Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Error In Quantum Physics?

I've been working on adding additional particles for the particle classes I discussed in a previous post. They'll be a lot more particles and more information about each particle. One of the things included is particle decay, when one particle transforms into several different particles. It was while I was working on this that I came across what looks like an error in the measured decays of a particle known as the Strange D.

Particles turning into other particles is neat, but when they do it they have to follow certain conservation laws. One of those laws is that the overall electric charge must be preserved. This means when you add up all the charges from the new particles it has to be exactly the same as the charge for the particle they decayed from.

The Strange D has an electric charge of 1. According to the the Particle Data Group the Strange D can decay into particles known as Eta, Leptons, and Eta Prime. Specifically, the decay (decay #14, btw) looks like this:

Decay
Particle__________________________Charge
Eta_______________________________0
Non-Neutrino Anti Lepton______________1
Neutrino __________________________0
Eta Prime__________________________0
Non-Neutrino Anti Lepton______________1
Neutrino __________________________0
-----------------------------
Total Decay Charge___________________2

Strange D Charge_____________________1

So the total charge of the particles from the decay is 2, while the original particle had only a charge of 1, which violates the conservation of electric charge.

When I discovered the bad redshift data a while back, I first gave the folks who produced the data a chance to respond. So I'm sending off a letter to the Particle Data Group to see if the data is bad, or if it's just a misunderstanding on my part. We'll see what they say.

References
Strange D data from the Particle Data Group
Conservation laws of physics

2 comments:

  1. I like you idea of a critical look. Good luck. It needs doing. Climate Science isn't the only branch that follows the Peer Review, grant chaser paradigm.

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  2. Also, I like the way you keep to short, simple, bite sized chunks. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete