| days of antiprotons -
11-15-2007, 01:45 PM
Mention anything about antimatter or antiparticles, at once a noisy room full of yakking cosmologists becomes a silent graveyard full of ghostly apparitions. They might just be coming to attention to hear what is being said or they might just be getting ready to bail out for fear of being asked to say something. What is a ghost to a person is what is an antiproton is to a proton. They are the space-time reflection of each other.
Conjuring a reflection would require a special type of physical mirrors using high energy accelerators. Since it has a unit positive charge and opposite magnetic moment, these mirrors must employ the forces of electricity and magnetism separately. Electricity to heat the accelerating charged particles and magnets to guide and to hold them together into a concentrated beam of high energy. This energy is about 6 billions electron volts. The crucial technology was finally achieved in 1955 by Emilio Segrč and Owen Chamberlain at the University of California, Berkeley. The accelerator was the Bevatron. Both received the 1959 Nobel Prize for Physics. Thus began the days of antiprotons from idea to reality, 25 years after its prediction by Paul Dirac.
At the very least, antiprotons have two significant major contributions for the physics of elementary particles and high energy. First, is the experimental verification of the fundamental unification of electromagnetic and nuclear weak forces into a single electroweak force. Second, is the discovery in 1956 the existence of antineutron. However, the most anticipated even greater contribution would have to be the artificial creation of a quark-gluon plasma (GGP). This effort is currently being planned by Germany national lab (GSI) for the construction of a Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) and operational by 2016. QGPs are much more plausible states of the early universe than what cosmologists have been saying. For more information about FAIR, see Science, Volume 318, 2 November 2007, pages 738 and 739.
Time independence: [∂E(g)]˛=[∂F(a)×∂r(a)]·[∂F(b)×∂r(b)] and Mass independence: ¶a(t)·¶r(t)=c˛
|