Monday, April 10, 2006

CDF excitement - press conference

This is how good P.R. looks like at Fermilab. ;-) Or is it more than good P.R.?

From: June Matthews

We've received advanced word on some exciting new results from the CDF experiment at Fermilab, where Christoph Paus heads up the MIT effort. This is the wording:

Fermilab will hold a press conference at 4:00 pm today (Central Time) with details on the precision measurement of extremely rapid transitions between matter and antimatter. It has been known for 50 years that very special species of subatomic particles can make spontaneous transitions between matter and antimatter. In this exciting new result, CDF physicists measured the rate of these matter-antimatter transitions for the B sub s meson, which consists of the heavy bottom quark bound by the strong nuclear interaction to a strange anti-quark, a staggering rate that challenges the imagination: 200 billion times per second. There will be a life feed of the press conference available on the web at:
Regards,
Marc Kastner

P.S. You can click the envelope icon two lines below this one to send the announcement about the press conference to all your friends who might be interested. The online press conference started at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Saving Time or 2:00 p.m. Californian time and ended one hour later.

Main content: They determined that at 99.5% confidence level, they have seen oscillations between matter and antimatter with frequency 17.33 plus minus something inverse picoseconds. The results are consistent with the Standard Model and place new upper bounds on flavor violation of new physics such as supersymmetry.