LHCb Confirms Existence of Exotic Hadrons

An anonymous reader sends this news from CERN: "The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration today announced results that confirm the existence of exotic hadrons – a type of matter that cannot be classified within the traditional quark model. Hadrons are subatomic particles that can take part in the strong interaction – the force that binds protons inside the nuclei of atoms. Physicists have theorized since the 1960s, and ample experimental evidence since has confirmed, that hadrons are made up of quarks and antiquarks that determine their properties. A subset of hadrons, called mesons, is formed from quark-antiquark pairs, while the rest – baryons – are made up of three quarks. ... The Belle Collaboration reported the first evidence for the Z(4430) in 2008. They found a tantalizing peak in the mass distribution of particles that result from the decays of B mesons. Belle later confirmed the existence of the Z(4430) with a significance of 5.2 sigma on the scale that particle physicists use to describe the certainty of a result. LHCb reports a more detailed measurement of the Z(4430) that confirms that it is unambiguously a particle, and a long-sought exotic hadron at that. They analyzed more than 25,000 decays of B mesons selected from data from 180 trillion (180x10^12) proton-proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider."

Comments

From the beginning...

[barlevg]

...what are the ten radical isotopes?

Is Slashdot all 12 year old boys now?

[Anonymous Coward]

18 comments in, and 17 of them are just stupid stuff about hard-ons. Either Slashdot has been taken over by 12 year old boys, or they're all just still boys trapped in the bodies of men.

Re:Is Slashdot all 12 year old boys now?

[wjcofkc]

Clearly you weren't here in those dark days before moderation. Natalie Portman, hot grits, goatse links, etc, etc, etc... Don't like what you see in the comments? Get an account, stop whining as an AC, earn some mod points, and help eradicate the less flattering posts. I do.

Editorial/stats geekiness

[MAXOMENOS]

Belle later confirmed the existence of the Z(4430) with a significance of 5.2 sigma on the scale that particle physicists use to describe the certainty of a result.

I believe that "scale" is called the normal distribution; that is to say, the odds of getting that result as a fluke are the same as finding a point 5.2 standard deviations away from the mean of the normal curve. If so, everything in that sentence after "5.2 sigma" can be left out.