electron cloud. Different atoms and molecules absorb light in different colors, very specific colors, across the whole spectrum of light. So here's the fun part: If you look carefully at light emitted by some object. If you break it apart in a prism say and count all the photons of all the different colors, you can tell what more or less tell what elements that object is made of. It's complicated, sure, but it's just like accounting, only with photons.So when astronomers look to the sky and see stars or interstellar gas, they can look at the different colors of the light and tell exactly what elements those stars are made of. The accounting works, and it's quite comforting to know that the laws of physics here on Earth also hold in outer space.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0 The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov/The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Electron CloudWe are made up of molecules, and molecules are made up of atoms joined together by their electrons - or sometimes, by their lack thereof.Atoms are modeled by a nucleus surrounded by an electron cloud. We've discussed the nucleus earlier; it's the hard center of the atom. It's really, really small, as small as a speck of dust in the middle of a baseball stadium. Despite that fact, the nucleus makes up over 99% of the atom's mass. Electrons are quite light by comparison.The nucleus is small because the nucleons - those protons and neutrons - are bound so tightly together. The electron, by comparison, is barely hanging on. That's why their orbits are so wide.Because electrons are small and light, they are subject to the physics of quantum mechanics. This is a deep and important fact, but for practical purposes it means that the details of their motion around the nucleus are obscured. We can't say with 100% certainty where the electron is, or how it is moving. And this obscurity is central to how atoms work.In traditional models from classical physics, forces like electromagnetism causes charged particles to orbit each other, just like planets orbiting the sun. The size and shape of those orbits are related how much energy those plants have. And unlike planets, electrons are known to lose energy very, very quickly.If electrons were really orbiting in circles or ellipses, the centrifugal force associated to that rotational motion would cause the electrons to lose a tremendous amount of energy. This would eventually collapse the atom, sending the electrons crashing into the nucleus. This paradox occupied was a big concern around the turn of the 20th century.To understand why electrons don't crash into the nucleus, it helps to consider a related mystery. Consider the simple case of the hydrogen atom: a single electron orbiting a single proton. The electron has no orbital angular momentum. How can an electron stay in orbit with a proton without any angular momentum?Quantum mechanics provides a curious - if unsatisfying - resolution to this mystery. It obscures the true position of the electron. The electron is smeared out as a spherical shell around the nucleus. The electron isn't really orbiting. It's just smeared out, hanging in a particular region, which happens to surround the proton. Perhaps this explains the name, electron cloud.It's important to understand that this obscurity isn't just a failure of imagination or a failure of technology. You can prove it mathematically, and verify that proof experimentally. It's not that we don't know the details of the electron's position and momentum, it's as if those details simply don't exist. They aren't real. Weird as it is, it's a literal fact of the universe that keeps the electrons bound to the proton.There's one other oddity that quantum mechanics bestows to the electron that's important to the physics of atoms. It's so important it has a name. It's called the Exclusion Principle and it says that no two electrons can share the same configuration at the same time. That's another deep statement with a lot of technical details, but its practical implications give rise to virtually all of chemistry.The exclusion principle means that each atom essentially has “slots” for individual electrons to fill. Typically, they fill in from lowest to highest energy. The more protons the nucleus has, the more slots for electrons the atom has to fill. Perhaps you learned about these slots in a chemistry class.Higher energy slots have slightly different shapes. Some have angular momentum. Some do not. It is these complicated shapes that allow electrons form bonds between atoms. But this is as this particle physics series, chemical bonds must be another story, for another time.
The Field Guide to Particle Physics https://pasayten.org/the-field-guide-to-particle-physics©2021 The Pasayten Institute cc by-sa-4.0The definitive resource for all data in particle physics is the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.The Pasayten Institute is on a mission to build and share physics knowledge, without barriers! Get in touch.The Atomic NucleusWe are made of molecules, and molecules are made of atoms, and atoms are really, really small. Atoms are so small that its hard for our minds to comprehend it, but if you need a reference point take your height and divide it by a billion. Or maybe ten billion! Atoms are too small to rationalize.When we think about atoms, we model them as a nucleus surrounded by an electron cloud. Today, we are talking about that nucleus.The nucleus is the hard center of the atom. It's much, much smaller than the atom itself: about 100,000 times smaller. It's so small that if the atom were a baseball stadium, the nucleus is smaller than the baseball at the pitcher's mound. Actually, the nucleus is more like a grain of clay atop of the pitcher's mound.Despite this small size, the nucleus makes up over 99% of the mass of the atom. So the nucleus is really, really small and really, really dense.The nucleus is made up of smaller particles: protons and neutrons. Different atoms have different numbers of both, and they are all bound together by a strong force - the aptly named strong nuclear force - a force much stronger than the electromagnetic force that binds molecules together. In some sense the nucleus is so much smaller and denser than the electron cloud because the nuclear force is so much stronger that the electric force.The chemical elements - familiar from the periodic table - are determined by the number of protons in a the nucleus of an atom. You can revisit the table and know immediately how many protons a given nucleus has. Hydrogen has one proton. Carbon has six. Silicon has fourteen, and Iron has twenty-six protons.Atoms of the same element might have different numbers of neutrons. Some numbers are more common than others. Part of this is how those nuclei were created and part of this is stability. For example, you'll never see a hydrogen atom with twelve neutrons. It's just not stable. Unstable nuclei are difficult to form and spontaneously break apart. A nucleus might spit out some particles, or it might even suck in others. On exceptional occasions, a nucleus fracture into multiple pieces. The details are manifold and make up the entire field of nuclear physics. Nuclear physics has given us a chart of which nuclei are known and which are stable. Each has a story, but typically the number of neutrons in a nucleus increases with the number of protons. We'll be sure to share a few of these stories with you in this series.
Frequently asked Questions about Elementary ParticlesWhat is a particle?A particle is a small packet of energy. It's nature's organizational scheme for energy, and energy - so far as we can tell - is never created or destroyed. But it can change forms.Particles can exist for a moment or for an eternity, but they don't really have a distinct existence. Unlike birds, trees or people have that their own distinct features or personalities, particles of the same species are completely indistinguishable. For example, it is physically impossible to tell one proton from another. How big is a particle?Particles may or may not have a definite size, although it's usually fine to think of them as extremely small. A particle's size is usually a determined by their inner workings, by their constituent components. For example, an atom is only as big as the size of its electrons' orbit, where as a proton is almost a million times smaller! Elementary particles, like electrons, don't appear to have any internal structure. Those particles don't even have a well-defined size!What is a charge?Particles are constantly pushing and pulling on each other. A particle's charge determines how strong it can push or pull. A great example is the electric charge: opposite charges attract and like charges repel. Electrons and protons have equal and opposite electric charges, which is why they attract to form atoms.Charges are associated with the forces of nature, like the electromagnetic force. There are also the strong and weak nuclear forces, and each has its own kind of charge. In some sense, the mass is the charge for the force of gravity. Incidentally, force is just a word for another kind of particle, and we'll learn all about them in this guide.Two particles of the same species will always have identical charges.What is a particle's mass?Like you or I, particles can have mass. It's important to remember that there's a difference between mass and weight, but they are proportional to each other. Weight is includes the effect of gravity:weight = mass x gravityOn Mars, you'd have the same mass as you do on Earth, but experience a very different weight. Of course, particles are so light that usually gravity has very little influence on their day to day life.Is it mass or energy?It's both. A particle's mass and energy are related: E = mc^2This is arguably the most famous equation in physics. It tells us one important thing: as weight is proportional to mass, energy is proportional to mass, squared.This fact has an interesting consequences: mass is also proportional to energy, and that means any kind of energy. If you have a bunch of particles zooming around like bees in a closed box - and the box is just sitting on the floor - that box's mass is increased by an amount proportional to the energy of those particles inside the box. That constant of pro- portionality is a doozy though, its the speed of light squared, which is 9 with sixteen zeros after it:mass = Energy /90000000000000000So those particles will have to have a lot of energy to appreciably change the mass of the box. One of the best ways to compare particle species with one another is by their mass. Particles of the same species have the precisely the same mass.What is an MeV?Because E = mc^2, physicists measure mass in units of energy. Volts are a pretty standard way to measure electrical energy. Your wall outlet has somewhere between 120 and 240 volts, which, multiplied by a particle's electric charge gives us the energy:Energy = electric charge × VoltsSo, roughly speaking, and electron - with charge e - comes out of your wall with well over 100 volts times the electric charge or 100 electron volts, or ”eV” for short.A convenient way to measure energy in particle physics is in mega electron volts or MeV. One mega electron volt is million electron volts. Which isn't as big as it sounds. The mass energy of a hydrogen atom is about one thousand MeV.Incidentally, a GeV or giga electron volt, is a billion electron volts.What is a particle's lifetime?Many particles don't live forever, they decay into other things. Particles will always decay into other particles with a smaller mass - otherwise energy wouldn't be conserved! Any left over energy is typically converted into the motion of the newly formed particles.Particle lives are typically quite very short. It's not uncommon for a particle to decay after 0.0000000000000000001 seconds! The decay of a particle is a random event governed by quantum physics. Because it is random, we can't predict exactly how long particles will live, but we can give a pretty detailed estimate. When we talk about a particle's lifetime, we mean an average.Where to Learn MoreCheck out our website at https://pasayten.org. Also, the definitive source for particle data information is given by the Particle Data Group: https://pdg.lbl.gov.
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