Science Current Events | Science News | Brightsurf.com
 
Email a Friend Send to a friend
Printer Friendly Print A new particle discovered by BaBar experiment

A new particle discovered by BaBar experiment

July 07, 2005

Its name is Y(4260) and it is not a new humanoid of Stars Wars, but a particle identified for the first time by BaBar experiment: an international collaboration-formed by the large participation of the Italian physicists of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (Infn)-that has its seat in Stanford (California). Y(4260) represents an interesting element with respect of particles' field and it will provide very useful signs about character of the strong force, that is the force that holds together the different particles inside atomic nuclei. The discovery, announced during the international symposium "Lepton Photon" just finished in Uppsala in Sweden, has been presented today during a meeting of the Supervising Committee of Babar experiment that this year has taken place in Rome, by the seat of Infn Headquarter.

"At first sight Y(4260) seems to be what we call a charmonic state, that is to say a particle made up of the combination of a charm quark and of its equivalent antiparticle: an anticharm quark", explains Marcello Giorgi, Infn researcher, professor of Physics at Pisa University and involved in Babar experiment since a long time.




Physicists have known since some time that for each particle, an antiparticle exists, nearly identical in all aspects, except for some properties that are opposite. The antiparticle of the electron is for instance the positron, named also antielectron, provided with positive electric charge, rather than negative. During the 50's it was although discovered that particles can be made up also of the combination of a fundamental particle and its corresponding antiparticle. "The first case was the positronium one, made up of the combination of an electron and a positron. The first charmonium, that is to say a particle made up of a charm quark and anti-charm, was instead discovered at the same time in Brookhaven and at Slac, both in the USA, by Samuel Ting and Burton Richter, awarded with the Nobel in 1976: its existence it was soon afterwards confirmed thanks to the analysis of the data produced in Italy by the National Laboratories of Frascati of Infn. As time passed, it was realized that charmoni are a real family of similar particles, but with a different mass. Nobody had been able to observe Y(4260) up to now, not only because there is a little possibility to produce it in the accelerators used today by physicists, but also because it is extremely unstable", explains Mauro Morandin, Infn researcher and national spokesman of BaBar experiment.

"Compound particles, made up of the combination of a fundamental particle and its corresponding antiparticle, are of great interest for physics. Quarks and corresponding anti-quarks can be held together because of several mechanisms: in order to understand the so-called strong force [the strong force is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, the other are the electromagnetic force, the weak force, responsible for fusion mechanisms occurring inside stars and the gravitational force] it is necessary to grasp these mechanisms deeply. The strong force holds together quarks of different type that form neutrons and protons, and holds also neutrons and protons together inside atomic nuclei. It is therefore a very important force, because without it would be impossible to conceive the existence of matter that forms all we know. All signs let us suppose that Y(4260) will give very interesting indications about it, whether it is really a charmonium, or, all the more so, something more exotic", concludes Marcello Giorgi.

The most surprising aspect of Y(4260) is although the fact that some properties of its nature seem to be unusual for a charmonium. This makes think that the particle could be something much more complex: a kind of molecule made up of particles named D mesons, or a state made up of four quarks. Since 2003 BaBar has discovered states that can have this structure never observed before, such as the DsJ (2317), the DsJ (2458), and the X(3872), but there are no definitive evidences for this interpretation. Verifying these possibilities is the challenge for the next future.

National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN)



Related Antiparticle Current Events and Antiparticle News Articles Antiparticle Current Events and Antiparticle News RSS Antiparticle Current Events and Antiparticle News RSS
Stunt doubles: Ultracold atoms could replicate the electron 'jitterbug'
Ultracold atoms moving through a carefully designed arrangement of laser beams will jiggle slightly as they go, two NIST scientists have predicted.

What Happened to the Antimatter? Fermilab's DZero Experiment Finds Clues in Quick-Change Meson
Scientists of the DZero collider detector collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have announced that their data on the properties of a subatomic particle, the B_s meson ("B sub s"), suggest that the particle oscillates between matter and antimatter in one of nature's fastest rapid-fire processes-more than 17 trillion times per second.

Physicists offer new approach to studying antimatter
What happens when two atoms, each made up of an electron and its antimatter counterpart, called the positron, collide with each other?

Beyond the Large Hadron Collider
A briefing note based on a seminar and discussion held at the Institute of Physics on Thursday 3 October 2002. This seminar is part of a series of evening seminars and discussions that highlight exciting and important new areas of research in physics and their applications. Topics at previous seminars have included Photonics, e-Science, Climate Change and Quantum Information   (accounts are available on the Institute¢s website at http://policy.iop.org). Seminars on Novel Fission Reactors, Spintronics and Nanotechnology are being considered for the near future. For further information, contact the Public Relations Department at the Institute: Dianne Stilwell, tel; 020 7470 4

First controlled production of atomic antimatter.
Physicists have just achieved the world's first controlled production of anti-hydrogen atoms, the crucial first step towards precision studies of its properties. This achievement has opened up the potential to cool, trap and study anti-atoms. A team from the University of Wales - Swansea, led by Professor Michael Charlton, played a key role in this major breakthrough as part of an international consortium, ATHENA. The Swindon based Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council provided funding for the Swansea team of £1.2M over the past 6 years. "This is a milestone that has opened up new horizons, to enable scientists to study symmetry in nature and explore the fundamental l

Time reversal in the real world
If time went backwards life would look like a video recording played in reverse - or would it? New findings demonstrate that this common assumption may not hold true. Experiments showing for the first time that time is not symmetrical are explained today by Dr John Fry from the University of Liverpool at the British Association Festival of Science. Direct measurements of the difference between the decay of a particle called the neutral kaon and its time-reversed process has been achieved. The experiments, which were carried out at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, show that time is not symmetrical. An antimatter universe would be obtained by changing all particles int
More Antiparticle Current Events and Antiparticle News Articles
Antiparticle: An entry from Thomson Gale's Gale Encyclopedia of Science, 3rd ed.
by David E. Newton

The ā€œGale Encyclopedia of Scienceā€ is written at a level somewhere between the introductory sources and the highly technical texts currently available. This six-volume set covers all major areas of science and engineering, as well as mathematics and the medical and health sciences, while providing a comprehensive overview of current scientific knowledge and technology. Alphabetically arranged...



The Reason for Antiparticles: The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lecture (VHS-NTSC)
by Richard P. Feynman

This is the video of the lecture The Reason for Antiparticles by Richard P. Feynman. Paul Dirac, one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century, was a professor at the University of Cambridge, England. He held the chair that once was occupied by Isaac Newton. When he died in 1984, his college, St John's College in Cambridge, endowed an annua l lecture to be held in Cambridge...



Isodual Theory of Antimatter: with applications to Antigravity, Grand Unification and Cosmology (Fundamental Theories of Physics)
by Ruggero Maria Santilli

Antimatter, already conjectured by A. Schuster in 1898, was actually predicted by P.A.M. Dirac in the late 19-twenties in the negative-energy solutions of the Dirac equation. Its existence was subsequently confirmed via the Wilson chamber and became an established part of theoretical physics. Dirac soon discovered that particles with negative energy do not behave in a physically conventional...

Alliance of opposites: electrons and positrons make new molecule.(This Week): An article from: Science News
by D. Castlevecchi

This digital document is an article from Science News, published by Thomson Gale on September 15, 2007. The length of the article is 522 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.Citation DetailsTitle: Alliance of...

© 2008 BrightSurf.com