The Life And Death Of Tennessee Neutrons

A system is said to be “handed,” Greene said, when its mirror image differs from its appearance looking at it directly. For example, a sphere is not handed, but a corkscrew is because its image in a mirror is reversed. The sphere viewed in a mirror looks the same.

Greene and others have long been puzzled by the fact that, in an otherwise symmetric universe, radioactivity viewed at the elementary particle level is left-handed. In the world of physics, the phenomenon is known as parity violation.

“So, is the left-handedness of the universe just an accident, a `broken symmetry,’ or is it a manifestation of a fundamental characteristic of the cosmos?” Greene asked.

Indeed, to have an instrument like the Fundamental Neutron Physics beam line has been the dream of physicists for years, said Greene, who noted that 65 participants from 20 institutions participated in an organizational meeting of the development team at ORNL in 2001.

Recently, the beam line project passed a milestone with the approval of the performance baseline — known as Critical Decision 2.

“This is, in a sense, the formal definition of the scope of the project and represents a detailed agreement between DOE and Oak Ridge National Laboratory as to what will be built, when it will be built, how much it will cost and how the project will be managed,” said Greene.

Greene noted that much work lies ahead, but the benefits of having extremely intense beams of neutrons at their disposal should be phenomenal.  He led the proposal team, which was made up of Vince Cianciolo of ORNL, David Bowman and Martin Cooper of Los Alamos National Laboratory, John Doyle of Harvard University, Christopher Gould of North Carolina State University, Paul Huffman of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Mike Snow of Indiana University.

The beam line will consist of neutron guides, choppers, secondary shutters and shielding, along with the necessary utilities and safety and radiation protection equipment. The facility will be capable of accommodating a wide variety of experiments, each of which typically takes years to develop and occupies the beam line continuously for many months.

The Fundamental Neutron Physics beam line will be operated as a user facility with all beam time allocated on the basis of independent peer reviews, Greene said. The beam line should be commissioned in mid-2008, about two years after the $1.4 billion SNS comes on line.

Funding for the project is being provided by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Physics within the Office of Science. ORNL, which is managed by UT-Battelle, employs 1,500 scientists and engineers and is DOE’s largest multipurpose science and energy laboratory.

2 thoughts on “The Life And Death Of Tennessee Neutrons”

  1. I guess the question is whether to stay neutral on the subject.

    Some years ago I remember reading speculations about antimatter and time reversal. Could it be that the handedness of radioactivity is merely a reflection of the fact that our positively oriented cosmic timeline might itself fall out from the gross lack of antimatter in our universe? If time reversal is real, then wouldn’t an equal mixture of matter and antimatter be the equivalent of zero net time?

    And that might connect with light/photons. Anything travelling at the speed of light exhibits no on-board time passage. Other gluons might not share in such zero time passage- and this might then relate to the mass seen in the weak force (Z^o, W^+/-). Remember than anything with mass cannot be accelerated to light speed without increasing that mass infinitely due to relativistic effects (not to mention foreshortening, time dilation, etc.).

    If there are magnetic monopoles (which would be the inverse of the weak force electical monopoles) they too would have mass (huge mass at that, in free spacetime, though recent experiments seem to indicate that bound derived magnetic monopoles seen in bulk condensed matter can have much lower energies/masses, and this may be another inversed property- which makes a lot of sense if one looks at the actual roles of the gluons in terms of whether they bind or unbind, whether they affect confinement, etc.).

    Colored gluons (strong force) on the other hand may be massless, and thus timeless. The strong force gluons are unusual too in that they may be capable of forming fermion-less "glueballs" that exist as constellations of gluons all by themselves, but whether these are then confined is a different issue.

    The entire system of vector bosons/gluons is, if one includes three magnetic monopoles, entirely symmetrical, and there is also room for an "inverse" photon (dark energy?) that would be the bosonic equivalent of Dracula, and which would fill the pattern hole left by the one colored gluon you would expect if the color analogy were perfect, but which is actually absent from the supersymmetry equations (since SUSY requires that there be one less item than the square- SU(1) equals 0, SU(2) = 3 (weak force), SU(3) = 8 (strong force gluons).

    It has always bothered me that nobody has been really able to integrate the strong force with the electroweak force in the Standard Model explanations. And I think I know why- they’ve left out both the three magnetic monopoles (predicted by Dirac- Diracula? (apologies)) and my speculated inverse photon.

    In fact, the photon itself is U(1), not SU(1), which is rather inconsistent mathematically, isn’t it?

    However, if you take the fact that the photon is the everlasting alternation of inverse electrical and magnetic fields then it seems obvious that symmetry breaking of the electroweak gluons alone would be insufficient to explain it- but if it has input from BOTH the electrical (weak) and magnetic monopoles there would be no problem. Then the photon is like a reciprocating engine, with a dynamic summing net zero charge (versus the real static zero of the Z^0, and its equivalent "M^0").

    In fact if one takes a look at the entire systems of subatomic particles (wheher matter or force carrying) one sees a conspiracy of groups of 4, where three members stand together to make a coherent set, and one gets shoved into exile. You can think of this as a tetrahedral assemblage where one vertex is segregated allowing the other three to form a plane.

    One sees this in fermions, where you have three charged items (the 3/3 electrons, 2/3 and 1/3 quarks, but then the 0/3 neutrinos, whose behavior (because the electrical charge is null) is aberrant. Similarly one sees three known families (electron, muon, tauon) in the Standard Model group, but then there is a long-speculated shadowy fourth group, the subject of two large conferences in the late ’80’s, which doesn’t hang out with regular matter if it exists, and is now seen by some as possibly one of the major components of dark matter.

    Many researchers think that the family groups in the fermions (the columns, versus the electrically differentiated  flavor rows in the usual set depiction) are distinguished by magnetic "charge" (winding number, etc.). This would of course fit in with any corresponding magnetic monopoles on the boson chart.

    But anyway, just as with the bosons, then, you would end up with 16 items per chart in 4 X 4 matrices, each with one column and one row each with strange behavior. Recapitulating, in the fermions the neutrinos and the missing family if any would be these. Note that there would also be one cell in the system which contained an item that was at once both electrically and magnetically neutral- a ghost neutrino, something that didn’t react to anything via these two forces (but which surprisingly may have substantial mass compared to the other neutrinos- this particle is being sought as I write, and was if I remember correctly, subject of an earlier posting on this list).

    This particle, if it exists, would be the matter equivalent of my inverse photon. Dark matter, dark energy respectively.

    On the boson side we have the unobserved (at least in high mass free form) magnetic monopoles, and the inverse photon I speculated (another group of four). Note that the electroweak group splits into three weak gluons and one electromagnetic. I’m guessing that simultaneous symmetry breaking created both the photon and its inverse, and the electrical and magnetic monopoles (so a 2 X (3 + 1) system, with each of the (3 + 1) sets orthogonal to each other.

    Finally, the colored gluons form their own system of 8 terms. They are differentiate into mesonic colored gluons- with paired +/- colors (2 by the supersymmetry equations) and then 6 hadronic colored gluons, where the paired colors are plus/minus, but NOT complementary. Again then a system of 2 X (3 + 1).

    If one were to push this idea to its limit one ends up with an extended color model (which I unfortunately cannot call technicolor since that name is already taken). If one remembers that in real colors one also has contrast (hue, chroma, value as in the Munsell system), then one can think of there being a contrast term pair X and -X (black versus white, but I prefer the terms "smoke" versus "mirrors" (absorption versus reflection- sometimes I just can’t contain myself).

    If this fourth color pair exists, then one could take the 4 X 4 chart of gluons (including the magnetic monopoles and the speculated inverse in the relationships outlined above) and simply name all the column and row headings. R, G, B, X, versus -R, -B, -G and -X.

    R-R, G-G, and B-B are your mesonic color gluons, of which only two are actually defined by SUSY (think of them as mixed), R-G, R-B, G-R, G-B, B-R, B-G are the hadronics, and X-X would be the photon. Terms containing a color and -X, or an anticolor and +X would be the sets of weak electrical and the magnetic monopoles arbitrarily.

    This system interestingly puts the photon and the inverse photon on a par with the mesonic colored glouons, along the diagonal of the figure.

    I’ll stop here (long past where probably I should have)- if comments warrent I can expand on the actual roles of the gluons in terms of behavioral symmetry.

    Codemaniac

  2. Heck… Write a story… You’ve got more than enough info there to make one. And if you put it in the edit queue, you might get someone who can help fill it out with some good links.

Comments are closed.