Fermilab Scientists Discover New Particle 151
An anonymous reader writes "Fermilab today announced that scientists working at the CDF (Collision Detector at Fermilab) experiment confirmed the observation of a new particle, the Xi-sub-b. The Xi-sub-b is categorized as a baryon, which are formed of three quarks. Commonly known baryons include the proton as well as the neutron."
Science! (Score:5, Informative)
Favorite quotes from TFA:
"existence of the Xi-sub-b has been predicted for some time"
"the Xi-sub-b was observed in 25 instances among almost 500 trillion proton-antiproton collisions"
Original paper (Score:5, Informative)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.3753
link to actual press release (Score:5, Informative)
If you'd prefer a link to the actual release instead ofconceivablytech's take on it:
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2011/CDF-Xi-sub-b-observation-20110720.html [fnal.gov]
does anyone have the arXiv link to the actual paper, not the PR fluff?
Yawn... (Score:3, Informative)
They haven't discovered a new fundamental particle. All they've done is to arrange some quarks into an arrangement we've already known about.
This is an engineering accomplishment -- sticking together an up, a strange, and a bottom quark to make a bound state. It doesn't represent any great discovery in physics; people have known for a long while that such a particle exists, simply from the properties of quarks. In fact, lattice QCD has been able to simulate such things for a while now, and (although I have not seen such a result) could calculate its mass.
Making a big deal about this could be a political move, since the Tevatron (the particle accelerator that the CDF is attached to) is due to shut down soon.
Re:Really new? (Score:2, Informative)
Nope. They made them.
It's possible, even likely, that something somewhere else (supernova, the big bang, etc.) made some in olden times. But these were brand-spankin' new.
And I get called pedantic!
Given that energy and/or matter cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another, I submit that nothing was "made" here, only converted from the same energy that had existed since the moment of the big bang.
Umm... How do you think we make antimatter at CERN? How do you think antimatter behaves when exposed to matter? Matter can be made and destroyed, but energy can only be converted from one form to another (matter is just a form of energy). You may say semantics, but that is a huge difference.
Re:Yawn... (Score:2, Informative)
One we theorized existed. Now we know. Not all physics is done with paper and pen.