Bosenova

[chelle]

I found something funky, I was looking if there would be some gas produced after "chriwi" suggested the different momentum states of particles. And hey, they are going to look for a gas in the lhc.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which restarts this week, will eventually produce collisions 3 times more powerful than those at RHIC to see if this quark-gluon plasma actually does transition into a gas. http://blogs.physicstoday.org/newspicks ... e-exi.html

This idea of gas made me think of Bose–Einstein condensate, which is a new phase of matter, Bose-gas, made out of bosons. And as a matter of fact this condensate brings something funky along with it's generation, a Bosenova, check this out:

In the particular experiment when a bosenova was first detected, this procedure caused the BEC to implode and shrink beyond detection, and then suddenly explode. In this explosion, about half of the atoms in the condensate seem to have disappeared from the experiment altogether, remaining undetected either in the cold particle remnants or in the expanding gas cloud produced.
"The 'missing' atoms are almost certainly still around in some form, but just not in a form that we can detect them in our current experiment," Carl Wieman told SPACE.com. "The two likely possibilities are that they have formed into molecules of two rubidium atoms stuck together, or they have gotten enough energy from somewhere to fly away fast enough that they are out of our observation region before we look for them."
Under current quantum theory, this characteristic of Bose–Einstein condensate remains unexplained, because the energy state of an atom near absolute zero appears to be insufficient to cause the observed implosion. However, subsequent mean-field theories have been proposed to explain the phenomenon.
Although the total energy of the explosion is very small, it appears very similar to a tiny supernova, hence the term 'bosenova' - the nomenclature is also partly a play on the Brazilian music style, bossa nova.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosenova

I'm curious if a gas found in the lhc would also bang

[Stephen]

The thought of a Bosenova completely freaked me out when I first heard about it in chat a few days ago. However, it seems to me that quark gloun plasma would behave differently than a Bose Einstein condesate. Here is an article containing a short explanation as to why a Bosenova could not be created by the LHC -
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbe ... a_wor.html

[Kasuha]

The idea of a mad scientist creating a huge bosenova in his secret lab to destroy the world sounds really funny.

The energy released in the bosenova "explosion" is way less than the energy released by "explosion" of a water drop on a hot plate. It requires very special conditions to acquire such state (laser traps, cryogenics, ...) and it can only be done on a few atoms because the more atoms the harder it is to create BEC from them.

Being afraid of this is a bit premature. This phenomenon needs studying, yes. It may reveal something new about nature around us.

And thinking it can eventually be created in LHC is a bit crazy IMO, LHC collisions are about as much about BEC as sun is about ice.

Edit: okay after some more study I have found the concerns about bosenova in LHC come from possibility of bosenovas forming in the liquid helium... Well, if nothing else the liquid helium is still darn hot at 1.9 K to form a BEC.

By the way, I have found this article about bosenova investigation and it contains several interesting facts. Among others, they don't talk about any "mysterious disappearance" of atoms, looks like they already know pretty well what happens there and no black holes seem to be involved.

[chelle]

The idea of a mad scientist creating a huge bosenova in his secret lab to destroy the world sounds really funny.

I don't consider them mad or evil, but rather nonchalant.

[chelle]

Edit: okay after some more study I have found the concerns about bosenova in LHC come from possibility of bosenovas forming in the liquid helium... Well, if nothing else the liquid helium is still darn hot at 1.9 K to form a BEC.

... and as you are a bit nonchalant

If you would have read Stephens Blog post (link) you would have read the comment on that topic, and found out that BEC also can happen at room temperature: Bose–Einstein condensation of quasi-equilibrium magnons at room temperature under pumping

[Kasuha]

The most dangerous thing to do seems to be running a BEC simulation on a PC with malfunctioning CPU cooler, you can achieve it happening way over 100 C.
Good thing they still don't know the bosenova mechanism well enough to make such simulations possible.

[chelle]

The most dangerous thing to do seems to be ...

Thinking that we can keep on pushing boundaries, without excepting the fact that there can also be negative effects.

Look at this piece of history: A Spark - Apollo

[chelle]

Good luck!

Hi,

I saw a new post here, and my old one about *sparks* it made me remember an other 'case' where people were afraid to take a step back when a project is in full progress and a huge budget is involved. See for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de4kq_QnVJo

Its about the Space Shuttle Columbia and how it got hit by a block of foam during lift off. It bruised the heat panels only a little bit. After a 'relative' successful launch the crew spend 16 days in space, doing all kinds of research, and they had plenty of time to have a look at the heat shield, but they didn't. They collectively stuck their heads in the ground and ignored possible issues. When returning home and reentering Earths atmosphere at high speed, temperatures rose to the extreme, and that small fraction gave a chance to let hot gasses enter the Shuttle, causing the whole capsule to disintegrate. 

This was one of the many disaster cases where routine made people over confident. They rather ignored possible negative results. Its a pattern.

I'm not saying that the lhc is a dangerous experiment, but it is dangerous to continue things at such high densities and frequencies for which we have no reference, especially when things such as Pilot Waves are waved away, as mentioned previously in the Quantum section, here's a reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_wave

Note, during the 1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels the Pilot Wave theory was presented by Louis de Broglie but was boldly countered by Wolfgang Pauli, perhaps because it was in competition with the Copenhagen Interpretation, Pauli even came up with an argument that turned out to be false. It wouldn't be the last time that Pauli made a wrong judgement, remember how he hated the postulation of 'spin' by Ralph Kronig, science is tough, and a dangerous business.

grtz,

chelle