Physicists Discover New Particle: the Bottom-most 'Bottomonium'

July 10, 2008

(PhysOrg.com) -- Thirty years ago, particle physics delighted in discovering the "bottomonium" family—the set of particles that contain both a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark but are bound together with different energies. Ever since, researchers have sought to ascertain the lowest energy state of these tiny yet important particles.

Now, for the first time, collaborators on the BaBar experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) have detected and measured the lowest energy particle of the bottomonium family, called the ηb (pronounced eta-sub-b).

"Faced with the end of its run, the BaBar collaboration decided to focus its remaining time on investigating some of the states of bottomonium," said Associate Director of the DOE Office of Science for High Energy Physics Dennis Kovar. "This exciting result achieves one of the principal aims of this final data collection run."

SLAC Director Persis Drell added: "This is a tremendous achievement for both the PEP-II accelerator and the BaBar collaboration. Congratulations to everyone involved."

Every system of matter contains a "ground state"—a lowest energy level to which the system is ever trying to get, shedding energy as it does so. The ground state provides a baseline from which to measure the other more energetic states of the particle, and is key to understanding the fundamental laws that govern how quarks interact and behave.

When a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark are pulled together by the strong force, they form a quark "atom"—much like an electron and a proton come together under the electromagnetic force to create a hydrogen atom. This bottom quark "atom," the ηb, can be excited to various higher-energy states, from the first excited state (called the "Upsilon(1S)") to the even higher states ("Upsilon(2S)," "Upsilon(3S)" and so on).

To determine the ground state, the BaBar collaboration gathered data in which the collision of an electron and a positron created a bottom quark and anti-bottom quark bound pair in the Upsilon(3S) state that in turn decayed by emitting a gamma ray and leaving behind the ηb ground state, which then decayed into still more particles. As this sequence of events occurred just once in every two or three thousand Upsilon(3S) decays in the BaBar detector, the collaboration needed to collect more than 100 million collisions in which the Upsilon(3S) state was created to ensure a precise measurement of the ηb.

"This very significant observation was made possible by the tremendous luminosity of the PEP-II accelerator and the great precision of the BaBar detector, which was so well calibrated over the BaBar experiment's 8-plus years of operation," said BaBar Spokesperson Hassan Jawahery, a physics professor at the University of Maryland. "These results were highly sought after for over 30 years and will have an important impact on our understanding of the strong interactions."

To make the observation even more difficult, experimentalists had to battle very high levels of background noise. Some of that is due to other decay processes that involve the Upsilon(1S) state, which has a similar energy and needs to be isolated from the signal to detect the ηb.

The motion of the bottom quark and anti-bottom quark within the ηb is slightly different from that of the Upsilon(1S)—due to the role of spin in quark interactions—and that introduces a very slight difference in energy between the particles. This slight split—known as "hyperfine splitting"—between the Upsilon(1S) and the ηb has been seen in other systems before, including the charm quark system, but this is the first time it has ever been observed in the bottom quark system. The hyperfine splitting is so small that the experimenters had to go to extraordinary lengths to definitively discover the ηb.

"Because the bottom quark is heavier than the charm quark, it offers theoretical physicists a more powerful handle for understanding the phenomena," said BaBar Physics Analysis Coordinator Soeren Prell, a physics professor at Iowa State University. Paradoxically, measurements of the heaviest quarks (the bottom is second heaviest, only behind the top quark), though hardest to observe, give some of the most precise measurements of the fundamental properties of the strong force.

The BaBar collaboration expects to release further results from its most recent data collection run over the next few months.

Some 500 scientists and engineers from 74 institutions in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States work on BaBar. SLAC is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Source: SLAC

4.6 /5 (61 votes)  

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Captain_Sakonna
Jul 10, 2008

Rank: 4.7 / 5 (3)
What I want to know is how the bottom quark and anti-bottom quark stay combined in the "quark atom" without annihilating each other. Or do these quark atoms only last for a tiny fraction of a second?
menkaur
Jul 11, 2008

Rank: 1.5 / 5 (4)
sounds like fun
taisha99
Jul 11, 2008

Rank: 1.6 / 5 (5)
I suggest that it should be called the arson
deatopmg
Jul 11, 2008

Rank: 1.5 / 5 (8)
How about antioccamium and anti-antioccamium for names? The proliferation of complexity to support the paradigm is to be expected in this religion.

If one smacks a neutron or proton hard enough one can mash them up to generate all sorts of metastable pieces, i.e. "fundamental particles", actually composed of just positrons and electrons. These metastable pieces are what the existing paradigm is "good" at predicting.

Whether or not these so called fundamental particles (which by definition must be waves but aren't) really contribute to our knowledge of how the universe really works remains to be seen. IMO that is unlikely but in the meantime all of these highly educated people are employed.
earls
Jul 11, 2008

Rank: 4.5 / 5 (2)
"must be waves but aren't" ???

What I found most interesting is the description of the structure as "quark atom." I'd be curious to understand more about why they take on this fundamental configuration.
CWFlink
Jul 11, 2008

Rank: 1 / 5 (4)
What can be more fundamental, basic, minimal, primitive than a photon? In my naive, ignorant way, all these particles seem more likely to be entangled photons, bound together in a warped space of their own making due to the energy they contain. Who says that space can't be warped by tiny amounts of energy, if it is confined in a sufficiently small space? Once warped, like tiny black holes, photons spin around their own energy well, able only to escape infrequently when interacting with other "particles" that distort the shape of their energy well by bumping into them. So much of the sub-atomic research reminds me of Kepler and the string of theories before Newton: complex schemes that happen to compute the correct answer, but without any unifying, conceptual basis.
Excalibur
Jul 11, 2008

Rank: 3.7 / 5 (3)
What I want to know is how the bottom quark and anti-bottom quark stay combined in the "quark atom" without annihilating each other. Or do these quark atoms only last for a tiny fraction of a second?

From the article - "the collision of an electron and a positron created a bottom quark and anti-bottom quark bound pair in the Upsilon(3S) state that in turn decayed by emitting a gamma ray and leaving behind the %u03B7b ground state, which then decayed into still more particles"
Rank 4.6 /5 (61 votes)
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