Axionmatic discovery

Physicists have discovered nothing! Well... something very close to nothing, anyway.

Piyare Jain shows detection of a particle called an axion, which is expected to have many very heavy friends like Higgs-Boson.

The axion has no charge, light mass & a short lifetime. Jain found the first signs of it in 1974 but has had to wait for “a heavy ion beam at very high energy” to be available for further testing.

Jain learned to use a special photo-detector from its inventor, British physicist Cecil Powell, in order to usefully detect the 10-13 second lifespan of these ephemeral particles where CERES at CERN (and others) had failed.

Axions decay into electron-positron pairs.

Jain rates his University at Buffalo discovery as “mission is complete” status.

Comments

Will Kinney said…

The Jain and Singh paper is available here.

They DO NOT claim a discovery of the axion. The University press release referenced here contains a number of factual errors, and has been retracted.

08 December, 2006 03:36

Leon RJ Brooks said…

A pity. If it were so, the implications would keep physicists occupied for many years.

09 December, 2006 22:54

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