📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: First-ever single top quark production with W and Z bosons

Researchers at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have detected a phenomenon that happens only every trillion proton collisions, after observing the production of a single top quark along with a W and a Z boson.

The astonishing result, achieved by the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) collaboration, represents the first-ever observation of single top quark production with W and Z bosons, a process known as tWZ production.

According to scientists, detecting such an event in the Large Hadron Collider data is extremely rare and as difficult as finding a single needle in a haystack the size of an Olympic stadium.

The event provided the team with a new approach to studying the forces that shape the universe and testing the limits of the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes all known fundamental particles and their interactions.

Single top quark event

Proton beams inside the LHC collide at nearly the speed of light. These collisions unleash bursts of energy, allowing physicists to explore the most fundamental building blocks of the universe.

Now, among billions of collisions, the CMS, a particle detector that is designed to see a wide range of particles and phenomena produced in high-energy collisions in the LHC, was able to identify the unique signature of tWZ production, which involves the creation of a top quark, a W boson, and a Z boson.

The process is extremely rare. It occurs only once for every trillion proton-proton collisions. Yet, its discovery provides a crucial opportunity to study how the top quark interacts with the electroweak force, which is carried by the W and Z bosons.

The top quark, being the heaviest known fundamental particle, has the strongest interaction with the Higgs field. Studying the tWZ could therefore provide a new, deeper understanding of the Higgs mechanism and reveal signs of phenomena and physics beyond the Standard Model.

Testing fundamental forces

During their analysis, the team faced a major challenge because the tWZ signal closely resembles a more common process called ttZ production. In this process, a top quark and its antimatter counterpart, an anti-top quark, are produced along with a Z boson.

This background occurs about seven times more often, which makes it difficult to distinguish the much rarer signal. To overcome the challenge, the scientists used state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to sift through massive amounts of data, separating the elusive tWZ signal from background noise.

Ultimately, the efforts revealed that the rate of tWZ production was slightly higher than what current theories predict. Future data and analysis will help determine whether this is merely a statistical fluctuation. The team believes it could also turn out to be the first hint of something beyond the known laws of physics.

“If there are unknown interactions or particles involved, the observed deviation between the measured rate [of tWZ production] and the prediction would rapidly become larger with increasing energies of the outgoing particles, an effect that is unique to the tWZ process,” Roman Kogler, PhD, an experimental particle physicist with the CMS collaboration at DESY, said in a press release.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: Elon Musk Announces Plan to Control Climate by Surro

Despite his fixation on “making life multiplanetary” and “expanding consciousness to the stars,” Elon Musk still occasionally expresses concern about humans on planet Earth. 

Which is why he wants to block out the Sun, of course.

On Monday, Musk took to his site X (née Twitter) to explain his masterplan for delivering humanity from the jaws of climate doom, which will involve a little help from what sounds an awful lot like the plot to “The Matrix.”

“A large solar-powered AI satellite constellation would be able to prevent global warming by making tiny adjustments in how much solar energy reached Earth,” Musk tweeted, apropos of seemingly nothing.

The SpaceX CEO currently maintains a vast constellation of nearly 9,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, which aren’t currently blocking out the Sun but are doing a tremendous job of blocking astronomers from getting clear observations of the farthest reaches of the cosmos.

Asked by a fan about how these satellites could possibly carry out the precise adjustments to the amount of solar energy hitting our planet without destabilizing the climate, not to mention the potential conflicts that would unfold for control over such a powerful global mechanism, Musk responded: “Yes.”

“It would only take tiny adjustments to prevent global warming or global cooling for that matter,” he added. “Earth has been a snowball many times in the past.”

Blocking out the Sun to mitigate climate change, a concept known as solar geoengineering — or solar radiation modification, to be particularly technical — is a matter of serious debate and controversy in the scientific community. Most agree that it’s possible, but also incredibly risky. The climate of an entire planet is an enormous and intricate system, and it’s almost certain that blocking sunlight, whatever the method, would have some unintended consequences. And once implemented, there’d be no putting the genie back in the bottle.

In other words, it’s considered a desperate measure — though that it’s under consideration at all is a sign of the times, with experiments planned, some facing legal hurdles. One method, called marine cloud brightening, would involve seeding clouds with aerosols that increase their reflectivity, enabling them to bounce more sunlight back into space. But generally, the most widely considered method is called stratospheric aerosol injection, in which we’d release particles of chemicals like sulfur dioxide high into the atmosphere to reflect solar radiation.

Notably, none of these involve a global constellation of omnipresent AI satellites that dictate our allotted worth of the Sun. Then again, Musk may simply be thinking on a temporal scale too vast for our feeble minds chained to the eternal present. In his post laying out his satellite scheme, he agreed with a fan’s assessment that it would be a “logical feature” for a Kardashev Type II civilization to build, referring to a hypothetical type of advanced civilization capable of directly harnessing the power of the entire Sun by building a megastructure around it — something that humankind is obviously nowhere close to achieving, and would likely take thousands of years for us to get there if it’s even possible. (He has previously stated that his newest Starlink satellites are the “path” to being a Kardashev Type II.)

“Yeah,” Musk remarked. “Comes with the territory.”

More on climate change: Scientists Warn Against Trying to Dim the Sun to Cool the Planet

The post Elon Musk Announces Plan to Control Climate by Surrounding Earth in Adjustable Satellites appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com