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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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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.
6 - Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity
111 - Treat people in your debt like family... exploit them.
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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!
"Research is the transformation of money to knowledge. Innovation is the transformation of knowledge to money."
Dr. Hans Meixner.
In 20 years when labsize is measured in Giga-physicists, this quote will come back to haunt you.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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. "
"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.
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
I hate to interrupt your conversation with yourself, but could you get to the point, please?
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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.
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...
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.
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.