Among the many particles that resulted from this crash were
bizarre objects called anti-hypertritons. Not only are these things antimatter,
but they're also what's called strange matter. Where normal atomic nuclei are
made of protons and neutrons (which are made of "up" quarks and
"down" quarks), strange nuclei also have so-called Lambda particles
that contain another flavor of quark called "strange" as well. These
Lambda particles orbit around the protons and neutrons.
If all that is a little much to straighten out, just think
of anti-hypertritons as several kinds of weird.
Though they normally don't exist on Earth, these particles
may be hiding in the universe in very hot, dense places like the centers of
some stars, and most likely were around when the universe was extremely young
and energetic, and all the matter was packed into a very small, sweltering
space.
"This is the first time they've ever been created in a laboratory
or a situation where they can be studied," said researcher Carl Gagliardi
of Texas A&M University. "We don't have anti-nuclei sitting around on
a shelf that we can use to put anti-strangeness into. Only a few anti-nuclei
have been observed so far."
These particles weren't around for too long, though – in
fact, they didn't last long enough to collide with normal matter and
annihilate. Instead they just decayed after a fraction of a billionth of a
second.
"That sounds like a really short time, but in fact on
the nuclear clock it's actually a long time," Gagliardi told SPACE.com.
"In that fraction of a billionth of a second that Lambda particle has already
gone around the nucleus as many times as the Earth has gone around the sun since
the solar system was created."
thinkahol * on 16 May 11COULD the structure of space and time be sketched out inside a cousin of plain old pencil lead? The atomic grid of graphene may mimic a lattice underlying reality, two physicists have claimed, an idea that could explain the curious spin of the electron. Graphene is an atom-thick layer of carbon in a hexagonal formation. Depending on its position in this grid, an electron can adopt either of two quantum states - a property called pseudospin which is mathematically akin to the intrinsic spin of an electron. Most physicists do not think it is true spin, but Chris Regan at the University of California, Los Angeles, disagrees. He cites work with carbon nanotubes (rolled up sheets of graphene) in the late 1990s, in which electrons were found to be reluctant to bounce back off these obstacles. Regan and his colleague Matthew Mecklenburg say this can be explained if a tricky change in spin is required to reverse direction. Their quantum model of graphene backs that up. The spin arises from the way electrons hop between atoms in graphene's lattice, says Regan. So how about the electron's intrinsic spin? It cannot be a rotation in the ordinary sense, as electrons are point particles with no radius and no innards. Instead, like pseudospin, it might come from a lattice pattern in space-time itself, says Regan. This echoes some attempts to unify quantum mechanics with gravity in which space-time is built out of tiny pieces or fundamental networks (Physical Review Letters, vol 106, p 116803). Sergei Sharapov of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kiev says that the work provides an interesting angle on how electrons and other particles acquire spin, but he is doubtful how far the analogy can be pushed. Regan admits that moving from the flatland world of graphene to higher-dimensional space is tricky. "It will be interesting to see if there are other lattices that give emergent spin," he says.
