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New Particle Found, the Bottom-Most Bottomonium

Posted by kdawson on from the how-low-can-you-go dept.

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."

1 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. 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?