New Subatomic Particle Discovered

Cyndi writes "A new subatomic particle has been discovered by researchers at Stanford. It seems to be "an unusual configuration of a charm quark and a strange anti-quark"."

Comments

Re:importance is in the details

[Bootsy Collins]

The combination was not the surprise, but the missing mass is, which suggests that the theoretical calculation of the binding force is incorrect (though such calculation is often an approximation themself) This usually signals that some aspect of the theory on the force is wrong or that their is yet another particle that was undetected, thus robbing some mass away. (Neutrino was 'discovered' this way)

Well, sorta. In the case of the neutrino, conservation of energy and momentum gave you a solid expectation against which you could notice the missing momentum. So the analogy is only relevant if you expect the theoretical calculation of this resonance's mass to be accurate in the first place. But such calculations are notoriously difficult to do, and few people who haven't hitched their careers to doing lattice QCD calculations believe that we really know how to do them well. The "benefit" of this discrepancy is, as you partly suggest, that it will hopefully improve the (typically numerical) models people use to do these kinds of calculations.

The Starbucks Particle

[August_zero]

We should let whoever pays for the research name it.