LHC discovers a new boson

Sadly, it’s not the Holy Grail that is the Higgs boson, but it’s a new particle that was predicted by the Standard Model but never actually observed.

It is called Chi_b (3P) and will help scientists understand better the forces that hold matter together.

The as-yet unpublished discovery is reported on the Arxiv pre-print server.
[…]

The Chi_b (3P) is a more excited state of Chi particles already seen in previous collision experiments, explained Prof Roger Jones, who works on the Atlas detector at the LHC.

“The new particle is made up of a ‘beauty quark’ and a ‘beauty anti-quark’, which are then bound together,” he told BBC News.

“People have thought this more excited state should exist for years but nobody has managed to see it until now.

“It’s also interesting for what it tells us about the forces that hold the quark and the anti-quark together – the strong nuclear force. And that’s the same force that holds, for instance, the atomic nucleus together with its protons and the neutrons.”

I hear “beauty quark” and think of Armin Shimerman.

Armin Shimerman as the Ferengi Quark from Star Trek: Deep Space 9
For a Ferengi, he ain't half bad looking. That's not saying much, though.

Admit it. You think so too.

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LHC discovers a new boson
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5 thoughts on “LHC discovers a new boson

  1. 1

    It’s one of the worst shames in American physics, to my mind, that we have decided to call the truth and beauty quarks “top” and “bottom” instead. While it does get the same parallelism as the up/down paring, and may thus be more utilitarian, I think we made quite the error. Alas…

  2. Art
    3

    Beauty is as beauty does. As far as countenances go his isn’t as bad as some others. To me the self-inflated and bloated face of Newton Gingrich, or the hyper-preened presentation of Mitt Romney, which strikes me in much the same way the first whiff of cheap rose scented perfume used to cover the smell of raw sewage does, are both less acceptable. But then again beauty is as beauty does and the later two carry many ugly words and deeds as baggage.

  3. 4

    You talk about the principal of Sunnydale High School and then put up some rubber-forehead weirdo? Come on! Talk about a show people actually watched!

    ::flee::

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