Electron-Collision Parity Violations *

I was reading this:

http://www.physicsweb.org/article/news/8/5/7

If these results are sufficiently reproduced so that their conclusions
are found to be valid, then does it mean that the electron itself may
have some internal geometry? Could the electron be composed of
constituent sub-particles that have previously not been detected?

Otherwise, how would one explain these parity violations, if they do
indeed exist?

No. These results are in agreement with the standard model of particle
physics, which models the electron as a point particle.

> Could the electron be composed of
> constituent sub-particles that have previously not been detected?

It could be, but these results do not support that conclusion. The limits
on electron sub-structure are pretty tight.

> Otherwise, how would one explain these parity violations, if they do
> indeed exist?

Parity violation has been known about since the 50's. The explanation
is that the W and Z bosons only interact with left handed electrons
(muons, taus, ...).

No. As the article clearly states, the results are consistent with
the Standard Model, in which the electron has no structure.

The weak force has been known to violate parity since the 50's.
Electron interactions at low energy are dominated by electromagnetic
interactions, which conserve parity. What the experiment is
observing is a very small, but non-zero contribution of weak
interactions at low energy. It's a *very* hard experiment. As the
article states, the observed signal is a scattering asymmetry
of well under a part per million.

Nature doesn't care what you see or don't see. If you can't
presently detect it, does it exist? Unless you take a real good look
will you ever know. If you can detect effects, ponder and/or test, and
postulate the cause.

First, parity violation in weak interactions has been known since the
1950's, and has been confirmed in literally hundreds of experiments,
so it's not so surprising that it should turn up in this case.

This is a good question - the answer is that the electron does have
"geometry", but only in the very specialized sense of having
quantum-mechanical spin. When you rotate an electron, its spin
wavefunction changes. This is in distinction to a scalar particle
which is completely insensitive to rotations.

So, we can distiguish between "right-handed" and "left-handed"
components of electrons. However, this type of geometry cannot be
thought of as involving physical distances in the three dimensions.
The spin wavefunction lives not in 3-d but in a 4-d complex space.
From here on it gets mathematical. It all follows from demanding that
particles should form a representation of the Poincare group which
describes Lorentz transformations and space-time translations. The
possible representations are scalars, spinors (i.e. the electron),
vectors (the photon and W, Z bosons), and some more exotic
possibilities.

Feynman made an important point: in contrast to an ordinary object or
a vector particle, when you rotate a spinor through 360 degrees, the
spin wavefunction doesn't get back to its original value - you need to
rotate an electron 720 degrees to get back to where you started.

Basically "positrons", funny anti-matter weighing 1/2000 of the neutron rest mass as much electrons but right handed spinning. This is the correct anti-matter particle. A small amount of anti-matter fulfills our right-handed side universe naturally produced and high energy accelerators might produce by self-induction in their own giant super-conductor windings a little amount of spurious positrons ond only a few of them annihilate a small amount of electrons involved in any kind of experiment. Only a virtual parity violation and a well know source of errors while computing.

sanman. I would be surprised in the electron wasn't divisible. As to turning it into component parts I would think we'd be looking at many magnitudes beyond any energy we can produce at present.

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Congratulations, for your promotion to pencils ...... however, I feel this to be a premature transition judging by the brainpulped garbage and delusion you scrawl - stick to crayons and less pretention, otherwise we'll paint you feedback red.