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Particles Seen Emerging From Empty Space For First Time

1 month 1 week ago
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from NewScientist: According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) -- widely considered to be our best theory for describing the strong force, which binds quarks inside protons and neutrons -- even a perfect vacuum isn't truly empty. Instead, it is filled with short-lived disturbances in the underlying energy of space that flicker in and out of existence, known as virtual particles. Among them are quark-antiquark pairs. Under normal conditions, these fleeting pairs vanish almost as soon as they appear. But if enough energy is injected into a vacuum, QCD predicts they can be promoted into real, detectable particles with measurable mass. Now, the STAR collaboration -- an international team of physicists working at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state -- has observed this process for the first time. The team smashed together high-energy protons in a vacuum, producing a spray of particles. Some of these particles should be quark-antiquark pairs pulled directly from the vacuum itself, but quarks can never exist alone and immediately combine into composite particles. Quarks and antiquarks are born with their spins correlated -- a shared quantum alignment inherited from the vacuum. The researchers found that this link persists even after the quarks and antiquarks become part of larger particles called hyperons, which decay in less than a tenth of a billionth of a second. Spotting these spin-aligned hyperons in the aftermath of the proton collisions allowed the researchers to confirm that the quarks within them came from the vacuum. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Error'd: Youth is Wasted on the Junge

1 month 1 week ago

"My thoughts exactly" muttered Jason H. "I was in a system that avoids check constraints and the developers never seemed to agree to a T/F or Y/N or 1/0 for indicator columns. All data in a column will use the same pattern but different columns in the same table will use different patterns so I'm not sure why I was surprised when I came across the attached. Sort the data descending and you have the shorthand for what I uttered." How are these all unique?

"I'd better act quickly!" Hugh Scenic almost panicked. "This Microsoft Rewards offer might expire (in just under 74 years)!"

"Copy-copy-copy" repeated Gordon. "Not sure I want the team to be in touch - my query might be best left unanswered."

"Was Comcast's episode guide data hacked by MAGA?" Barry M. wondered. "This is not the usual generic description of Real Time."

"Holiday Workshop for Children learning how to write web pages, apparently," notes self-named Youth P. "You need a new category - because it is no error to involve young people in a web design workshop during their holidays. A little bit of a surprise was that it will happen in a local museum, and that children between 8 and 12 are the target audience - should they really already think about their work future?"

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