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posted by takyon on Thursday October 04 2018, @04:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the GO-SIGMA-BETA dept.

Atom Smasher Detects Hints of New Unstable Particle

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest atom smasher, just discovered at least two previously unknown particles.

The 17-mile (27 kilometers) underground ring near Geneva recently discovered two baryons and a hint of another particle, according to a statement from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which runs the LHC. Baryons are fundamental subatomic particles that are each made up of three quarks. The quarks, in turn, are even smaller particles that come in different "flavors": up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm.

[...] The first, named Σb(6097)+, is made up of one bottom quark and two up quarks, while the second, named Σb(6097)-, is made up of one bottom quark and two down quarks. [...] As for the third potential particle, the researchers discovered only hints that it exists. Named Z sub c-(4100), this particle could be a weird meson, a type of unstable particle that briefly flits into existence during high-energy collisions and that consists of two quarks and two antiquarks.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday October 04 2018, @07:12PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Thursday October 04 2018, @07:12PM (#744261)

    No - because at that point they've only been predicted, not discovered. Much like the Uu... elements in the periodic table - their existence was predicted decades ago, but they're weren't considered "discovered" (nor properly named) until someone actually manages to synthesize one of them.

    Just because something is predicted, doens't mean it exists. There might be a flaw in the theory, or they might require impossibly unlikely conditions to form. In fact, a big part of the motivation to actually create such things is to confirm that the theory actually holds under more extreme scenarios than we ca easily test (or perhaps more accurately, the motivation is to hopefully find some way in which the prediction is flawed, and thus another clue towards forming a better, and hopefully more satisfying, theory)

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