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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.
...that's strange.
"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"
...doubly strange, some quirks, and six times overweight.
Ed, you're famous!
Sure. Quarks are one of the two basic building blocks of matter, the other being the lepton. This particular particle -- a baryon, since it is comprised of three quarks -- consists of two strange quarks and one bottom quark. Strange quarks and bottom quarks are both very unstable. Another example of a baryon is the proton, which contains two up quarks and and a down quark. Up and down quarks are generally, by comparison, very stable. The instability of the quarks make this particular baryon difficult to detect.
My blog
Perhaps LHC emits some sort field
In Richard Florida's book Who's your city? he actually gets into various theories about how centers of excellence (whether fashion, IT, finance, science, etc.) tend to create a self-reinforcing "buzz" that draws in more and more talented people, and the intellectual atmosphere and other elements of creative infrastructure then allow those people to achieve at a higher level than they otherwise could.
...
So according to that theory, yes, the LHC does emit some sort of field
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Yes, it's been seen before. There's an ungodly amount of particles (even if you restrict yourself to baryons), in fact, including many weird ones - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_baryons for instance, or locate a copy of the Physics Letters B/Review of Particle Physics, which dedicates ~150 pages to listing baryons (in my 2004 copy, that is; chances are it's even more today).
Must be an American particle.
Can someone translate that last sentence for me?
Done:
Dit staat waarschijnlijk een op het punt van de laatste merkbare sub-atomic ontdekkingen ergens gemaakt dan bij CERN anders aangezien LHC is de jacht voor het deeltje te beginnen Higgs dat zelfs voor het experiment ontwijkend blijft dat enkel omega-sub-B. ontdekte.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
So I am obviously not understanding how the masses of the quarks correlate to the masses of the fermions. What am I missing here?
IANAPP (particle physicist), but I guess you're missing the equivalent to the "binding energy". Just like the mass of an atomic nucleus isn't equal to the sum of the masses of the protons and neutrons in it.
The infamous Konami particle. Very controversial. For example, it may or may not contain a Select particle, depending on who you ask.
Long signatures suck.
Won't happen. We're hard at work on it right now (except when we're reading slashdot...), and we're making some amazing leaps forward in analysis techniques, but we simply won't have enough data to be sufficiently sensitive to the Higgs by the time the accelerator shuts down. We might find evidence or even strong evidence, but not strong enough to call it discovery. We do have enough data to exclude certain mass ranges, however. When you combine our data with D0's (the experiment that did the analysis in TFA), we have enough sensitivity to say that the Higgs, if it is the standard model Higgs (and the lightest SUSY Higgs is sufficiently similar that this holds for it, too), does not have a mass quite close to 170 GeV (which is pretty close to the mass of the top quark, incidentally). http://www-d0.fnal.gov/Run2Physics/WWW/results/prelim/HIGGS/H64/
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
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.."
In actual English--with tenses--as it used to be used (which is now, as is evident, archaic):
"This recent discovery [of the Omega-sub-b particle] will probably be the last *notable* subatomic discovery made before the Large Hadron Collider at CERN begins to operate, which is scheduled to happen in October of this year. The LHC will be used to hunt for the Higgs Boson, which has thus far remained undetectable, even by experiments such as this one, which managed to find the Omega-sub-b particle."
* The author's clever-at-first-glance use of the adjective "noticeable" fails because it applies to "discoveries," and discoveries rarely go unnoticed, unlike grammar.
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
Call me when they put together the particle consisting of 2 up quarks, 2 down quarks, a left quark, a right quark, a left quark, a right quark, a 'b' quark, an 'a' quark, a 'select' quark, and a 'start' quark. ;)