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

Oh jeez, here come the bad jokes

[jimbobborg]

So this would be the bottom of the bottomonium barrel?

Re:Oh jeez, here come the bad jokes

[TornCityVenz]

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

Re:Oh jeez, here come the bad jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Oh jeez, here come the bad jokes

[Anonymous Coward]

Scientific Symbol: ASS.

Well...

[bigstrat2003]

It seems this line of research has certainly bottomed out.

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?

Re:Huh?

[jeffmeden]

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.

Re:Huh?

[Remus Shepherd]

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.

Re:Huh?

[blueg3]

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.

Re:Huh?

[Steve Max]

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).

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Huh?

[jschen]

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.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Huh?

[GrievousMistake]

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

Lowest energy particle found in California!

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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

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]

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.

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

[Jamu]

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

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

[Remus Shepherd]

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.

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

[mapsjanhere]

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).

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

[jollyreaper]

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.

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

[k_187]

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

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

[clonan]

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...

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

[Dr Caleb]

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

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

[drinkypoo]

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...)

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

[krlynch]

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.

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.

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

[Loki_1929]

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).

bottom and anti-bottom?

[spooje]

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

Sounds cheeky to me

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.

Re:bottom and anti-bottom?

[badfish99]

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.

Re:bottom and anti-bottom?

[Danny Rathjens]

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.

Bottomonium?

[Mikkeles]

'... the BaBar experiment at ...

Shouldn't this be called Elephantonium?

That's pure, weapons grade ...

[0racle]

bullonium.

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:Alternative Theory Tie in?

[krlynch]

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.

Re:No force jokes?

[everphilski]

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.

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?

Re:Bottom, Top?

[icegreentea]

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.

Re:Zoo? I want to go to the particle zoo!

[Zarf]

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

If you do you'll get gluon yer hands.

Are particle physicists really perverted enough...

[hyades1]

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

Re:No force jokes?

[4D6963]

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.

My AsS is taken

[tepples]

Scientific Symbol: ASS.

AsS is taken: it is the symbol for realgar.

Sun does not annihilate the Earth

[Roger W Moore]

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.

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!

Re:Physicists are weirder than astronomers

[sconeu]

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"

Maybe Black Meson?

[bckrispi]

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