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"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.
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Better enjoy it while it lasts.
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 Bottom quark: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom_quark Down quark: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_quark
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Who was it who said, "People always 'discover' Higgs particles when funding is low."
Table-ized A.I.
ought to be enough for anybody.
I'm happy with the Physidore 64.
Table-ized A.I.
"I don't understand a word you just said."
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The most annoying thing is they won't tell us who the 610 physicists are!
How we know is more important than what we know.
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, 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?
I still think the moon is made of cheese and that everything I see is composed of red, green and blue
In the test chamber!
Cue the AYB jokes...
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).
610 is not a "team", it's a "sign here to get your name on a paper" gaggle.
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!
The most annoying thing is they won't tell us who the 610 physicists are!
Well, I'm pretty sure at least one is named "Robert", if that helps.
Table-ized A.I.
In 20 years when labsize is measured in Giga-physicists, this quote will come back to haunt you.
I never thought I'd see a resonance cascade B. Let alone create one.
Take what ye can. Give nothing back!
I don't know, I could easily imagine that some future discovery could require a team of up to 640 kilophysicists. But any more than that would be ridiculous - for example, there is no feasible catering service that could serve a lab that big, and the bathroom facilities would surely fill up before they had discovered their first bottom quark.
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Three members of Quark's family delivering "cascades" of heavy matter
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
Wow, now if only we can get 610 climatologists to believe in this particle, its existence will be confirmed.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
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!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I'm happy with the Physidore 64.
Physicists often have many quarks abouts them.
tag for the first list item.
(\(\
(=_=) Bani!
(")")
"It's turtles... all the way down."
Seriously though, they managed to get the author information to fit on three pages. Here's the preprint. 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.
Oops... for suitably large values of 10, that is. Namely 61.
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.
Unknown host pong.
Some other places attribute the quote to "Geoff Nicholson, Former VP, 3M Company".
It's too late at night for me to delve further though, and I got an essay to write.
~= scwizard =~
Fermilab is off the hook to fix the Large Hadron Collider.
No, just 6. But the quarks do get bigger with each generation!
sigfault. core dumped.
That's due to the the slashdot formatting uncertainty principle.
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.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
Fifty comments and not one reference to resonance cascade? How's that even possible? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mesa_Research_F acility
...
5) Higgs Profit!
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?
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I read that as "labia size". Certainly won't be many physicists needing to measure that.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
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.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Physicists of the DZero experiment at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a new heavy particle, the b (pronounced "zigh sub b") baryon..
So now instead of
*sigh* goes back to watching pr0n
we will get
*zigh* goes back to watching pr0n
Any other ramifications other than standard model verification?
this is the first step for the Q bomb.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Obviously, the long sought after Cascade Bitter particle. I guess physicists must be pretty desperate to find a good beer these days. Though shelling out for a particle accelerator just so you can get some beer money seems pretty inefficient.
Bitter and proud of it.
So! That's how many physicists it takes to make a "cascade b". I didn't think I was going to ever know the answer to that riddle.
Of all the things I've lost. I miss my keys the most.
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.
I think you do not undestand what I am alluding to. If you develop a method, a technology, device, etc. that is applicable to wide range of scientific experimentation, that does not mean you automatically become a coauthor of any paper that uses this technology. LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is designed to perform all kind of elementary particle experiments, not only the subject of the current paper. So you comment about LHC is off the target here.
Even if we consider people who worked specifically on this project: many of them did pure technical work (comparable to the job of translator). The same situation in genomic papers: people applied technology and get included in the paper for pure technical work. People should get authorship only when they applied their creativity and contribute to the paper something that have never been contributed before. Applying PCR to a new gene is NOT a scientific contribution and deserves to be mentioned only in acknowledgement.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Not quality, but the way the scientific credit is given.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I fail to track why the widely accepted practice of crediting staff who made non-critical but important contributions indicates pathetic state of modern science.
who discovered this particle? If so, we might need to watch out for a Resonance Cascade.
"No prints can come from fingers / If machines become our hands." -- Jack Johnson
I used a wrong adjective. It is pathetic but for different reasons. The word I should use here is "obscene", "shameful" (or "shameless" which is the same in this case).
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Sex: the final frontier
or does that word make one very nervous when hearing about people messing with unknown particles within atomics...
K-9's not around to seal any black holes they may create
(a very geeky little bit of Sarah Jane Smith Adventures humour)
Don't forget Higgy Baby (as TC called him) from "Magnum, P.I.".
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The experiment is one where scientists bash stuff with a huge hammer, and it breaks into small bits. This experiment has a certain size of a hammer, and can only blow shit to fragments of certain size. The report says that they think they found the last piece of size A.
Now they are building a bigger hammer to blow shit to pieces of size B, etc.
Some people think this is very exciting.
I don't know, have you seen End of Evangelion?
Why? Were there lips of indeterminate size?
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Wesley, re-calibrate the labia wavefront generator...
I drank what? -- Socrates
I'd bet you're wrong... 610 is way too many folks for a "meaningful" team. I agree with the parent, it was a "sign your name here" team. But then again, definitions mean everything and our definitions of a team might be different.
So does Heim's theory predict the existence and mass of this particle with the same accuracy as the others in the Standard Model?
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
From TFA:
> Sifting through data from trillions of collisions...
and
> The odds of the observed signal being due to something other than the
> cascade b are estimated to be one in 30 million.
There are over 66,000 one in 30 million events in "trillions" of collisions, which means at least 2 trillion.
I presume they mean one in 30 million, after taking into account "trillions".
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Apparently nobody notice that the particle discovered at Fermilab is the BSD (as in Bottom Strange Down)
:)
(and yes, I know that you should not identify a baryon only by its quark content but...
And yes, it does take that many people to make this kind of discovery. Which is why I, and many others, are not interested in working in HEP long term. Come on, I read slashdot, obviously I don't like people.
It's very obvious. One or two scientists made the particle but the chief physicist dropped it on the floor shortly afterwards. You know how messy labs get - there was no way they could find it on their own.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Surely you're joking, Mr. Freeman!
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.
Well, although you could see Rei standing from orbit, most of the ground is obscured by clouds/LCL, but I'd estimate that the labia was a good mile or so...wait, am I really discussing the size of the genitalia on a fictional fourteen-year-old? >.>;
Depends which end.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Damn Straight! Not to mention the Uber-PHd-Skillz needed to push a trolley into an energy beam
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.
I've always wondered how strong a part of the meme "everyone is important to the success" you see at NASA was the fact that they've had to think long and hard about issues of sanitation, etc in a closed environment, so they really do know just how valuable the janitors are...
"Cascade B Particle discovered at Fermilab. In related news, cascade resonance detected at Black Mesa, Gordon Freeman to assess the situation"
k =2874683
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLin
He will most likely venture into the test chamber and push the sample into the beam, if all goes well he will be out of there and cleaned up for lunch with the G man directly after the test..... or will he?
It's definitely the definition of "team" fouling things up.
Consider a big engineering project like designing the SR-71. Who's name always gets mentioned along with the SR-71? Kelly Johnson. He's far from the only contributor to the team, and would in fact have accomplished almost nothing without the dozens or hundreds of engineers working with him, but he gets most of the credit because he was in charge and saw the project through.
And while I would call all of them part of the team, the clarity of the team definition is a little hazy. You would never have seen all the engineers (or in this case physicists) in a room together collectively beating their heads over one problem. Don't forget division of labor. Given the amount of number crunching and review necessary to get a useful and accurate interpretation of the data coming out of a particle accellerator over years of operation, I could easily see a couple hundred physisicsts having meaningful contributions to the project.
The difference here is someone decided credit should be given to all of them instead of the just project leaders, so all the names went on the paper. It's not just a "sign your name here" team, but it's not the way credit is normally given, either. Most likely because in the academic world success is partially measured by how much important research you've published.
Unless you're familiar with the individual contributions of each of those people who's names are on the report, I think you're passing a premature judgement.
If all of them have otherwise uncredited work that contributed to this discovery, which giving the complexity of the Tevatron and the amount of data it generates would not surprise me, then surely this is an appropriate place to gain credit? Actually, re-reading your post, I think that's actually your argument, but you're finding it hard to accept the possibility that so many people could have made meaningful contributions.
Given that having a name on a paper is the primary way credit is given in academia, I suspect if there were names on this paper that don't really deserve to be, some of those who do would raise a fuss to keep the recognition of their own participation from being marginalized.
And for your example, applying an existing method to a new case is a scientific contribution, but not noteworthy (ergo, it doesn't make the front page of slashdot) unless something new is learned. To wit:
Mentos and water: null
Mentos and milk: null
Mentos and eggs: null
Mentos and coke: Hilarity, fortune, and youtube fame! Mentos and Pepsi: *yawn*
Who's name always gets mentioned
"Whose".