Researchers have now measured the slowest process ever detected

[n2doc]

EXO releases first results
September 9, 2011 | 10:54 am
SLAC published this article on Sept. 8, 2011.
Cooks think of watched pots. Handymen grumble about drying paint. Kids dread the endless night before Christmas morning.

Turns out physicists have their own expression to convey the concept of “slow,” and now, thanks to the Enriched Xenon Observatory (EXO), they know how slow “slow” really is: The flurry of activity during the 13.75 billion years from the Big Bang to us was positively hasty in comparison.

The expression is “2nubb” and it stands for “two-neutrino double-beta decay”, a rare type of particle decay undergone by certain forms of radioactive elements. In this type of decay, two neutrons, the neutral subatomic particles in the nucleus of an atom, spontaneously decay into two protons, two electrons, and two antineutrinos, which are the antimatter twins of the tiny, nearly massless mystery particles called neutrinos. The EXO team announced yesterday at a conference in Munich that, according to their measurements of two-neutrino double-beta decay in Xe-136, an isotope of xenon, the half-life of the process clocks in at 2.11 x 10²¹ years. In other words, it would take 100 billion times longer than the universe has even existed for half of a sample of this radioactive isotope to decay via the 2nubb decay pathway.

“This represents the slowest Standard Model process ever measured,” said Giorgio Gratta, Stanford University physicist and member of the joint SLAC-Stanford Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, who leads the team. The Standard Model is the best description scientists have for the way all the building blocks of matter, like the aforementioned neutrons, protons and electrons, fit together, and why two-neutrino double-beta decay happens in the first place.

Two-neutrino double-beta decay fits neatly within the Standard Model, “so in this sense the observation was not unexpected,” Gratta said. In fact, this form of decay has been seen before in other elements. “In that sense, it is not even new.”

Even so, the team’s results mean much more than a shot at the Guinness Book of World Records.

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2011/09/09/exo-releases-first-results/

[itsrobert]

1. I thought it was Rick Perry's brain.

I want evidence to proves me wrong.

[shraby]

2. I thought it was the republican congress

[Vinnie From Indy]

3. Are we supposed to believe that a process

just happened to be measured by these physicists? We'll see how their data stands up to scrutiny.

[sudopod]

11. There are on the order of 10^21 to 10^22 atoms per cubic cm in liquid matter

So yeah, they'd see some events with a sensitive detector.

U mad?

[BlueJazz]

4. I think their findings are wrong. They obviously have never stood in a checkout line at K-Mart.

:)

[qazplm]

5. ok i volunteer to stick around

to see how it works out.

[RC]

7. You will die of boredom waiting long before that happens.

[sudopod]

13. Why is everyone on this thread having a problem with this?

The experiment really is very clever. Of all the things for people to get a stick up their butts about, why this?

[laconicsax]

14. There's a lot of anti-Standard Model sentiment out there.

Mention that there might not be a Higgs particle and you'll see elation because the Standard Model is bullshit.

Mention that the Standard Model has been again confirmed with unfathomably precise measurements and you'll see attacks.

It's odd that supposedly pro-science progressives hate one of the crowning achievements of 20th century.

[sudopod]

15. That's weird, but it puts the bizarre hostility into perspective.

Thanks for the heads up!

Still, wtf? :p

[kestrel91316]

6. These scientists have clearly never seen a three-toed sloth take a step.

[Nihil]

16. Well they waited for a while but got bored ... (n/t)

:P

[The Doctor.]

8. I think the 'process of recognition' in this overly snarked thread

will trump the findings.

[meow mix]

9. great, radioactive twinkies coming right up.

:rofl:

[demoblemocratic]

10. i call bs.

[sudopod]

12. Why? nt

[TupperHappy]

17. Meanwhile, the fastest process ever recorded...

Is the length of time between when the traffic light turns green and the moron behind you starts blatting on his horn.

In fact, its so fast it might even violate causality.