Particles Seen Emerging From Empty Space For First Time (newscientist.com)
- Reference: 0181510520
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/04/10/018227/particles-seen-emerging-from-empty-space-for-first-time
- Source link: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2522324-particles-seen-emerging-from-empty-space-for-first-time/
> According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) -- widely considered to be our best theory for describing the strong force, which binds quarks inside protons and neutrons -- even a perfect vacuum isn't truly empty. Instead, it is filled with short-lived disturbances in the underlying energy of space that flicker in and out of existence, known as virtual particles. Among them are quark-antiquark pairs. Under normal conditions, these fleeting pairs vanish almost as soon as they appear. But if enough energy is injected into a vacuum, QCD predicts they can be promoted into real, detectable particles with measurable mass. Now, the STAR collaboration -- an international team of physicists working at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state -- [2]has observed this process for the first time .
>
> The team smashed together high-energy protons in a vacuum, producing a spray of particles. Some of these particles should be quark-antiquark pairs pulled directly from the vacuum itself, but quarks can never exist alone and immediately combine into composite particles. Quarks and antiquarks are born with their spins correlated -- a shared quantum alignment inherited from the vacuum. The researchers found that this link persists even after the quarks and antiquarks become part of larger particles called hyperons, which decay in less than a tenth of a billionth of a second. Spotting these spin-aligned hyperons in the aftermath of the proton collisions allowed the researchers to confirm that the quarks within them came from the vacuum.
The findings have been [3]published in the journal Nature .
[1] https://slashdot.org/~fahrbot-bot
[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2522324-particles-seen-emerging-from-empty-space-for-first-time/
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09920-0
Skimmed the article.. (Score:3)
They created stuff by using a strong force to ram a Hardon to into a tube ?
I'm no physics guy, but how is that new?
Re: (Score:2)
> They created stuff by using a strong force to ram a Hardon to into a tube ?
I think this comment would also apply in the previous story about the declining birthrates.
Vacuum energy (Score:2)
Vacuum energy has been known for quite a while and has been observed experimentally. In the [1]Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] there's a reference to Arthur C. Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth, where he referenced actual papers. Smashing protons together in colliders is always done in vacuum, as otherwise they'd collide with the particles from gases and thus not achieve the high energies wanted, among other issues. This writer doesn't seem to have much of a grasp of physics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy
Re: (Score:2)
If it's got anything in it, is it really a vacuum? Maybe Vacuum doesn't exist. As soon as you introduce something it is no longer a vacuum. A vacuum is the absence of matter , matter is defined as something of mass, a proton has mass according to the Interweb.
Even space is not true vacuum by this definition, it's got planets and stars in it and the odd molecule, atom in the spaces in between. Photons can have mass in some of the sums.
Did vacuum ever exist, if the start of the universe was a big bang, perha
Higher dimmensions? (Score:1)
If particles "seem" to emit from empty space, they could be emitting everywhere only to be drowned by existing particles? Also could that mean that there could be a higher dimension and that we are in living in a projection?
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, but we could also be living on the shell of a giant tortoise. Ok seriously yes, it is happening everywhere like all the time. However these particles pop into existence as pairs (particle-antiparticle) so they (usually) annihilate each other and disappear.
Re: (Score:2)
Which was the basis for the fictional Zero Point Module (ZPM) in the Stargate Atlantis franchise. Would be cool if those were real, but it's probably impossible to harness that energy.
God knows. Maybe literally. (Score:2)
The problem is that quantum mechanics appears to be hitting the upper bounds of human intellect as far as understanding is concerned. Its been around 100 years but no one understands WTF is going on under the hood. Physicists can explain the what but not the how and why.
And now IRS... (Score:2)
...has an argument to tax vacuum space!
They Didn't Find "Something From Nothing (Score:2, Interesting)
They smashed protons together at relativistic energies and found particles in the debris. That's not "particles emerging from empty space" — that's particles emerging from a high-energy collision. The headline is doing a lot of heavy lifting. #### The deeper issue is that "virtual particles" are not physical objects lurking in the vacuum waiting for a promotion. They're terms in a perturbation expansion — mathematical bookkeeping for computing scattering amplitudes. Treating them as real things
Re: (Score:3)
> They smashed protons together at relativistic energies and found particles in the debris. That's not "particles emerging from empty space" â" that's particles emerging from a high-energy collision.
That's not how I read it (although I'm also only relying on the summary)
I read it as:
It's a given in the standard model that even in a perfect vacuum at absolute zero virtual (pairs of) particles are constantly being created and destroyed. While we can detect some side effects of that, the particles themselv
Re: (Score:2)
No. The collision concentrates the amount of (kinetic) energy into a small area. The energy density is high enough that a large amount of quarks emerge from the vacuum. When a proton is in an accelerated state, the energy within the proton radius is very high. This enables us to see the strange-quark/antiquarks popping in and out of existence as collision debris. The thing you can do with strange quarks is use them to make hyperons. Without strange quarks, you'd be trying to make carrot cake with flour but
Re: (Score:1)
You've described how the calculation works, not what happens. QCD gives correct amplitudes — nobody disputes that. But 'virtual particles popping in and out of existence' is narrative layered on top of a perturbation expansion, not a conclusion derived from it. You can spend an entire career computing within the framework, publishing papers, winning grants, and never once ask whether the story that dresses up the math is actually derivable from the math.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree, and would also be much more convinced of the theory if the Schwinger effect had finally been demonstrated experimentally, rather than having yet-another Breit-Wheeler process demonstration.