News from the world of maths: Beautiful symmetry provides glimpse into quantum world
A complex symmetric structure known as the exceptional Lie group E8, which has so far only existed in the minds of mathematicians, seems to have turned up in real life for the first time. Physicists from the UK and Germany have conducted an experiment which involved cooling a crystal made of cobalt and niobium to near absolute zero and then applying a magnetic field. As they increased the strength of the magnetic field to a critical value, spontaneous patterns appeared in the configuration of electrons in the crystal, and these patterns carried the tell-tale signature of E8.
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posted by Plus @ 11:06 AM 
3 Comments:
- At 10:13 PM,
BlindTurtle said... -
So, the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 57.
So what is the question? - At 4:34 PM,
said... -
Not 57...30.
- At 1:41 PM, Steve said...
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Dr. Radu Coldea is deadly right. The E8 symmetry group is more fundamental than what was achieved experimentally. Alexander Zamolodchikov pointed out its possible importance in a somewhat limited context similar to what was done in Helmholtz Inst. and Oxford. However, and since almost twenty years, there was a fully developed general theory for high energy physics based on transfinite E8. This is the usual E8 plus a manifest golden mean effect in addition to the inert one. The theory is fully explained in various papers published in a journal for nonlinear dynamics, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. I should list three papers which readers of this serious site may find very illuminating and informative. They are: High energy physics and the standard group from the exceptional Lie groups, 36, 2008, pp. 1-17. On a class of general theories for high energy particle physics, 14, 2002, pp. 649-668 and The theory of Cantorian spacetime and high energy particle physics (an informal review), 41, 2009, pp. 2635-2646. Further work on the subject was made by Ervin Goldfain, L. Marek-Crnjac, Ji-Huan He and G. Iovane as well as Tim Palmer.