Washington, Dec 7: Using a visual target/detector, a University of Buffalo researcher has revealed the existence of the axion, a tiny particle with no charge, a very low mass and a lifetime much shorter than a nanosecond.

Dr. Piyare Jain, a UB professor emeritus in the Department of Physics, suggested the existence of the axion way back in 1974.

He published his latest research, which appears online in the British Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, during a two-day symposium held in October at UB that celebrated Jain's 50-year career in the physics department in the College of Arts and Sciences.

"These results show that we have detected axions, part of a family of particles that likely also includes the very heavy Higgs-Boson particle, which at present is being sought after at different laboratories," said Dr. Jain.

The axion has been seen as critical to the Standard Model of Physics and is believed to be a component of much of the dark matter in the universe.

Research on axion started way back in 1977, when scientists predicted the possibility of existence of a particle with characteristics very similar to those described in Dr. Jain's papers. In that publication, the term "axion" was coined.

After the theoretical work, there was a mushrooming of papers from both theoretical and experimental physicists all chasing the axion using low, medium and high-energy accelerator beams from different laboratories worldwide.

But when it proved to be too elusive, many in the physics community abandoned the search in the 1990s. Opinions started making round that such things as axions never existed at all. Later in 1999, a project called the CERES experiment at CERN in Geneva again focused on attempting to detect the axion, but that project was unsuccessful as well.

According to Dr. Jain, the problem in all these failed experiments lay with their detector, which was electronic, the standard used in high-energy physics experiments today.

“They didn't know how to handle the detector for short-lived particles. I knew that for this very short-lived particle -- 10 to the power minus 13 seconds -- the detector must be placed very near the interaction point where the collision between the projectile beam and the target takes place so that the produced particle doesn't run away too far; if it does, it will decay quickly and it will be completely missed. That is what happened in most of the unsuccessful experiments,” Dr. Jain said.

"This particle was there in my original paper in 1974. The experiment gave a hint that these particles existed but did not generate sufficient statistics to prove it. I knew I had to wait until a heavy ion beam at very high energy was available at a new accelerator,” he said.

In his experiment, Dr. Jain produced axions under extreme conditions of high temperature and high pressure, using a heavy ion lead beam with a total energy of 25 trillion electron volts at CERN in Geneva. (ANI)