Some Gee Whiz Particle Physics

Here's a bit of news to knock your socks off:

An international team of scientists studying high-energy collisions of gold ions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, has published evidence of the most massive antinucleus discovered to date. The new antinucleus, discovered at RHIC’s STAR detector, is a negatively charged state of antimatter containing an antiproton, an antineutron, and an anti-Lambda particle. It is also the first antinucleus containing an anti-strange quark. The results will be published online by Science Express on March 4, 2010.

The above is a bit from a report on PhysOrg.com.

I like the sound of "containing an anti-strange quark". I remember back in the late 1960s where quarks moved from being a purely theoretical construct to something physicists agree was "real". And I remember the frustration which solitary quarks couldn't be separated by atom smashers. But now we are happily creating anti-matter with exotic quarks. Wow!

If you go read the whole report you get treated to goodies like the following diagram:

The diagram above is known as the 3-D chart of the nuclides. The familiar Periodic Table arranges the elements according to their atomic number, Z, which determines the chemical properties of each element. Physicists are also concerned with the N axis, which gives the number of neutrons in the nucleus. The third axis represents strangeness, S, which is zero for all naturally occurring matter, but could be non-zero in the core of collapsed stars. Antinuclei lie at negative Z and N in the above chart, and the newly discovered antinucleus (magenta) now extends the 3-D chart into the new region of strange antimatter.

The guy in the bottom left corner is what all the excitement is about.

For a guy raised on the old Periodic Table, I look at this "new and improved" Periodic Table and have to give a whistle. Wow! The old simple world is so much more rich and complex... and wonderful. And those old Greeks who puzzled over the four or five basic "elements" of earth, air, water, fire, and "quintessence" would be mind-boggled at a periodic table of 110+ "basic elements" (the Z axis) that now come in differing isotopes (the N axis) and that creepy wonderful "strangeness" axis. And the icing on the cake is that odd quadrant of "anti-matter" that is the mirror image of the Z axis. The world is far stranger than we can imagine and every time we "conquer" new knowledge Mother Nature happily gives us tougher homework assignment by showing us ever more complexity and "surprises".