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Physicists Discover "Doubly Strange" Particle
Tsalg writes "Physicists have discovered a new particle made of three quarks, the Omega-sub-b. The particle contains two strange quarks and a bottom quark (s-s-b). It is an exotic relative of the much more common proton and weighs about six times the proton mass. This is probably one of the last noticeable sub-atomic discoveries made somewhere else than at CERN since LHC is about to start the hunt for the Higgs particle that remains elusive even for the experiment that just discovered the Omega-sub-b."
Sometimes I think physicists are just making things up. This is one of those times.
This is probably one of the last noticeable sub-atomic discoveries made somewhere else than at CERN since LHC is about to start the hunt for the Higgs particle that remains elusive even for the experiment that just discovered the Omega-sub-b.
How can you be so sure? It's not like CERN lays claim to all the greatest physicists in the world. Am I the only one that is a bit wary of all the eggs in one basket?
Can someone translate that last sentence for me?
Because you can - or because you should?
Scientists' current model of the structure of a quark here Imagine three of those things!
...that's strange.
"This is probably one of the last noticeable sub-atomic discoveries made somewhere else than at CERN since LHC is about to start the hunt for the Higgs particle that remains elusive even for the experiment that just discovered the Omega-sub-b.."
Easy on the sentence structure, fuller, you're gonna wet the bed.
Hmm, I think that this is only a relative of the proton in that it too is a baryon (3 quarks). A proton is up-up-down, and this is strange-strange-bottom.
The charge on the new one is -1, the charge on a proton is +1.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Ok I thought quarks, leptons, and neutrinos were grouped like this:
Group 1: quarks; Up & Down, lepton; electron, neutrino; neutrino
Group 2: quarks; Charm & Strange, lepton; muon; neutrino; muon neutrino
Group 3: quarks; Top & Bottom, lepton; tau, neutrino; tau neutrino
So this newly discovered particle is made of quarks from two groups, the strange quark from group 2 and the bottom quark from group 3. Has that been seen before? I never knew it happened.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
"The measurement of the mass of the Omega-sub-b provides a great test of computer calculations using lattice quantum chromodynamics"
Discuss ; )
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
...doesn't make sense, not least because TFA notes that 13 out of 20 predicted baryons have been observed, leaving 7 still to be discovered. Surely these will be just as noteworthy as this discovery. Is the LHC the only accelerator capable of creating and observing these remaining baryons?
Also, to nit-pick, TFA states that the Omega-sub-b travels 1 mm in a trillionth of a second. This seems a little high to me, given that c is about 3*10^8 m/s = 3^10^11 mm/s. Rounding errors?
OK, so I have been reading a lot about particle physics lately and find the whole subject fascinating, but there is one thing (amongst many things) that I am not quite understanding. I have looked it up and my understanding of particle physics is not "there" yet, or at least not enough to grasp this particular concept. Maybe I have just not read the right explanation.
Can someone in here put it in a simple lamen explanation?
The question is this:
This Omega-sub-b particle contains two strange quarks and a bottom quark and weighs about six times the mass of a proton.
A proton contains 2 up quarks and one down quark.
Strange quarks have a mass of 95MeV, bottom has 4.2GeV so the total mass of the Omega-sub-b would be 4.39GeV
Up quarks have a mass of 3MeV, down has 6MeV so the total mass of a Proton would be 0.012GeV
This would put the Omega-sub-b at 365.8 times the mass of a Proton.
So I am obviously not understanding how the masses of the quarks correlate to the masses of the fermions. What am I missing here?
Thanks,
Tom...
...doubly strange, some quirks, and six times overweight.
Ed, you're famous!
Must be an American particle.
They looked at 100 trillion pieces of data, and found 18 that they could call Omega-sub-b. Wouldn't this fall into the realm of randomness?
I stop thinking about all these particles and fall back to the Stevens (as in George 'Kingfish' Stevens) model of atomic structure: protons, neutrons, fig newtons, and morons.
IANAP
In nature, quarks are always found bound together in groups like this, and never in isolation, because of a phenomenon known as confinement.
I think the problem with "real" -vs- "theoretical" is that we are talking about the things that make-up matter. So even the idea of "real" doesn't apply. People want something they can see and touch and interact with, and if that is what it means to be real, then quarks are not real. But scientifically, they exist and they can be seen and measured indirectly.
(Although, thanks to the magic of the internet, there is no way to know that I exist either)
I think it's more accurate to say that it is "starting", and will continue to start for a while. These things don't just turn on, and the LHC has actually been pretty much on-target with the exception of that magnet blowing up.
"with the exception of the Apollo Project"
Parts of the Apollo projects were put back several time, not to mention ending up costing around double the original estimate despite consisting of less missions than originally planned (cost overruns are almost always closely related to time overruns).
That's just the nature of big projects (of all types). Nothing specific to do with publicly funded ones, all really big projects commonly take longer than expected. The difference with publicly funded ones is that we all tend to have access to those estimates; whereas private companies tend to just say "it will be done when it's ready" (whilst internally, the estimates are getting put back further and further).
This is probably one of the last noticeable sub-atomic discoveries made somewhere else than at CERN since LHC is about to start the hunt for the Higgs particle..."
Oh see I read that as, "Since the universe, or at least our corner of it, will end as soon as they fire up the LHC"
I'm actually attending a "Party at the End of the Universe" to celebrate our last days as a species. A terrestrial version of Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters will be served.
Gives me a hadron.
Ever since deep inelastic scattering experiments revealed that the proton is not a pointlike charge at sufficiently small electron wavelengths, but rather scatters electrons as if it contained three pointlike (at that scale) charges (+2/3, +2/3, and -1/3), quarks have generally been considered real. Prior to these experiments, there most certainly was ontological debate about quarks. There was also similar debate about atoms for quite some time (see Ernst Mach).
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
I was always fascinated by particle physics but it's been a while since I studied it. Can someone explain how a proton-antiproton collision (u,u,d quarks and anti-u,anti-u,anti-d quarks) could produce strange quarks? I thought all that was left after a matter-antimatter collision was x-rays and gamma-rays.
The proton weighs a little under a GeV, most of which is binding energy. Since the u and d quarks have so little mass, you can effectively ignore it and look at the dynamical relationship of 3 bound quarks. This is why early models which treated protons and neutrons as different states of the same particle (called isospin symmetry) worked so well. The equation's not all that simple, since binding energy is itself a function of the masses of the quarks involved. The only real theoretical calculations are heavily computational lattice QCD simulations, and experiments like this are a good test of those calculations.
As a sidenote, the headline makes very little sense. We observed a "triply-strange" particle, the original Omega, ages ago. What makes this special aren't the two s quarks per se, but their appearance alongside a bottom quark.
IAAPP
They can't be seen or isolated, but we know the reasons why we can't do that. They can only be traced insofar as we observe the particles they make up, like this one. So it's rather like asking whether the electromagnetic field is real - we can't observe it directly, but it simplifies our theories a lot.
Whether that's good enough is up to you. You're never going to be able to separate out a quark and hold it in your hand, but it makes one's life a lot easier to treat it as if it were real, and all the measurements that we can make give the results we would expect if it was real.
I am trolling
Where are all of the scientifically-expert global-warming deniers ready to gainsay this discovery by the obviously-liberal elite particle physics community and their media pawns in the pocket of Big Quantum Chromodynamics?
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
If only there were some sort of theory to string these things together sensibly!
[ think ]
I think M-Theory proponents are just stringing us along.