Slashdot Mirror


New Particle Found, the Bottom-Most Bottomonium

PhysicsDavid writes "Collaborators on the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center have detected and measured, for the first time after a 30-year search, the lowest energy particle of the 'bottomonium' family, called the eta-sub-b. Bottomonium consists of a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark bound together by the strong force. The discovery fills in a missing piece of quark physics that will help reveal the nature and behavior of the quarks and the strong force."

119 comments

  1. Oh jeez, here come the bad jokes by jimbobborg · · Score: 4, Funny

    So this would be the bottom of the bottomonium barrel?

    1. Re:Oh jeez, here come the bad jokes by TornCityVenz · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well this should certainly make Sir Mixalot very happy..... wait...nevermind.

      --
      I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
    2. Re:Oh jeez, here come the bad jokes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, any attempt at telling a bad joke will result in you get a smacked bottomonium!

    3. Re:Oh jeez, here come the bad jokes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Scientific Symbol: ASS.

  2. Well... by bigstrat2003 · · Score: 4, Funny

    It seems this line of research has certainly bottomed out.

    --
    "16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
    1. Re:Well... by Walt+Dismal · · Score: 1

      This was already discovered in 1998 by San Francisco scientists Doctor Madame Dominatrix and her colleague Teenage Nurse. They experimentally determined that the Whiponium strong force caused the bottom quark and the anti-bottom quark to gyrate violently before binding together, emitting a Handcuff particle in a random direction. Afterwards, the bottom quark smoked a cigarette and the anti-bottom quark demanded to be paid.

  3. Huh? by Millennium · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Shouldn't a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark annihilate one another? How do they manage to avoid doing so in this 'bottomonium' state?

    1. Re:Huh? by jeffmeden · · Score: 4, Informative
      The article knows this and many other astonishing things!

      When a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark are pulled together by the strong force, they form a quark âoeatomâ-much like an electron and a proton come together under the electromagnetic force to create a hydrogen atom.

      Anti-quarks don't behave like anti-matter, despite sharing that awesome prefix.

    2. Re:Huh? by Remus+Shepherd · · Score: 5, Informative

      The same way protons and electrons avoid crashing into each other. The energy states are discontinuous and do not include zero. Once the bottomonium meson reaches its lowest state, it can't lose any more energy, so it can't get close enough to annihilate.

      --
      Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
    3. Re:Huh? by blueg3 · · Score: 4, Informative

      No, the antibottom quark is the bottom quark's antiparticle. It's just that antimatter doesn't work quite the way science fiction stories make it sound.

    4. Re:Huh? by brunokummel · · Score: 1

      Shouldn't a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark annihilate one another? How do they manage to avoid doing so in this 'bottomonium' state?

      I guess in the bottom in the bottom they all get along just fine! =)

      --
      What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
    5. Re:Huh? by Steve+Max · · Score: 5, Informative

      They will annihilate after some time (the particle's lifetime), but they can be bound together for some time before that happens. Another good example is the \pi^0 (neutral pion), which is made of up and anti-up (or down and anti-down) quarks. It decays after some time to two photons.

      I don't know what is the lifetime of this \eta_b particle or its main decay branch (I haven't RTF BaBar's A and I'm not a QCD specialist), but it should be very short, and the main decay channel should be hadronic (ie, particle jets).

    6. Re:Huh? by nategoose · · Score: 1

      Since the 2 particles travel in different directions in time, it should no time at all!

    7. Re:Huh? by pla · · Score: 0

      Another good example is the \pi^0 (neutral pion), which is made of up and anti-up (or down and anti-down) quarks. It decays after some time to two photons.

      As a slightly more familiar example, a photon consists of a positron and an electron. Since it occurs reverseably, you could just as well consider their "annhilation" into a photon as a composition, and their creation as a decomposition.

    8. Re:Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      The should have called the particle a "panda". Then we could call it the "pandamonium" state!

    9. Re:Huh? by g0dsp33d · · Score: 1

      No, the force is strong with these two.

      --
      lol: You see no door there!
    10. Re:Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Shouldn't a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark annihilate one another? How do they manage to avoid doing so in this 'bottomonium' state?

      No, The top quark has forbidden the bottom quark from doing this. If the bottom does not obey the top then the strong force will be applied.

    11. Re:Huh? by Khashishi · · Score: 1

      It's probably unstable. Antibottom and bottom can annihilate, but it takes some time to do so, and can act as a compound particle for a short time. eta-sub-b is a kind of meson. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meson

    12. Re:Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, they do annihilate, but they can exist in a somewhat stable state before they do. The article doesn't mention it but these particles have lifetimes of tiny fractions of a second, they are not long lived the way protons or electrons are.

    13. Re:Huh? by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

      what the hell, 2 directions in time?

    14. Re:Huh? by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

      A virtual photon is a positron-electron, according to my bad interpretation of Wikipedia. It doesn't acknowledge a photon as a composite particle, but an elementary one.

    15. Re:Huh? by thechao · · Score: 1

      You're gonna need more '$' if you want to make that TeX go.

    16. Re:Huh? by Squiffy · · Score: 1

      "As a slightly more familiar example, a photon consists of a positron and an electron. Since it occurs reverseably, you could just as well consider their "annhilation" into a photon as a composition, and their creation as a decomposition."

      Except that a photon of sufficient energy can also spontaneously "decompose" into a muon-antimuon or tau-antitau. So it really is inappropriate to liken pair production to decomposition.

    17. Re:Huh? by jschen · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually, under the right circumstances, anti-particles don't immediately self-destruct. Electrons and positrons (anti-electrons) can form an atom-like species, too, with half-lives on the order of 10^-7 to 10^-10 seconds. Way back in 1971, an entire review of positronium chemistry (ie chemistry of positron and electron as an ato-like species) was published in Angewandte Chemie, a major chemistry journal. (Page 179 for the international edition, published in English.) It's not my area of study, but I came across the review once when looking for something else in the same issue.

      Abstract: In this progress report, the properties and behavior of the positron (positive electron, anti-electron) and of the positronium, a hydrogen atom containing a positron instead of a proton, are considered from the chemist's viewpoint. Examples are given to demonstrate the development of positronium chemistry, in aqueous solution and in the gaseous, liquid, and solid phases, with its problems and possibilities.

    18. Re:Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Just because their wave functions look like one is the time reversed version of the other, doesn't mean they actually move in different time directions.

    19. Re:Huh? by dwye · · Score: 1

      > Shouldn't a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark
      > annihilate one another? How do they manage to
      > avoid doing so in this 'bottomonium' state?

      Eventually, they do. While they are detector range, however, they can still be orbiting each other. Even if they do break down before detected, you can determine that they were there by a spike in particle energies from a point source that adds up to the mass of that meson.

      You can even make positronium with an suitable accelerator, where an electron and anti-electron orbit stably for a few nanoseconds (well, about 142 nanoseconds, actually) before decaying. There, you get a spike in gammas at just the right energy.

    20. Re:Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      No, anti-matter pretty much does work the way most Sci-Fi portrays it. However, quarks, while being what matter is composed of, are not matter in and of themselves and thus can behave differently.

    21. Re:Huh? by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · · Score: 1
      By your argument, no particle could ever annihilate its own antiparticle, and yet particle-antiparticle annihilation is a well observed phenomenon.

      The lowest bound state of a particle-antiparticle pair is not, as you claim, stable, but depending on what happens when you run the numbers for any particular type of particle, it may be live for long enough to be observed in the lab. Ultimately it's going to decay from the lowest bound state to a pair of photons. No such decay is going to happen with protons and electrons because even when they do 'crash' nothing comes of it.

      --
      Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
    22. Re:Huh? by snowgirl · · Score: 1

      Protons and electrons are not anti-particles though.

      The better example is positronium, where you have a positron (anti-electron) orbited by an electron (also known as a negatron... no seriously).

      You end up with a particle-anti-particle interacting in a way that has some form of life time... but positronium even in its most stable form doesn't last more than a few milliseconds.

      So, this "bottomonium" would probably be a case where the two quarks are interacting by strong-force to make a Meson, while not annihilating each other... studying this mechanism could help us understand the structure of Mesons better, much like the interaction of electrons and protons/neutrons made it more clear the structure of the atom.

      Only difference is that at Meson level everything is far too small to make much meaningful sense out of with our current measurement techniques. Unfortunately, our current measurement techniques are constrained by the physical universe anymore >_ So don't hope for leaps and bounds on this.

      --
      WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
    23. Re:Huh? by BitterOak · · Score: 1

      They will annihilate after some time (the particle's lifetime), but they can be bound together for some time before that happens.

      Exactly. The process by which a particle and anti-particle annihilate is electromagnetic, resulting in the production of photons. Since the timescale for electromagnetic interactions is much longer than that for strong interactions (and it is the strong force which binds the b and b-bar quarks in a meson), the meson exists long enough to have a very definite, observable mass. This is measured by reconstructing the 4-momenta of the decay products to form an invariant mass. When plotted in a histogram, a peak is found at the particle's mass.

      --
      If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
    24. Re:Huh? by BitterOak · · Score: 1

      Actually, electrons in the ground state s orbitals have wavefunctions which significantly overlap with the nucleus. They don't annihilate because the proton is not the anti-particle of the electron: the positron is. Any such annihilation between electrons and protons would violate conservation of baryon number.

      --
      If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
    25. Re:Huh? by GrievousMistake · · Score: 2, Funny

      They wanted to, but then they'd have to suffer all the bad jokes about quantum physics being bamboozling.

      --
      In a fair world, refrigerators would make electricity.
    26. Re:Huh? by nog_lorp · · Score: 1

      I thought it went like so:
      electron, anti-electron (aka positron)
      proton, anti-proton (aka negatron)

      but alas, I am wrong :(.
      Anti-proton doesn't get a cool name? Electron's taking negatron just leaves anti-protons with... antitron? That sucks!

      Damn you Irish physicist G. J. Stoney (1826â€"1911)!

    27. Re:Huh? by Bloater · · Score: 1

      Anti-proton doesn't get a cool name? Electron's taking negatron just leaves anti-protons with... antitron? That sucks!

      How about "krupton" (loosly "shadow particle")?

  4. Lowest energy particle found in California! by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is it any surprise that the most laid back particle evar was discovered in California?

    1. Re:Lowest energy particle found in California! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They still haven't found BC-Budmium. It may have the same lack of energy, but it'll be far smoother.
       

    2. Re:Lowest energy particle found in California! by Tmack · · Score: 1

      Is it any surprise that the most laid back particle evar was discovered in California?

      More specifically at the SLAC!

      Tm

      --
      Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
  5. I am looking for a physicist here... by clonan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I thought quarks could not exist in anything less than triplets....This sounds like a doublet.

    1. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      They exist in groups of two or three that create a neutral color charge. For example, a particle can consist of red, green, and blue or of blue and anti-blue.

    2. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Jamu · · Score: 5, Informative

      They just have to be "color"-neutral so (red, green, blue) and (red, anti-red) are both allowed.

      --
      Who ordered that?
    3. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Remus+Shepherd · · Score: 4, Informative

      It is a doublet, also known as a meson. They're not long-lived, but they exist.

      I have no idea why they didn't use the word 'meson' in the article. Bottomonium is a type of quarkonium, which is a type of meson.

      --
      Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
    4. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Relic+of+the+Future · · Score: 1
      Yes, but. One of the two is an anti-quark. So while you need three (regular) quarks to get a chromodynamically balanced particle (red+blue+green=0), green+antigreen (for example) is also balanced.

      (Excuse the naive liberties taken to explain the concept. Let the pedants now correct this statement down to incoherence.)

      --
      Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
    5. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by mapsjanhere · · Score: 4, Informative

      Our stable particles are made of triplets. There are all kinds of doublets in the particle zoo; the fact that they are unstable makes them observable (since we usually detect not the particle but its decay).

      --
      I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
    6. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by jollyreaper · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They exist in groups of two or three that create a neutral color charge. For example, a particle can consist of red, green, and blue or of blue and anti-blue.

      I'm not surprised that I can't tell the difference between a proper description of quantum mechanics and the ramblings of a drunken madman on the street. What surprises me is that particle physicists have trouble with that as well. The best way I've heard it described, we're used to relating to things on a human scale. We're used to matter at about our size, moving things about with our own hands, seeing physics operate on a human scale. This is what we're used to, this is what we've come to expect, all is fine. But things outside of our natural environment are very odd. Being in space produces very odd results. We can eventually wrap our brains around it but those things are still odd. At the QM scale, things go from odd to perverse. We can experimentally validate that our seemingly addled theories are correct but it doesn't make any kind of neat and proper sense. The classic scientist saw an exploration of nature as a discovery of the working of the mind of God, a mind we of course imagine in the ideal of our own human mind. Stars on their courses, planets in their orbits, everything neat and prim and orderly. No wonder so many bright scientists reacted in disgust when they looked at the implications of QM. If this is a picture of the mind of God, he's a bloody nutter.

      --
      Kwisatz Haderach
      Sell the spice to CHOAM
      This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
    7. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by k_187 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'm not surprised that I can't tell the difference between a proper description of quantum mechanics and the ramblings of a drunken madman on the street

      That's what makes quantum mechanics so AWESOME

      --
      11 was a racehorse
      12 was 12
      1111 Race
      12112
    8. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Picard: What is it, Commander Data?
      Data: The probe appears to be emitting a stream of charged bottomonium particles.
      Riker: How is that even possible? I thought quarks only existed as red-green-blue triplets.
      Data: Actually, current theory predicts...
      Picard: Data, could you disrupt the stream by modifying the deflector dish to emit a stream of anti-bottomonium particles?
      Data: No captain, bottomonium and anti-bottomonium particles exist in a power state too low to interact with each other.

      ugh, glad TNG was made when technobabble was limited to coherent tetryon beams, quantum phase inverters, ...

    9. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by clonan · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hey!!! Thats what Data needs to do...feed the anti-bottomonium particles through the quantum phase inverter than boost the power using a coherent tetryon beam!

      I am sensing a line from the next Star Trek movie...

    10. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Are you serious or are you just meson with me? ;)

    11. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Dr+Caleb · · Score: 2, Funny

      Would we be surprised if these experiments were carried out at Black Meson?

      --
      "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
    12. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Informative

      I believe it was Niels Bohr who said that if you do not find quantum mechanics confusing you do not really understand it. But then, he didn't really understand it either :D (There's still more to learn/discover...)

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    13. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by krlynch · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm not surprised that I can't tell the difference between a proper description of quantum mechanics and the ramblings of a drunken madman on the street.

      I don't mean to sound like I'm ripping on you, but QM isn't really that fundamentally "weird" or difficult to understand, or "odd" at this point in history; it's not any more complicated to wrap your brain around than classical mechanics, or E&M, or automobile maintenance. The "romance" that QM (like Relativity) is "hard" is, I think, a remnant of early popularizations of cutting edge research in the 1920s and 1930s, when a coherent theoretical framework was under construction for the first time, and physicists didn't really know how far down the rabbit hole went. Popularizers were desperately flailing around, looking for analogies that a much more rural and less technically sophisticated public could understand, and to whom they had trouble relating (the "they're all bumpkins" fallacy). We physicists were pretty inept at doing so then, and have been particularly inept at eradicating those early and incorrectly popularized notions from our public interactions to this day.

      Today, we should know better ... most of QM is robust and mature enough that it's an engineering discipline, for cripes sake. Hopefully, the popularizations will catch up with the reality at some point, and we won't keep subjecting generations to the "QM is so weird you can't possibly understand it unless you're a genius" meme.

    14. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Khashishi · · Score: 1

      You thought wrong. Combinations of quarks form hadrons. There are two types of hadrons: baryons (formed from 3 quarks or 3 antiquarks) and mesons (formed from a quark and an antiquark). There's speculation that there could be higher number groups like 4 quarks and 1 antiquark. The only restriction is that the combination be color neutral. An antiquark of the same color can neutralize a quark, or three quarks of different colors are together neutral.

    15. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by bigstrat2003 · · Score: 1
      The study itself may not be weird, the terminology is really fucking weird. Consider what that guy was responding to:

      They exist in groups of two or three that create a neutral color charge. For example, a particle can consist of red, green, and blue or of blue and anti-blue.

      To the average person, that's going to sound really fucking crazy. Most science just sounds complicated if you don't know much about it, QM sounds like the scientist is stark raving mad because of the weird terminology that it uses.

      --
      "16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
    16. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by gr8_phk · · Score: 1

      They just have to be "color"-neutral so (red, green, blue) and (red, anti-red) are both allowed.

      Why does this statement make me think of quaternions?

    17. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by maxume · · Score: 1

      While I believe that your comment is accurate, it is funny as hell that it could just as well be completely made up.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
    18. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by electricbern · · Score: 1

      Cheers to that!

      --
      alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls /dev > il && tail daemon.log'
    19. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Pauli · · Score: 1

      QM may not be all that difficult to "wrap your brain around" if you neglect spin, but I defy you to give me a verbal explanation of spin that is simple and accurate in all situations.

    20. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Every discipline has its own jargon. To me, a quantum chemist, what biologists say sounds weird. It takes a while to understand the jargon of a discipline. In case of quantum physics, the terminology is probably confusing because:
      1) you have to "name" something in order to talk about it.
      2) the naming is proposed during meetings/conferences where either the catering is more interesting, the flight back is imminent, or you have too many things in the brain to care about what the hell the name is. If you are not into acadamia, you should try to live as one, and you would understand why this happens. It is not easy, believe me.
      3) no one has yet a clue. Previous examples are Phlogiston theory, the Ether, and the Armillary sphere. You have to refine your model, and the current model seems to explain experimental evidence quite well, but things are too complex, and we got used to the fact that nature is normally quite simply described when you have a powerful mathematical framework. After all, you can explain all quantum chemistry with a very simple formula, H * psi = E * psi, the Schroedinger equation.

      Going back to the issue of difficulty of quantum chemistry/physics: yes, it is hard to understand, because it looks unnatural, but once you understand the mathematical framework, and the meaning of it in practice, the stuff you handle and the rules you apply are always the same, and things behave in a very predictable way.

    21. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by b4dc0d3r · · Score: 1

      Is that a real explanation or an analogy? I've never heard it put that way, and now that I think about it (with my limited knowledge) it's a pretty freaking awesome way to describe it. And convenient, unless you work in CMYK.

    22. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      QM may not be all that difficult to "wrap your brain around" if you neglect spin, but I defy you to give me a verbal explanation of spin that is simple and accurate in all situations.

      That the coordinates expressing an electron in space are at least a quaternion, so they exist in at least a four dimensional space.

      And I must add, since quaternions and rotations are so nicely associated, that's why spin is called spin.

    23. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · · Score: 1
      I've no idea what you're talking about. The rules for what groups quarks can exist in are simple enough that they could be explained to a child. The weirdest thing about QM is the way people repeat the mantra "QM is weird". There are some weird things about QM, but the rules for combining quarks are straightforward, Unfortunately, because of people like you blathering on with the same old mantra, people feel like they might as well turn off their brains even when the simplest things are explained to them that have nothing to do with the weirdness of QM.

      Quarks come in three flavours, red, green and blue. They aren't actually red, green and blue. Those are just names given to them by analogy with the way you can mix colours. Mix red, green and blue light in equal proportions and you get white light. The idea is that standalone particles made of quarks must be 'white'. (And again, just in case you've really turned your brain off here, this is just an analogy.) So a red, green and blue quark can combine to form a quark, but two reds and a green can't because the corresponding light colour would be reddish, not white. There's an extra complication because you can have antiquarks and their colours combine negatively. So a blue quark and a blue anti-quark cancel out and also give white and so are a legal combination of quarks.

      ANother way to check if a quark combination is legal: count up the number of red quarks with antiquarks contributing -1 instead of 1 to the total. Call the total r. Make similar totals g for the number of green quarks and b for the number of blue quarks. If r, g and b aren't equal then you can't have a particle using that combination.

      Now, what the hell is so weird about that? Your head must explode whenever you contemplate the idea that traffic stops on a red light and moves on a green light?

      --
      Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
    24. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Loki_1929 · · Score: 1

      Funny, I thought the point of QM was that it was UNpredictable.

      Predictable unpredictableness? And you people wonder why outside observers think your topic of study is weird. ;)

      --
      -- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
    25. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Loki_1929 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      First of all, drop the "it's so simple a child could understand it" attitude. In a room full of geniuses (ie 120+ IQs), maybe half can have this stuff explained to them on a better than absurdly simplified level. Get deep into the mathematics and you're down to about 5%.

      Secondly, "what the hell is so weird" about what you just talked about?

      Gee, I dunno, how about the fact that you have to combine things that can't exist to get something that can?

      Yes, I realize that mathematically, manifesting energies in various forms makes wonderful sense. To the casual observer, however, much of QM is anti-intuitive and difficult at best to understand. To the average Joe on the street, most of physics is completely impossible to understand, unless you're going to dumb it down to 4-year-old terminology (and lose all nuance and consequence along the way).

      --
      -- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
    26. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Funny, I thought the point of QM was that it was UNpredictable.

      Predictable unpredictableness? And you people wonder why outside observers think your topic of study is weird. ;)

      Predictable unpredictableness is what is known as statistics. quantum mechanics has deep statistical aspects.

    27. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      First I read the title of this post:

      Re:I am looking for a physicist here...

      Then I read the first sentence:

      They exist in groups of two or three that create a neutral color charge.

      Then I got visions of 2-3 physicists standing around the lab changing colors. "Dude! That's an awesome blue! Okay okay. Now watch me, watch what I'm gonna do..."

      You wacky quantum physicists, you...

    28. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... by Kryptikmo · · Score: 1
      I pretty much disagree with that. Most engineering disciplines are reasonably intuitive on some level, and use macroscopic behaviour that most people can understand. They may not get all the immediate consequences, but most things there are somehow 'what one might reasonably expect'. I am a physicist working on medium energy scales, similar to BaBar, and I don't find most stuff intuitive at all! Particle creation is fine and dandy, but predicting the other behaviours in a multi-particle system is not obvious to me at all.

      I do the maths and it generally works out, but if you ask me to explain qualitatively how (for example) the input pion mass directly influences the difference between lattice calculations and experimental results, I'd find it difficult to give any layman a reasonable answer, other than the mind-numbingly obvious "they choose a false starting position so one expects to be consistently wrong". Certainly expecting anyone who is not a specialist to 'get' how QM works like they 'get' how an engine works or how a ball flies through the air is, well, ambitious to say the least!

      How anyone can call QM an engineering discipline is beyond me. It's a scientific theory that is a hell of a lot more developed than the theories in most fields (and there's lots of evidence for it being the most correct thing we thought of), but there's still a hell of a long way to go. If you find it intuitive, then congrats! But if you think that most people would (or EM field theory, for that matter) - then you need to spend a little less time in university ;)

  6. Bottom-Most Bottom? by larry+bagina · · Score: 1

    I thought Cowboi Neal had that distinct honor.

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  7. bottom and anti-bottom? by spooje · · Score: 5, Funny

    The bottom and anti-bottom held together by the strong force?

    Sounds cheeky to me

    --
    Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
    1. Re:bottom and anti-bottom? by JohnFluxx · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I was reading a book on this last night, and it said that scientists named it that just so that they could publish papers about searching for a 'bare bottom' ( A bottom quark by itself ).

      The book said that the silly names assigned to the quarks was because at the start nobody took quark theory seriously. Nobody expected the theory to last, so they assigned silly names.

    2. Re:bottom and anti-bottom? by khallow · · Score: 1

      OTOH, what names would be serious in this context? Naming them after trios of politicians or physicists?

    3. Re:bottom and anti-bottom? by An+ominous+Cow+art · · Score: 1

      Yes. The force is strong with this one.

    4. Re:bottom and anti-bottom? by badfish99 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, the top and bottom quarks were originally named truth and beauty. They were renamed to top and bottom because the original names were thought to be silly. Names like top and bottom count as sensible in the context of quantum mechanics.

    5. Re:bottom and anti-bottom? by dpilot · · Score: 1

      I seem to remember hearing a while back about the search for "naked Truth" or "naked beauty".

      --
      The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
    6. Re:bottom and anti-bottom? by Chameleon+Man · · Score: 0

      Don't worry, in California this is legal.

    7. Re:bottom and anti-bottom? by ShoulderGuy · · Score: 1

      It took the researchers much longer to determine which one was the power-bottom

    8. Re:bottom and anti-bottom? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, but in that case the term was naked beauty, instead of bare bottom.

    9. Re:bottom and anti-bottom? by Danny+Rathjens · · Score: 2, Funny

      Truth decays into beauty, while beauty soon becomes merely charm. Charm ends up as strangeness, and even that doesn't last, but up and down are forever.

  8. Bottomonium? by Mikkeles · · Score: 3, Funny

    '... the BaBar experiment at ...

    Shouldn't this be called Elephantonium?

    --
    Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
    1. Re:Bottomonium? by celle · · Score: 1

      I wondered how long it would take for someone to notice.

  9. I'd bet my bottom dollar.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    that.... I'd bet CowboyNeal's bottom....

    I don't know, I was just trying to fit in.

  10. That's pure, weapons grade ... by 0racle · · Score: 5, Funny

    bullonium.

    --
    "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
    1. Re:That's pure, weapons grade ... by geekoid · · Score: 1

      Well Done.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    2. Re:That's pure, weapons grade ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      bolognium.

  11. Oblig. by R2.0 · · Score: 1

    "None more bottom."

    --
    "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
  12. BaBar Experiment by courteaudotbiz · · Score: 1

    Now, for the first time, collaborators on the BaBar experiment at the U.S. Department of Energyâ(TM)s (DOE) Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)...

    I mean, I guess this experiment has nothing to do with testing on animals

  13. Alternative Theory Tie in? by merlinokos · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The interesting question, IMHO, is: Was this particle predicted by anybody else's research? I remember an alternative theory being mentioned a while back that proposed An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything that included predictions for 5 new particles. If this one is on his list, where he said it would be, it could be a big step for non-string theory theories.

    1. Re:Alternative Theory Tie in? by krlynch · · Score: 5, Informative

      The interesting question, IMHO, is: Was this particle predicted by anybody else's research?

      Yes. It's called the standard model. It's not surprising that it was found ... it would have been more surprising if it hadn't been found eventually.

    2. Re:Alternative Theory Tie in? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'd imagine it was predicted, since this isn't a fundamental particle like an electron, but a composite particle like a proton. Actually...the article more or less said it was since it's the last expected bottomonium particle.

      I don't think this discovery says anything of substance supporting or undermining string theory. It's related to quantum chromodynamics.

    3. Re:Alternative Theory Tie in? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As far as I understand this particle is definitely within the standard model, i.e. it's not an "unexpected" particle, but an expected composite of the fairly well-known bottom & anti-bottom quarks that has just now been measured.

  14. No force jokes? by alta · · Score: 1

    I mean come on... I've heard of the force, and the dark side of the force. But WTF is "the strong force"? I've heard "The force is strong with this one" but that's simply referring to the state of "the force" not "the strong force."

    --
    Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
    1. Re:No force jokes? by everphilski · · Score: 4, Funny

      The strong force would be the sticky side of the duct tape, and the weak force would be the opposite side of the duct tape, which is still useful but not as strong.

    2. Re:No force jokes? by 4D6963 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Here it comes :

      Bottomonium consists of a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark bound together by the strong force

      I feel a great disturbance in the strong Force, as if millions of bottom and anti-bottom quarks were bound together in the Upsilon(3S) state and suddenly decayed by emitting a gamma ray.

      --
      You just got troll'd!
    3. Re:No force jokes? by thedrx · · Score: 1, Informative

      The strong force is one of the four fundamental forces. They are gravitation, EM force, weak force and strong force.

    4. Re:No force jokes? by alta · · Score: 1

      You seem to know a thing or two about this subject. So, just where to the midichloridians come in?

      --
      Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
  15. Zoo? I want to go to the particle zoo! by DRAGONWEEZEL · · Score: 1

    I love zoos. Can I pet the yellow part of a meson?

    --
    How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
  16. That's one tiny jacket! by RingDev · · Score: 1

    Not being the physics geek I once was, I was slightly confused by your use of the word 'doublet'.

    Thank Google for Just In Time Comprehension.

    -Rick

    --
    "Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
  17. Bottom, Top? by JSBiff · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm confused - at an atomic scale, what is top and bottom? I thought space has no 'preferred' direction in which to define up, down, east, west, north, south? How can there be a 'bottom' particle?

    1. Re:Bottom, Top? by icegreentea · · Score: 4, Informative

      Bottom (and top and up and all the colours) are arbitrary names chosen by the scientists who discovered/theorized these particles. The names do not describe the properties of the particles in any way. You'll have to go ask them why they picked these names, but personally I think it's because they got bored of Greek and Latin.

    2. Re:Bottom, Top? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      aren't there also vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate quarks?

  18. ehhhh by unity100 · · Score: 1

    i would let that anti-bottom quark handle my bottominum, if you know what i mean ... or frontominium ... well, as long as it is an anti-bottom quark, im fine with anything.

    then again was an anti-bottom quark is positive or negative (metaphorically speaking) ? i wouldnt want to end up on the wrong side of the spectrum, if you know what i mean ....

    or should i scratch the whole thing and go gay ?

  19. Just a thought by bigattichouse · · Score: 1

    looking at anti-particles from the standpoint of reverse entropy (going back in time).. the strong force here seems to be the release and absorption of the energy released... OR the strong force is keeping the two from colliding, acting - in a reverse entropy sense as a repulsion.
    I am, obviously, not schooled in this whole mess of stuff, but it's interesting to think about (even if my thoughts are fiction). How fun!

    --
    meh
  20. Re:Zoo? I want to go to the particle zoo! by Zarf · · Score: 4, Funny

    I love zoos. Can I pet the yellow part of a meson?

    If you do you'll get gluon yer hands.

    --
    [signature]
  21. well, young 'un by unity100 · · Score: 1

    thats the power of love for ya.

  22. Are particle physicists really perverted enough... by hyades1 · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...to discover the bottom-most bottom's "safe word"? Then, surely, we will be near to achieving a Theory of Everything.

    --
    I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
  23. My AsS is taken by tepples · · Score: 4, Funny

    Scientific Symbol: ASS.

    AsS is taken: it is the symbol for realgar.

  24. Tetris? by tepples · · Score: 1

    Thats what Data needs to do...feed the anti-bottomonium particles through the quantum phase inverter than boost the power using a coherent tetryon beam!

    "Tetryon beam"? I thought a tetrion was a Tetris machine.

  25. what about... by Tmack · · Score: 1

    They exist in groups of two or three that create a neutral color charge. For example, a particle can consist of red, green, and blue or of blue and anti-blue.

    What about a hyper intelligent shade of the color blue?

    tm

    --
    Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
  26. Finally! by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 1

    I had lost that particle when returning from work. Glad the researchers found it.

  27. Sun does not annihilate the Earth by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 2, Informative

    The Earth orbits the Sun and does not get annihilated by being sucked into the middle of the sun despite being attracted to it by gravity. For the (sort of) the same reason bound states of matter/anti-matter particles can exist without the particles combining and annihilating each other.

  28. Physicists are weirder than astronomers by argent · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Murray Gell-Mann named the 'quark' after a line in James Joyce's novel Finnegan's Wake because he liked the sound of the word. The quarks themselves come in six 'flavors': up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Only the up and down quarks are stable, which is why it's taken 30 years to create [eta]b Bottomonium.

    Meanwhile, astronomers worry about whether Pluto is a planet or not.

    Hail Eris!

    1. Re:Physicists are weirder than astronomers by sconeu · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not only did Gell-Mann like the sound of the word, but it was also because they came in triplets. The line from Joyce is "Three quarks for Muster Mark"

      --
      General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  29. Let me guess by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It can be found in mens bathroom and is a republican?

  30. Arguing backwards by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 1

    There are all kinds of doublets in the particle zoo; the fact that they are unstable makes them observable (since we usually detect not the particle but its decay).

    You have this argument backwards. The reason we detect decay products from particles is BECAUSE they decay! Stable particles are often very easy to detect e.g. electron, proton, muon (ok, technically this is not stable but it is so long lived at high energy that we usually treat it as stable). In fact stable particles are generally a lot easier to detect than unstable ones because we detect the particle itself, and not its decay products.

    Since all our detectors are made of matter what determines whether a particle is easy to detect is how well it interacts with matter. Electrons and protons interact strongly (after all that is what matter is made of!) whereas things like neutrinos can pass through light years of matter without interacting at all which makes then very hard to detect (you need a lot of them to see anything at all).

  31. Science by Translation+Error · · Score: 1

    Bottomonium consists of a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark bound together by the strong force.

    And we wonder why people think scientists are just making things up.

    (I was going to say 'talking out of their asses' but remembered what I was quoting while typing it.)

    --
    When someone says, "Any fool can see ..." they're usually exactly right.
  32. but by Tekninja_Hawk · · Score: 0

    which one of them will do anything for gold pressed latinum?

  33. Maybe Black Meson? by bckrispi · · Score: 2, Funny

    That was a joke. Ha-ha! Fat chance!

    --
    Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
  34. bloody nutter by Joseph_Daniel_Zukige · · Score: 1

    Well, this is actually, nearly as I can tell, the entire argument between atheism and, well, serious religion.

    If we assume that certain ancient Greek philosophers were correct and God should meet human ideals, the atheists must be right and a person tends to make his Gods in his own image.

    But guy called Isaiah and a guy called Benjamin indicated that God is a bit beyond us. This makes sense, if you think about it, if God is immortal. An immortal man would likely have views that mortals would prefer to consider less than sane. A true God would necessarily know already about quarks and dark matter (if such really do exist) and far beyond those.

    If sufficiently advanced technology appears to the not-so-advanced as magic, what should we expect the wisdom of any being truly worthy of being called God to appear to us as?

    Some question whether such an incomprehensible being could possibly be the object of faith, but you have to look at it the other way -- how could a person possibly be confident in a God that was entirely comprehensible? A perfect match to a set of human ideals would seem to be a dead giveaway that the entity in question must be less than the Absolute.

    On the other hand, if God is not inimical to us, He would restrict anything He reveals to that which the revealee could understand, plus a maybe a little to keep us on our toes.

    That's the reason faith requires trust. (For my part, I've considered both trusting and not trusting, and it seems to me that refusing to trust can have no advantage over trusting, but trusting might have some advantages.)

    1. Re:bloody nutter by chartreuse · · Score: 1

      (For my part, I've considered both trusting and not trusting, and it seems to me that refusing to trust can have no advantage over trusting, but trusting might have some advantages.)

      Game theory (using the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, natch) seems to indicate you're correct. In fact, forgiveness in addition to trust appears to be the optimum strategy, last time I read about it.

  35. From the paper eta_b is at 9389 MeV/c^2 by physburn · · Score: 0

    The article, didn't give the mass of the state. Its 9389 MeV/c^2 about 73 MeV/c^2 below the U(1s) state. Its about as heavy as an atom of Boron, 10 times heavy than a proton.