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."

Comments

Huh?

[Millennium]

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 am looking for a physicist here...

[clonan]

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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Alternative Theory Tie in?

[merlinokos]

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.

Re:bottom and anti-bottom?

[JohnFluxx]

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.

Bottom, Top?

[JSBiff]

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?

Physicists are weirder than astronomers

[argent]

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!