New Particle Found, the Bottom-Most Bottomonium 119
PhysicsDavid writes "Collaborators on the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center have detected and measured, for the first time after a 30-year search, the lowest energy particle of the 'bottomonium' family, called the eta-sub-b. Bottomonium consists of a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark bound together by the strong force. The discovery fills in a missing piece of quark physics that will help reveal the nature and behavior of the quarks and the strong force."
Oh jeez, here come the bad jokes (Score:5, Funny)
So this would be the bottom of the bottomonium barrel?
Re:Oh jeez, here come the bad jokes (Score:5, Funny)
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No, any attempt at telling a bad joke will result in you get a smacked bottomonium!
Re:Oh jeez, here come the bad jokes (Score:5, Funny)
Scientific Symbol: ASS.
My AsS is taken (Score:5, Funny)
Scientific Symbol: ASS.
AsS is taken: it is the symbol for realgar [galleries.com].
ehhhh (Score:2)
then again was an anti-bottom quark is positive or negative (metaphorically speaking) ? i wouldnt want to end up on the wrong side of the spectrum, if you know what i mean
or should i scratch the whole thing and go gay ?
Finally! (Score:2)
I had lost that particle when returning from work. Glad the researchers found it.
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
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Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Shouldn't a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark annihilate one another? How do they manage to avoid doing so in this 'bottomonium' state?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
When a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark are pulled together by the strong force, they form a quark âoeatomâ-much like an electron and a proton come together under the electromagnetic force to create a hydrogen atom.
Anti-quarks don't behave like anti-matter, despite sharing that awesome prefix.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
No, the antibottom quark is the bottom quark's antiparticle. It's just that antimatter doesn't work quite the way science fiction stories make it sound.
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No, anti-matter pretty much does work the way most Sci-Fi portrays it. However, quarks, while being what matter is composed of, are not matter in and of themselves and thus can behave differently.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know what is the lifetime of this \eta_b particle or its main decay branch (I haven't RTF BaBar's A and I'm not a QCD specialist), but it should be very short, and the main decay channel should be hadronic (ie, particle jets).
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what the hell, 2 directions in time?
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You're gonna need more '$' if you want to make that TeX go.
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They will annihilate after some time (the particle's lifetime), but they can be bound together for some time before that happens.
Exactly. The process by which a particle and anti-particle annihilate is electromagnetic, resulting in the production of photons. Since the timescale for electromagnetic interactions is much longer than that for strong interactions (and it is the strong force which binds the b and b-bar quarks in a meson), the meson exists long enough to have a very definite, observable mass. This is measured by reconstructing the 4-momenta of the decay products to form an invariant mass. When plotted in a histogram, a
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A virtual photon is a positron-electron, according to my bad interpretation of Wikipedia. It doesn't acknowledge a photon as a composite particle, but an elementary one.
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"As a slightly more familiar example, a photon consists of a positron and an electron. Since it occurs reverseably, you could just as well consider their "annhilation" into a photon as a composition, and their creation as a decomposition."
Except that a photon of sufficient energy can also spontaneously "decompose" into a muon-antimuon or tau-antitau. So it really is inappropriate to liken pair production to decomposition.
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Actually, under the right circumstances, anti-particles don't immediately self-destruct. Electrons and positrons (anti-electrons) can form an atom-like species, too, with half-lives on the order of 10^-7 to 10^-10 seconds. Way back in 1971, an entire review of positronium chemistry (ie chemistry of positron and electron as an ato-like species) was published in Angewandte Chemie, a major chemistry journal. (Page 179 for the international edition, published in English.) It's not my area of study, but I came a
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
The same way protons and electrons avoid crashing into each other. The energy states are discontinuous and do not include zero. Once the bottomonium meson reaches its lowest state, it can't lose any more energy, so it can't get close enough to annihilate.
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The lowest bound state of a particle-antiparticle pair is not, as you claim, stable, but depending on what happens when you run the numbers for any particular type of particle, it may be live for long enough to be observed in the lab. Ultimately it's going to decay from the lowest bound state to a pair of photons. No such decay is going to happen with protons a
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Protons and electrons are not anti-particles though.
The better example is positronium, where you have a positron (anti-electron) orbited by an electron (also known as a negatron... no seriously).
You end up with a particle-anti-particle interacting in a way that has some form of life time... but positronium even in its most stable form doesn't last more than a few milliseconds.
So, this "bottomonium" would probably be a case where the two quarks are interacting by strong-force to make a Meson, while not annih
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electron, anti-electron (aka positron)
proton, anti-proton (aka negatron)
but alas, I am wrong
Anti-proton doesn't get a cool name? Electron's taking negatron just leaves anti-protons with... antitron? That sucks!
Damn you Irish physicist G. J. Stoney (1826â€"1911)!
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Anti-proton doesn't get a cool name? Electron's taking negatron just leaves anti-protons with... antitron? That sucks!
How about "krupton" (loosly "shadow particle")?
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Shouldn't a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark annihilate one another? How do they manage to avoid doing so in this 'bottomonium' state?
I guess in the bottom in the bottom they all get along just fine! =)
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The should have called the particle a "panda". Then we could call it the "pandamonium" state!
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They wanted to, but then they'd have to suffer all the bad jokes about quantum physics being bamboozling.
well, young 'un (Score:2)
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Sun does not annihilate the Earth (Score:3, Informative)
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> Shouldn't a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark
> annihilate one another? How do they manage to
> avoid doing so in this 'bottomonium' state?
Eventually, they do. While they are detector range, however, they can still be orbiting each other. Even if they do break down before detected, you can determine that they were there by a spike in particle energies from a point source that adds up to the mass of that meson.
You can even make positronium with an suitable accelerator, where an electron and an
Lowest energy particle found in California! (Score:5, Funny)
Is it any surprise that the most laid back particle evar was discovered in California?
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Is it any surprise that the most laid back particle evar was discovered in California?
More specifically at the SLAC!
Tm
I am looking for a physicist here... (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought quarks could not exist in anything less than triplets....This sounds like a doublet.
Re:I am looking for a physicist here... (Score:5, Informative)
They exist in groups of two or three that create a neutral color charge. For example, a particle can consist of red, green, and blue or of blue and anti-blue.
Re:I am looking for a physicist here... (Score:5, Insightful)
They exist in groups of two or three that create a neutral color charge. For example, a particle can consist of red, green, and blue or of blue and anti-blue.
I'm not surprised that I can't tell the difference between a proper description of quantum mechanics and the ramblings of a drunken madman on the street. What surprises me is that particle physicists have trouble with that as well. The best way I've heard it described, we're used to relating to things on a human scale. We're used to matter at about our size, moving things about with our own hands, seeing physics operate on a human scale. This is what we're used to, this is what we've come to expect, all is fine. But things outside of our natural environment are very odd. Being in space produces very odd results. We can eventually wrap our brains around it but those things are still odd. At the QM scale, things go from odd to perverse. We can experimentally validate that our seemingly addled theories are correct but it doesn't make any kind of neat and proper sense. The classic scientist saw an exploration of nature as a discovery of the working of the mind of God, a mind we of course imagine in the ideal of our own human mind. Stars on their courses, planets in their orbits, everything neat and prim and orderly. No wonder so many bright scientists reacted in disgust when they looked at the implications of QM. If this is a picture of the mind of God, he's a bloody nutter.
Re:I am looking for a physicist here... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not surprised that I can't tell the difference between a proper description of quantum mechanics and the ramblings of a drunken madman on the street
That's what makes quantum mechanics so AWESOME
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Re:I am looking for a physicist here... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not surprised that I can't tell the difference between a proper description of quantum mechanics and the ramblings of a drunken madman on the street.
I don't mean to sound like I'm ripping on you, but QM isn't really that fundamentally "weird" or difficult to understand, or "odd" at this point in history; it's not any more complicated to wrap your brain around than classical mechanics, or E&M, or automobile maintenance. The "romance" that QM (like Relativity) is "hard" is, I think, a remnant of early popularizations of cutting edge research in the 1920s and 1930s, when a coherent theoretical framework was under construction for the first time, and physicists didn't really know how far down the rabbit hole went. Popularizers were desperately flailing around, looking for analogies that a much more rural and less technically sophisticated public could understand, and to whom they had trouble relating (the "they're all bumpkins" fallacy). We physicists were pretty inept at doing so then, and have been particularly inept at eradicating those early and incorrectly popularized notions from our public interactions to this day.
Today, we should know better ... most of QM is robust and mature enough that it's an engineering discipline, for cripes sake. Hopefully, the popularizations will catch up with the reality at some point, and we won't keep subjecting generations to the "QM is so weird you can't possibly understand it unless you're a genius" meme.
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They exist in groups of two or three that create a neutral color charge. For example, a particle can consist of red, green, and blue or of blue and anti-blue.
To the average person, that's going to sound really fucking crazy. Most science just sounds complicated if you don't know much about it, QM sounds like the scientist is stark raving mad because of the weird terminology that it uses.
Re:I am looking for a physicist here... (Score:4, Interesting)
Every discipline has its own jargon. To me, a quantum chemist, what biologists say sounds weird. It takes a while to understand the jargon of a discipline. In case of quantum physics, the terminology is probably confusing because:
1) you have to "name" something in order to talk about it.
2) the naming is proposed during meetings/conferences where either the catering is more interesting, the flight back is imminent, or you have too many things in the brain to care about what the hell the name is. If you are not into acadamia, you should try to live as one, and you would understand why this happens. It is not easy, believe me.
3) no one has yet a clue. Previous examples are Phlogiston theory, the Ether, and the Armillary sphere. You have to refine your model, and the current model seems to explain experimental evidence quite well, but things are too complex, and we got used to the fact that nature is normally quite simply described when you have a powerful mathematical framework. After all, you can explain all quantum chemistry with a very simple formula, H * psi = E * psi, the Schroedinger equation.
Going back to the issue of difficulty of quantum chemistry/physics: yes, it is hard to understand, because it looks unnatural, but once you understand the mathematical framework, and the meaning of it in practice, the stuff you handle and the rules you apply are always the same, and things behave in a very predictable way.
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Funny, I thought the point of QM was that it was UNpredictable.
Predictable unpredictableness? And you people wonder why outside observers think your topic of study is weird. ;)
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QM may not be all that difficult to "wrap your brain around" if you neglect spin, but I defy you to give me a verbal explanation of spin that is simple and accurate in all situations.
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First of all, drop the "it's so simple a child could understand it" attitude. In a room full of geniuses (ie 120+ IQs), maybe half can have this stuff explained to them on a better than absurdly simplified level. Get deep into the mathematics and you're down to about 5%.
Secondly, "what the hell is so weird" about what you just talked about?
Gee, I dunno, how about the fact that you have to combine things that can't exist to get something that can?
Yes, I realize that mathematically, manifesting energies in va
bloody nutter (Score:1)
Well, this is actually, nearly as I can tell, the entire argument between atheism and, well, serious religion.
If we assume that certain ancient Greek philosophers were correct and God should meet human ideals, the atheists must be right and a person tends to make his Gods in his own image.
But guy called Isaiah [lds.org] and a guy called Benjamin [lds.org] indicated that God is a bit beyond us. This makes sense, if you think about it, if God is immortal. An immortal man would likely have views that mortals would prefer to consi
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(For my part, I've considered both trusting and not trusting, and it seems to me that refusing to trust can have no advantage over trusting, but trusting might have some advantages.)
Game theory (using the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, natch) seems to indicate you're correct. In fact, forgiveness in addition to trust appears to be the optimum strategy, last time I read about it.
what about... (Score:2)
They exist in groups of two or three that create a neutral color charge. For example, a particle can consist of red, green, and blue or of blue and anti-blue.
What about a hyper intelligent shade of the color blue?
tm
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Re:I am looking for a physicist here... (Score:5, Informative)
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Why does this statement make me think of quaternions?
Re:I am looking for a physicist here... (Score:5, Informative)
It is a doublet, also known as a meson. They're not long-lived, but they exist.
I have no idea why they didn't use the word 'meson' in the article. Bottomonium is a type of quarkonium, which is a type of meson.
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Would we be surprised if these experiments were carried out at Black Meson?
Maybe Black Meson? (Score:3, Funny)
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While I believe that your comment is accurate, it is funny as hell that it could just as well be completely made up.
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(Excuse the naive liberties taken to explain the concept. Let the pedants now correct this statement down to incoherence.)
Re:I am looking for a physicist here... (Score:5, Informative)
Zoo? I want to go to the particle zoo! (Score:2)
I love zoos. Can I pet the yellow part of a meson?
Re:Zoo? I want to go to the particle zoo! (Score:5, Funny)
I love zoos. Can I pet the yellow part of a meson?
If you do you'll get gluon yer hands.
Arguing backwards (Score:2)
There are all kinds of doublets in the particle zoo; the fact that they are unstable makes them observable (since we usually detect not the particle but its decay).
You have this argument backwards. The reason we detect decay products from particles is BECAUSE they decay! Stable particles are often very easy to detect e.g. electron, proton, muon (ok, technically this is not stable but it is so long lived at high energy that we usually treat it as stable). In fact stable particles are generally a lot easier to detect than unstable ones because we detect the particle itself, and not its decay products.
Since all our detectors are made of matter what determines whether
That's one tiny jacket! (Score:2)
Not being the physics geek I once was, I was slightly confused by your use of the word 'doublet'.
Thank Google for Just In Time Comprehension.
-Rick
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Hey!!! Thats what Data needs to do...feed the anti-bottomonium particles through the quantum phase inverter than boost the power using a coherent tetryon beam!
I am sensing a line from the next Star Trek movie...
Tetris? (Score:2)
Thats what Data needs to do...feed the anti-bottomonium particles through the quantum phase inverter than boost the power using a coherent tetryon beam!
"Tetryon beam"? I thought a tetrion was a Tetris machine [nintendoworldreport.com].
Bottom-Most Bottom? (Score:1)
bottom and anti-bottom? (Score:5, Funny)
The bottom and anti-bottom held together by the strong force?
Sounds cheeky to me
Re:bottom and anti-bottom? (Score:4, Interesting)
I was reading a book on this last night, and it said that scientists named it that just so that they could publish papers about searching for a 'bare bottom' ( A bottom quark by itself ).
The book said that the silly names assigned to the quarks was because at the start nobody took quark theory seriously. Nobody expected the theory to last, so they assigned silly names.
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Re:bottom and anti-bottom? (Score:5, Informative)
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I seem to remember hearing a while back about the search for "naked Truth" or "naked beauty".
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It took the researchers much longer to determine which one was the power-bottom
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Yes. The force is strong with this one.
Bottomonium? (Score:3, Funny)
'... the BaBar experiment at ...
Shouldn't this be called Elephantonium?
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That's pure, weapons grade ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Well Done.
Oblig. (Score:1)
"None more bottom."
BaBar Experiment (Score:1)
Now, for the first time, collaborators on the BaBar experiment at the U.S. Department of Energyâ(TM)s (DOE) Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)...
I mean, I guess this experiment has nothing to do with testing on animals [wikipedia.org]
Alternative Theory Tie in? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Alternative Theory Tie in? (Score:5, Informative)
The interesting question, IMHO, is: Was this particle predicted by anybody else's research?
Yes. It's called the standard model. It's not surprising that it was found ... it would have been more surprising if it hadn't been found eventually.
No force jokes? (Score:2)
I mean come on... I've heard of the force, and the dark side of the force. But WTF is "the strong force"? I've heard "The force is strong with this one" but that's simply referring to the state of "the force" not "the strong force."
Re:No force jokes? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No force jokes? (Score:5, Funny)
Here it comes :
Bottomonium consists of a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark bound together by the strong force
I feel a great disturbance in the strong Force, as if millions of bottom and anti-bottom quarks were bound together in the Upsilon(3S) state and suddenly decayed by emitting a gamma ray.
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You seem to know a thing or two about this subject. So, just where to the midichloridians come in?
Bottom, Top? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm confused - at an atomic scale, what is top and bottom? I thought space has no 'preferred' direction in which to define up, down, east, west, north, south? How can there be a 'bottom' particle?
Re:Bottom, Top? (Score:5, Informative)
Physicists are weirder than astronomers (Score:3, Interesting)
Murray Gell-Mann named the 'quark' after a line in James Joyce's novel Finnegan's Wake because he liked the sound of the word. The quarks themselves come in six 'flavors': up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Only the up and down quarks are stable, which is why it's taken 30 years to create [eta]b Bottomonium.
Meanwhile, astronomers worry about whether Pluto is a planet or not.
Hail Eris!
Re:Physicists are weirder than astronomers (Score:5, Informative)
Not only did Gell-Mann like the sound of the word, but it was also because they came in triplets. The line from Joyce is "Three quarks for Muster Mark"
Just a thought (Score:2)
I am, obviously, not schooled in this whole mess of stuff, but it's interesting to think about (even if my thoughts are fiction). How fun!
Are particle physicists really perverted enough... (Score:4, Funny)
Science (Score:1)
And we wonder why people think scientists are just making things up.
(I was going to say 'talking out of their asses' but remembered what I was quoting while typing it.)