CERN scientists discover new particle, with “imaginary“ charge

I got the information from an insider, although most scientists at the research facility CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, want to keep the news under wraps, pending further experiments. It appears recent experiments in the LHC particle accelerator have revealed the existence of a previously unknown particle and its antiparticle. “The particles interact via a force similar to the Coulomb interaction, decreasing like the inverse of the distance between particles squared, but there is a twist“ Dr. A. Phooles-Deigh told me, barely able to hide her excitement. “Instead of being directed along the line connecting the two particles, the force is turned sideways by 90 degrees, causing particles to move at right angles to that line, in a direction depending on their charges. This is similar to a rotation by 90 degrees in the complex plane, mapping real numbers to imaginary ones, hence the name ’imaginary charge’. This finding is both exciting and a bit scary, since this interaction might violate several known conservation laws in physics - which is why some of my colleagues call them ’the devil’s particles’. On the plus side, these new particles may help explain several unsolved mysteries in physics, such as the nature of dark matter. They might even help explain quantum mechanics, which never made much sense to me“. One open issue is how to name these new particles. Proposals include ’leftons’ and ’rightons’, as well as ’commuons’ and ’fascions’. But many physicists are not happy with these names. If you have a good idea, please leave a comment, or write directly to @. So far, scientists have only been able to create a handful of these particles. In this simulation, I wanted to find out how a larger number of them would behave, and the result turns out to be quite interesting, as the unusual interaction created large-scale structures. The video has three parts, showing simulations with different numbers of particles: 800 particles: 0:00 2450 particles: 0:52 7200 particles: 1:53 The particles’ color hue depends on their charge. To save on computation time, particles are placed into a “hash grid“, each cell of which contains between 3 and 10 particles. Then only the influence of other particles in the same or neighboring cells is taken into account for each particle. The temperature is controlled by a thermostat, implemented here with the “Nosé-Hoover-Langevin“ algorithm introduced by Ben Leimkuhler, Emad Noorizadeh and Florian Theil, see reference below. The idea of the algorithm is to couple the momenta of the system to a single random process, which fluctuates around a temperature-dependent mean value. Lower temperatures lead to lower mean values. The Lennard-Jones potential is strongly repulsive at short distance, and mildly attracting at long distance. It is widely used as a simple yet realistic model for the motion of electrically neutral molecules. The force results from the repulsion between electrons due to Pauli’s exclusion principle, while the attractive part is a more subtle effect appearing in a multipole expansion. For more details, see Render time: Part 1 - 1 minutes 11 seconds Part 2 - 6 minutes 7 seconds Part 3 - 25 minutes 41 seconds Compression: crf 28 Color scheme: Twilight by Bastian Bechtold Music: “Space Racer“ by Bad Snacks@badsnacks Reference: Leimkuhler, B., Noorizadeh, E. & Theil, F. A Gentle Stochastic Thermostat for Molecular Dynamics. J Stat Phys 135, 261–277 (2009). ~theil/ Current version of the C code used to make these animations: Some outreach articles on mathematics: (in French, some with a Spanish translation) #molecular_dynamics #charge #cern