Saturday, June 28, 2008

June 28 2008
















Sparticles

I have a hard time with naming my beads. My daughter helped me come up with this name though. I took a private lesson with Corina Tettinger this summer, and as part of her lesson, she showed me how she makes Quarks. Having a daughter who is a physics engineer, and having learned about quarks previously from her, the name immediately intrigued me, as did Corina's beads. I came home from Corina's lesson, and practiced, and practiced, and did some more practicing….and have come up with the following beads.

Now to name them…I can't name them quarks – that name has been taken. I went to my daughter for help. There are lots of physics names out there, but none had the ring to them that "sparticles" had.

Sparticles. There is a supersymmetry theory out there that says for every particle we know of, there is a sister particle that has yet to be discovered. For example, the superpartner of the electron is the selectron, the partner of a quark is a squark. The whole group of these supersymmetric particles are called sparticles for short. Sparticles have not existed naturally since the "big bang"

At CERN, Geneva Switzerland, the world’s largest particle physical laboratory, where my daughter happened to work for a summer, there is a really big Hadron Collider, where they are trying to smash protons up by having them run into each other at a very very fast speed. When they collide, they will unleash energies similar to those found during the Big Bang. That's when scientists hope to see supersymmetric particles or sparticles.

Till scientists can give us a picture of real sparticles, wouldn't it be neat if they looked something like this series of beads?

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