Q: Disappearing photons?

Joe Rongen

>From "Science" Volume 311, Issue 5767,
17 March 2006, page 1535:
"Magnet experiment appears to drain life from stars"

"It's an unassuming experiment: to see how a magnetic
field affects polarized laser light. And the rotation the
researchers saw was tiny, a mere 100,000th of a degree.
If the results are true, however, the implications are huge.
According to researchers in Italy who conducted the
experiment, this slight twist in the beam--the results of
disappearing photons--suggest the existence of a small,
never-before-seen neutral particle, which, if made in stars,
would siphon off all their energy. [.......]
"But there are no other obvious explanations."
Standard physics predicts a very small rotation in a beam's
polarization in a magnetic field due to ordinary particles
popping in and out of the vacuum. [......]
[Researchers] ....turned on their 5-Tesla magnet in 2000,
they immediately saw a rotation 10,000 times larger than
expected, [.....] The rotation is caused by the loss of a
small number of photons whose electric fields line up with
the magnetic field. This selective disappearance is what
physicists would see if the missing photons were converted
into neutral particles about 1 billionth of the mass of electrons.
[This] PVLAS particle, if it exists, has the makings of an axion,
a hypothetical particle that some cosmologists propose is the
invisible missing dark matter that makes up a large chunk of
mass of the universe [....]
"A paper in "Physical Review letters" is due this month."
[March 2006] [.....]
Raffelt says the PVLAS particle would need "crazy properties"
to match astrophysical constraints, but there is no fundamental
reason they can't behave that way"

Any comments?

Starbles@Earthlink.net

Joe Rongen wrote:
> >From "Science" Volume 311, Issue 5767,
> 17 March 2006, page 1535:
> "Magnet experiment appears to drain life from stars"
>
> "It's an unassuming experiment: to see how a magnetic
> field affects polarized laser light. And the rotation the
> researchers saw was tiny, a mere 100,000th of a degree.
> If the results are true, however, the implications are huge.
> According to researchers in Italy who conducted the
> experiment, this slight twist in the beam--the results of
> disappearing photons--suggest the existence of a small,
> never-before-seen neutral particle, which, if made in stars,
> would siphon off all their energy. [.......]
> "But there are no other obvious explanations."

There are no other OBVIOUS explanations. However, one should check to
see if there are any other theories out there which predict such a
thing.

> Standard physics predicts a very small rotation in a beam's
> polarization in a magnetic field due to ordinary particles
> popping in and out of the vacuum. [......]
> [Researchers] ....turned on their 5-Tesla magnet in 2000,
> they immediately saw a rotation 10,000 times larger than
> expected, [.....] The rotation is caused by the loss of a
> small number of photons whose electric fields line up with
> the magnetic field. This selective disappearance is what
> physicists would see if the missing photons were converted
> into neutral particles about 1 billionth of the mass of electrons.
> [This] PVLAS particle, if it exists, has the makings of an axion,
> a hypothetical particle that some cosmologists propose is the
> invisible missing dark matter that makes up a large chunk of
> mass of the universe [....]
> "A paper in "Physical Review letters" is due this month."
> [March 2006] [.....]
> Raffelt says the PVLAS particle would need "crazy properties"
> to match astrophysical constraints, but there is no fundamental
> reason they can't behave that way"
>
> Any comments?

Yes. There are other ways possible other than the introduction of a new
particle. Of course, this would require that physics be changed.
Ultimately, which one violates Occam's Razor more?