Long the fixation of physicists worldwide, a tiny particle is found

[John21]

After decades of intensive effort by both experimental and theoretical physicists worldwide, a tiny particle with no charge, a very low mass and a lifetime much shorter than a nanosecond, dubbed the "axion," ...

http://www.physorg.com/news84633896.html

[Semtex]

Axion? Also without reading the article, how do they know it has no charge?

[Metric]

Thanks for the heads up -- fascinating news. This will definately add some new life to the "dark matter" discussions.

I am also puzzled by something: People apparently published "upper bounds" on the mass of the axion by studying certain astrophysical phenomena. These were on the order of 10^-2 eV or even less. This discovery apparently has the mass of the axion in the range of 6-20 MeV. Apparently, something is not working as expected -- it's hard to know how these upper bounds could have been off by so many orders of magnitude.

[arahant]

Because I know the physicists will be here, I'm going to throw something into this thread that doesn't belong...
This paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0611109) was brought to my attention the other day. I've never heard of the authors, who appear to be nobodies. And it would seem to imply faster than light communication.

Is this just non-peer-reviewed BS? Or is it grounded?
The one aspect I was unfamiliar with was the idea that electrons would be induced to leave traps by a collapse of the wave function...anyway, this sounds iffy, but if anyone works in this field I'd be curious...

[Metric]

Some people in my department were joking a bit over that one a while back... I guess I could charitably describe their attitude as "incredulous." I didn't read the paper myself.