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New Subatomic Particle Discovered

Posted by michael on from the charmed-life dept.

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"."

17 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Naked charm!?! by MarkusQ · · Score: 4, Funny

    From the article, it sounds as if this particle would exhibit naked charm (and naked (anti-)strange as well I assume). This seems astounding to me (at a quarter to five AM at least). Last I heard that sort of thing was on mother nature's short list of no-nos.

    -- MarkusQ

    1. Re:Naked charm!?! by barawn · · Score: 4, Informative

      Might be a little too early in the morning. This guy is just a resonance of D_s+, which has a mass of 1968 MeV, and also is made up of c & s_bar. Naked charm just means the particle has a c and no c_bar, which is perfectly fine. Charmed particles have been around for a while now.

  2. What the Quark? by Neck_of_the_Woods · · Score: 4, Funny


    Could someone explain the who Anti-Quark, Naked Quark, Bio-Polar Quark, Spring Break Quark, and Got my head up my ass CIO Quark please?

    --
    Neck_of_the_Woods
    #/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
    1. Re:What the Quark? by reiggin · · Score: 4, Funny

      "Anti-Quark" can be vaguely defined as any Mac OS X user or any Adobe programmer.

  3. That's not really an event by KDan · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's tons of different configurations of fundamental particles, especially quarks. Though the people who set up the accelerators and did this must be pretty chuffed, and have indeed contributed to the advancement of particle physics by helping repertoriate more of the possible combinations, there's nothing even remotely interesting to anyone who's not a particle physicist working on this type of quark configuration.

    Now if they had discovered a new fundamental particle, or if that particle exhibited properties in contradiction with the current laws of particle physics (eg symmetry breaking), that would be worth posting...

    Daniel

    --
    Carpe Diem
  4. importance is in the details by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)

    1. Re:importance is in the details by Bootsy+Collins · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  5. Must be LOVE! by SillySlashdotName · · Score: 5, Funny

    a charm quark with ... an anti strange [quark]

    Love makes strange bedfellows...

    This force, unlike most others in nature, becomes stronger as the distance between the two quarks increases.

    Absence makes the heart grow fonder...

    They have discovered the LOVE particle!

    --
    Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
  6. Quark is so overrated... by jbarr · · Score: 4, Funny

    I prefer Neelix's portrayal of the Grand Proxy in "False Profits"!

    --
    My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
  7. Don't forget this one: by 0x00000dcc · · Score: 4, Funny
    Don't forget: the Bill O'Reilly quark, which, if combined with other quarks to make an electron, has no spin ...

    I kill me.

    --

    -- (Score:i, Imaginary)

  8. Binding force gets stronger with distance? by Lafe · · Score: 5, Interesting
    "The new particle called the Ds (2317), which combines a charm quark with another heavy quark - an anti strange, has unexpected properties that will provide insight into the force that binds the quarks together. This force, unlike most others in nature, becomes stronger as the distance between the two quarks increases."
    So, if I read this right, as long as you have enough of these particles, or none of them, you're fine.

    But what happens if you've only got one of them here, and the nearest other one is in a neighboring galaxy? Massive destruction? Infinite attraction? Or just enough attraction to get a geek a date?
    1. Re:Binding force gets stronger with distance? by judowillreturns · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Quarks are particles 'inside' (that compromise) other sub-atomic particles. Therefore there are many of them.
      No problem.

    2. Re:Binding force gets stronger with distance? by Bootsy+Collins · · Score: 3, Informative

      This is a very simplistic response, but it'll have to do:

      The situation you describe (two isolated/bare quarks or antiquarks, separated by a vast distance) can't really occur in the theory. It takes energy to separate the quarks/antiquarks in a subatomic particle; and because of the force getting stronger as the distance increases, it keeps taking more and more energy. As you separate the quarks, you're raising the potential energy of the system, just as if you were rolling a ball up the side of a bowl. Eventually you've put enough energy into the system to allow the creation of new particles -- specifically, a quark-antiquark pair, each member of which binds to the two quarks you're trying to separate, giving you two subatomic particles where before you had one (and still no bare quarks).

      This phenomenon (among others) occurs all the time in particle accelerators in which hadrons (that is, particles made up of quarks and antiquarks) are collided, such as the Tevatron at Fermilab or the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Protons at high energies collide with protons or antiprotons, and the input energies of the colliding particles provide the energy necessary for particle creation in the process described above.

  9. Perpetual motion, here I come... by clambake · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This force, unlike most others in nature, becomes stronger as the distance between the two quarks increases.

    For the physicists out there, if this forces is true, then what stops somone from developing a device based on it and, say, some electromagetic force (or just plain old gravity) where by each side pushes and pulls in balance so that they actually generate energy.

    Like for eample, have a "Ds" particle bolted to the top of a room, and drop a second "Ds" particle directly from it, it would be pulled by gravity until the point where the strange inverted force gets strong enough to pull it back up. As it goes back up, that force diminshes, and then gravity takes over again, etc.

  10. Re:Perpetual motion, here I come... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hmm...I really can't tell if you are joking or not. This is never going to happen due to the scale at which these forces work. The strong nuclear force prevents free quarks from being observed. This is called confinement and is due to quantum chromodynamics (QCD). If a enough energy is pumped into a particle composed of quarks, the energy enevtually goes into creating a new quark pair, therefore satifying confinement (no free quarks). The amount of energy to do this is staggering. Think GeV or higher particle accelerator. Any other time the distances over which these forces work (10^-18 m) prevents much of anything being extracted.

  11. What's the difference? by barawn · · Score: 2, Informative

    Because the definition of a "particle" in this case is completely arbitrary. It's a charm and an antistrange quark in a bound configuration. You can 'imagine' it as the charm and the antistrange orbiting each other (though this isn't strictly true!) There's a 'ground state' for a D_s+, which is like 1970 MeV as I said above. This is an 'excited state'. In particle physics you call excited states new 'particles'.

    We know we didn't 'invent' it because a c and an s_bar existed a long time before this guy. We just put them together in a weird way.

  12. The Starbucks Particle by August_zero · · Score: 2, Insightful

    We should let whoever pays for the research name it.

    --
    On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?