"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.

Comments

Re:What's the significance?

[QuantumG]

Confirms the Standard Model.. again.

Takes us one more step closer to a Grand Unified Theory.

And no, there's no practical upshot.. it's pure research.

Re:688 authors

[rumith]

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.

Re:What's the significance?

[Rich0]

I tend to doubt this would work. The costs of these projects are astronomical - so in order to recoup them the license costs would have to be VERY high. And the way people are treating drug patents these days, who is going to want to invest $5B in solving the energy crisis when the American public is probably going to just given them a token compulsory license fee instead of the 10% tax on all energy use for a decade that the invention might be worth?

These are very long-term, high-risk investments. Unless the payoff is large and likely to happen, you won't see private investment. That doesn't mean that we can't try to encourage this, but until lots of people are already making money off of this kind of investment you're not going to see a lot of private cash flowing in...

BSD

[mu22le]

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... :)

Re:610 physicists

[Falstius]

It should be obvious that any scientist would prefer their name to be the first and only name on some seminal paper. The only reason then to include 609 other people in the list is that you truly value their contribution and you need them to maintain there commitment to the project. You need scientists to do work that doesn't directly provide this kind of high profile paper, if the primary authors didn't acknowledge their contribution the rug would be pulled out from underneath them.

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.

Re:Three more years...

[moosesocks]

From what I understood, there were Neutrino experiments scheduled to run at Fermilab until 2012 at least. Sure, with the LHC operational, it doesn't make much sense to continue the search for the Higgs at Fermilab, but that doesn't mean that other meaningful research isn't going on there.

That also said, it's very important to have two large colliders operational at once, as an observation recorded at *both* would be considerably more significant. The US really needs to get its head back into the game when it comes to science -- the LHC and ITER taking place overseas doesn't exactly reflect positively upon our current state of affairs.

Clinton's cancellation of the SSC (when it was halfway completed, no less) set particle physics back 15-20 years worldwide. If completed, it would have had 3 times the circumference of the LHC.

But, hey. We've got Iraq. That's got to count for something, right?