"Cascade B" Particle Discovered At Fermilab

pnotequalsnp writes to note that physicists at Fermilab have discovered a new heavy particle called the Cascade B. This is the first particle ever seen that is made up of quarks representing all three quark families. A team of 610 physicists from 88 institutions reported the discovery in a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters last week. This must be the discovery that triggered rumors that the Higgs had been found.

610 physicists

[asifyoucare (302582)]

ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:

[QuantumG (50515)]

The most annoying thing is they won't tell us who the 610 physicists are!

Re:610 physicists

[cspruck (28447)]

The most annoying thing is they won't tell us who the 610 physicists are!

If you had their names, you probably wouldn't be able to plot their current positions.

Re:

[QuantumG (50515)]

Not really. They're just trying to use these 238 physicists against us. If they told us who they are, the community could address them.

Re:610 physicists

[Torvaun (1040898)]

We have here an article about physics that uses the word cascade. They better have Gordon Freeman on this team, I'm betting none of the other scientists can swing a crowbar worth a damn.

Re:610 physicists

[BigFoot48 (726201)]

610 is not a "team", it's a "sign here to get your name on a paper" gaggle.

Re:610 physicists

[Silver Sloth (770927)]

One way to build a solid team is to get complete involvement from the bottom to the top. If, at the end of the day, all the personnel who worked on the project get to put their names on the paper it shows how their work is valued and how much they are 'part of the team'.

And as for team size being limited - I'll bet that during the better days at NASA, say during the Apollo missions, everyone right down to the janitor felt that they were part of the team - and, if you don't think that janitors are important just wait until the next time the toilet blocks.

Re:610 physicists

[Mr_Tulip (639140)]

In 20 years when labsize is measured in Giga-physicists, this quote will come back to haunt you.

Re:610 physicists

[antic (29198)]

I read that as "labia size". Certainly won't be many physicists needing to measure that.

Re:

[kalirion (728907)]

I don't know, have you seen End of Evangelion?

Re: 610 physicists

[Black Parrot (19622)]

ought to be enough for anybody.

Most of the paper was the list of authors; there was only room for one sentence about the discovery.

One sentence about the discovery

[JonTurner (178845)]

"It's turtles... all the way down."

Re: 610 physicists

[SnowZero (92219)]

Seriously though, they managed to get the author information to fit on three pages. Here's the preprint [arxiv.org]. Usually it's bad when your paper has 10 times as many authors as references, but in this case I guess one can make an exception.

It's late.

[SnowZero (92219)]

Oops... for suitably large values of 10, that is. Namely 61.

Re: 610 physicists

[iabervon (1971)]

A fraction of a second after this paper was published, it split into an administrative form called a WC329 and a smaller, 108-author paper entitled "Reconstructing evidence of the strange-b-baryon". The WC329 then split into a pair of grant proposals, cousins of ordinary funding requests. "Reconstructing evidence of the strange-b-baryon" then emitted a Ph.D. thesis and became a 23-author paper which was nearly published before it decayed into another Ph.D thesis and an ordinary 4-author paper.

Researchers at arxiv were able to reconstruct the form of the original paper by analyzing hundreds of thousands of "personal communicaion" and "in press" citations by physicists distributed around the field.

Re:

[bdjacobson (1094909)]

ought to be enough for anybody.

I'm happy with the Physidore 64.

   

Physicists often have many quarks abouts them.

interesting

[wizardforce (1005805)]

with a mass of 5.774±0.019 GeV/c2, approximately six times the proton mass. The newly discovered electrically charged b baryon, also known as the "cascade b," is made of a down, a strange and a bottom quark. It is the first observed baryon formed of quarks from all three families of matter. judging by its componants, it should have a (-1/3*3=-1) charge of -1. strange quark: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_quark [wikipedia.org] Bottom quark: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom_quark [wikipedia.org] Down quark: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_quark [wikipedia.org]

What's the significance?

[emjoi_gently (812227)]

I read the article, and got the gist of what they have found, but what does it mean? Why is is important? Is there any practical upshot of the discovery?

Re:What's the significance?

[QuantumG (50515)]

Confirms the Standard Model.. again.

Takes us one more step closer to a Grand Unified Theory.

And no, there's no practical upshot.. it's pure research.

Re:What's the significance?

[rumith (983060)]

"Research is the transformation of money to knowledge. Innovation is the transformation of knowledge to money."
Dr. Hans Meixner.

Re:

[sco08y (615665)]

And a supercollider is the transformation of a hell of a lot of money into blinky little puffs of light.

Re:What's the significance?

[Rich0 (548339)]

I tend to doubt this would work. The costs of these projects are astronomical - so in order to recoup them the license costs would have to be VERY high. And the way people are treating drug patents these days, who is going to want to invest $5B in solving the energy crisis when the American public is probably going to just given them a token compulsory license fee instead of the 10% tax on all energy use for a decade that the invention might be worth?

These are very long-term, high-risk investments. Unless the payoff is large and likely to happen, you won't see private investment. That doesn't mean that we can't try to encourage this, but until lots of people are already making money off of this kind of investment you're not going to see a lot of private cash flowing in...

Re:

[ceoyoyo (59147)]

Yet. There's no practical upshot yet. Pure research has a habit of being very, very useful, a couple of decades down the road.

Re:

[zahl2 (821572)]

http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/06/10/cascade-b-b aryons-in-the-bag/ [wordpress.com]

...it is a very nice new bit of evidence that our understanding of heavy hadrons (particles composed of quarks, one of which a b or a c) is very accurate. The particles, yielding a signal whose significance exceeds seven standard deviations, have a mass in perfect agreement with theoretical expectations.

http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2007/jun/14/uta-fe rmilab-physicists-discover-triple-scoop-bary/ [pegasusnews.com]

Its discovery and the measurement of

Re:

[qbwiz (87077)]

So I'm gonna guess that we're getting closer to re-creating the big bang as a result of discovering this particle?

Personally, I'd rather not recreate the Big Bang. I'm pretty happy with the one we have, really.

On the other hand, recreating the conditions right after the Big Bang should be fine.

To quote "Napolean Dynamite"...

[TheDarkener (198348)]

"I don't understand a word you just said."

Moooooooogieeeee!

[Y-Crate (540566)]

This is the first particle ever seen that is made up of quarks representing all three quark families.

That being said, they should keep in mind the following Ferengi Rules of Acquisition during their research:

6 - Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity

111 - Treat people in your debt like family... exploit them.

I read the article...

[INeededALogin (771371)]

I still think the moon is made of cheese and that everything I see is composed of red, green and blue

They're waiting for you, Gordon!

[by Anonymous Coward]

In the test chamber!

b (pronounced "zigh sub b")

[Chris Pimlott (16212)]

Cue the AYB jokes...

Unlikely to match the Higgs rumors...

[jpflip (670957)]

The article describes a new particle with a mass a bit over 5 GeV. This is interesting, but is very different from the supposed resonance at ~180 GeV appearing in the rumors from the Tevatron. It seems pretty unlikely these are related. We'll still have to wait and hear from Dzero on the original rumors (probably just an analysis issue).

Re:Unlikely to match the Higgs rumors...

[WIAKywbfatw (307557)]

That sounds like an awesome pick-up line. Mind if I use it some time?

Re:

[MobileTatsu-NJG (946591)]

"That sounds like an awesome pick-up line. Mind if I use it some time?"

The great thing about that pick-up line is you won't be burdened with figuring out how to explain that to your kids.

Re:Unlikely to match the Higgs rumors...

[by Anonymous Coward]

The article describes a new particle with a mass a bit over 5 GeV. This is interesting, but is very different from the supposed resonance at ~180 GeV appearing in the rumors from the Tevatron. It seems pretty unlikely these are related. We'll still have to wait and hear from Dzero on the original rumors (probably just an analysis issue).

Your post reminds me of a typical Star Trek episode.
1. Data uses some big word for particle of the week that nobody's heard of
2. Someone says, "What?"
3. Data repeats the word and proceeds to explain it
4. Nerds everywhere nod in mystifed agreement with the cool scientific complexity of the future, and
5. This weeks show is a success.

Re:Unlikely to match the Higgs rumors...

[jpflip (670957)]

Fair enough - it was late and I threw in a bit of jargon there :) A bit of explanation:

(1) 1 GeV is approximately the proton mass, so this new particle is a bit over 5x the proton mass

(2) "Resonance" in this case means a feature in their data that looks like a new particle. When analyzing data from an accelerator, you basically add up the energies of all the particles coming out of a collision and histogram the result for a lot of collisions. If you see a peak in the histogram, it may mean that something interesting is happening at collisions of a particular energy, and such a peak is a signature that a particle is being created. The rumors related to a peak at ~180 GeV, which means it probably isn't the same peak that led to the discovery of the 5 GeV "cascade B" mentioned in this article.

(3) Dzero (or D0) is one of the two major detectors at the Tevatron particle accelerator (the other is CDF). They are the source of the rumors and of this new discovery.

(4) I say this is probably an "analysis issue", in that the 180 GeV feature could turn out to be an analysis mistake. It's probably being rechecked extensively by the folks working on Dzero, and they'll eventually let us know if it's real.

New particle!

[suv4x4 (956391)]

physicists at Fermilab have discovered a new heavy particle called the Cascade B.

Splendid! Now all I have to do is feed this into our generators, reverse the polarity of our schields, and our enemies are history. Muahahahah!

Three more years...

[stox (131684)]

and that's it. Fermilab has nothing scheduled past then, and will have passed the torch to the LHC. I admit it, I am biased, having worked at Fermilab, but I find this to be tragic. Nowhere else have I had the opportunity to work with such an incredible group of people. Closing Fermilab will be an incredible loss to this country. I can only hope that the International Linear Collider will be built, and will be built at Fermilab. Time will tell.

Congratulations to the folks at DZero on yet another fine piece of work!

Re:

[moosesocks (264553)]

From what I understood, there were Neutrino experiments scheduled to run at Fermilab until 2012 at least. Sure, with the LHC operational, it doesn't make much sense to continue the search for the Higgs at Fermilab, but that doesn't mean that other meaningful research isn't going on there.

That also said, it's very important to have two large colliders operational at once, as an observation recorded at *both* would be considerably more significant. The US really needs to get its head back into the game when

where has this thing been all this time?

[wizardforce (1005805)]

The article describes a new particle with a mass a bit over 5 GeV. This is interesting, but is very different from the supposed resonance at ~180 GeV appearing in the rumors from the Tevatron. It seems pretty unlikely these are related.

I would imagine that there is some sort of resonance phenomenon going on here. [any particle physicists know if this is even remotely accurate?] something else that is interesting about it is that we are just now finding a particle with a mass of about 6 GEV and we have particle accelerators capable of creating something over a hundred times that massive; so why now? why is it that the particle formation cross-section is so low? does the standard model have anything to say about this?

Re:

[Lord Ender (156273)]

does the standard model have anything to say about this?

The standard model says he wants you to stop anthropomorphizing him.

Cascade B

[k4_pacific (736911)]

From what I understand, Cascade B was discovered when a beam of high energy particles was directed at a plate with dried spaghetti crusted on it. The scientists found that the Cascade B removed the dried on food and left no water spots. Further research is needed to determine if Cascade B can be adapted for use in existing dishwashers.

Re:

[FiloEleven (602040)]

...with dried spaghetti...

I am SO SICK of you FSM loonies hijacking our rational scientific discussions to push your Pastafarian agenda! Every time some new discovery comes up, you guys aren't far behind, spouting about great noodly appendages and whatnot. Mod parent down to avoid yet another stupid creati--er, spaghetti vs. science flamewar! ...oh, you meant regular spaghetti? My bad.

Not related to Higgs boson

[hweimer (709734)]

This is completely unrelated to the search for the Higgs boson. While the Higgs is believed to be the elementary particle responsible for giving mass to all other particles, the Xi_b mentioned here is a composite particle consisting of three previously known quarks. So while it is good to know that the particle really exists as predicted by the standard model, this is definitely not the Nobel prize physics the discovery of the Higgs would be.

No, no! It migh lead to a "resonance cascade"!!!!

[porttikivi (93246)]

I am pretty sure the scientists at Black Mesa were discussing a danger of "resonance cascade" just before the tests with teir anomalous materials caused the dimensional outbreak... So we better leave this Cascade B stuff alone. The Freeman recovered us from the Cascade A, but we might not be so lucky this time. And what exactly caused the alternative future events in City 17?

Re:No, no! It migh lead to a "resonance cascade"!!

[jollyreaper (513215)]

The Freeman recovered us from the Cascade A, but we might not be so lucky this time.

Forget about Freeman!

not the higgs

[kakapo (88299)]

This particle is not related to the rumored detection of the Higgs. It is 30 times lighter than the unexplained resonance that is at the basis of these rumors.

Heim?

[blincoln (592401)]

So does Heim's theory [wikipedia.org] predict the existence and mass of this particle with the same accuracy as the others in the Standard Model?

Re:Which Higgs?

[SnowZero (92219)]

...
5) Higgs Profit!

Re:Something other?

[heinousjay (683506)]

I hate to interrupt your conversation with yourself, but could you get to the point, please?

Re:

[rumith (983060)]

You mean, like in "the larger the number of soldiers, the more pathetic an army is"? Don't be naive; not a single scientist, even if he is qualified in absolutely everything known to man, will be able to design something as complex as the LHC during his lifetime if he's working alone. Many specialists, probably diverse, will be needed to manage that tremendous amount of job in acceptable terms.