Finding a new type of matter with the LHC

Cms

Sometimes you have to wonder if physicists are just playing out a cosmic joke on the rest of us. Harvard's Howard Georgi, a renowned theorist, has suggested that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the giant accelerator due to switch on next year, might be able to detect what he calls "unparticles." The members of this new class of matter have no mass, and should be difficult to detect, but physicists are already at work trying to figure out how to find them at the LHC.

While Georgi deserves applause for the clever nomenclature, the astrophysics community still prevails in this department, having proposed the existence of such strange beauties as repulsive dark matter (RDM), self-annihilating dark matter (SADM), and, our favorite, fuzzy dark matter (FDM).

Via Phys Org

2 Comments

For related speculations on the LHC, see http://moridura.blogspot.com

Oh, goodie. we get warm fuzzy dark matter, except it don't exist, it's already been explained away. How many millions did we throw away on that? Wish I had a job where I could make up any old wild crap and have people throw BILLIONS at just me and a cuppla others, long as they don't try to make up a story that sounds more fuzzy than mine; and where I NEVER had to PRODUCE ANYTHING of value for the BILLIONS. But I'm not an embezzler, or a schyster, or a chiseler, or a flim flam man. I'm just a machinist that was told by the government that my kids would get to go to college.



Download Our iPhone App

Stay up to date on the latest news of the future of science and technology from your iPhone with full articles, images and offline viewing



Follow Us On Twitter

Featuring every article from the magazine and website, plus links from around the Web. Also see our PopSci DIY feed



Become a Fan On Facebook

Share links with friends, comment on stories and more


November 2009: Astronaut 3.0

Inside NASA's astronaut bootcamp and the grueling new training regimen for deep space. Plus, ten young geniuses shaking up science today, one writer's quest to analyze every man-made chemical in her body and more.

Check out the issue's full contents online here

Popular Science Photo Pool


Share your photos in the Pop Sci pool at www.flickr.com!
tags_sprite.png
POP_embeddedForm_cover_May09.jpg