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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."
So this would be the bottom of the bottomonium barrel?
It seems this line of research has certainly bottomed out.
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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?
Is it any surprise that the most laid back particle evar was discovered in California?
The bottom and anti-bottom held together by the strong force?
Sounds cheeky to me
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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.
They just have to be "color"-neutral so (red, green, blue) and (red, anti-red) are both allowed.
Who ordered that?
bullonium.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
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
I love zoos. Can I pet the yellow part of a meson?
If you do you'll get gluon yer hands.
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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.
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!
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.
Scientific Symbol: ASS.
AsS is taken: it is the symbol for realgar.
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.
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.