Category: Particles
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God. Angels. Particles. Lost.
A 2017 report of the discovery of a particular kind of Majorana fermion – the chiral Majorana fermion, referred to as the “angel particle” – is likely a false alarm, according to another research. Majorana fermions are enigmatic particles that act as their own antiparticle and were first hypothesized to exist in 1937. They are […]
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New force…
Everything in our Universe is held together or pushed apart by four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and two nuclear interactions. Physicists now think they’ve spotted the actions of a fifth physical force emerging from a helium atom. It’s not the first time researchers claim to have caught a glimpse of it, either. A few years […]
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Faster than light. In nothingness…
It has long been known that charged particles, such as electrons and protons, produce the electromagnetic equivalent of a sonic boom when their speeds exceed that of photons in the surrounding medium. This effect, known as Cherenkov emission, is responsible for the characteristic blue glow from water in a nuclear reactor, and is used to […]
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Longevity. Xenon 124. Universe.
Theory predicts the isotope’s radioactive decay has a half-life that surpasses the age of the universe “by many orders of magnitude,” but no evidence of the process has appeared until now. An international team of physicists that includes three Rice University researchers – assistant professor Christopher Tunnell, visiting scientist Junji Naganoma and assistant research professor […]
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Proton. Mass. Higgs. Phantoms of science.
A proton’s mass is more just than the sum of its parts. And now scientists know just what accounts for the subatomic particle’s heft. Protons are made up of even smaller particles called quarks, so you might expect that simply adding up the quarks’ masses should give you the proton’s mass. However, that sum is […]
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