logoalt Hacker News

bilsbie12/09/20242 repliesview on HN

What are the properties of this? Any cool applications?


Replies

cogman1012/09/2024

LHC likely created these particles which means we have single atoms that have been created and not full compounds.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but the significance of this is mostly just further confirmation of the predictions of the standard model. The standard model says such particles should exist and now that we've created them, we've confirmed that they do indeed exist.

I don't think there's much practical application beyond further refinement of theoretical physics and ruling out other candidate theories.

mrguyorama12/09/2024

It decays in under a nanosecond. A reality of all exotic matter research is that it is exotic almost always because it cannot exist in a stable manner for longer than a second.

The vast majority of applications, if any, will be extremely niche sensing applications. They are useful to further probe the edges of our knowledge of physics and look at the corner cases where our models give confused shrugs and odd answers.

It's not going to power a warp drive.

show 2 replies