The plot thickens for a hypothetical “X17” particle

Re:The plot thickens for a hypothetical “X17” particle by throwaway2048 on Friday November 29, 2019 @07:04PM (#21667564)

Its pretty much what it sounds like, when there are particle collisions or decays, the particles come off at certain characteristic angles relative to the beam that are signatures of certain types decay and energies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_scattering

In this video, look for the forks that happen in the vapor trails being generated, that is a particle collision, and the corresponding sort of angle being talked about here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B2cvZgLToY

This technique works because the air is essentially super saturated with moisture, so even very slight atomic level disturbances will cause the water to condense to form mini "clouds" (hence the term cloud chamber).

Its difficult to find videos about, but antimatter pair production will cause patterns that look like this for instance

https://i.stack.imgur.com/9CKRA.jpg

muons, electrons, and alpha particles of different energies will will cause patterns that look like this

https://i.stack.imgur.com/NwNcS.jpg

and so on.

Check out http://avtanski.net/projects/cc/virtual_cloud_chamber.html and https://www.nucleonica.com/wiki/index.php?title=Help%3AVirtu... and see if you can identify some of the particles :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The plot thickens for a hypothetical “X17” particle by dmix on Friday November 29, 2019 @09:45PM (#21668197)

Thanks very helpful, the angles being signatures to help determine what forced/objects are involved makes a lot more sense to me now. That's always been something I've struggled with in biology/chemistry and physics is the higher level abstractions used to infer smaller phenomenons that are not as easily observable.

I'm too used to compsci where it's more explicit and every "but why?" doesn't lead you down a Wikipedia rabbit hole.

Edit: that cloud chamber video is very cool!

[ Parent | on HN ]