Scientists Have Found a New Subatomic Particle Through Large Hadron Collider
Author: Usman Zafar Paracha
Published: May 02, 2012 at 5:34 am
Many times in the field of science, one experiment helps in the discovery or invention of many different products and the same thing happens in the case of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments.
Now researchers working in the LHC have found a new particle through an atom smashing experiment. This subatomic particle is referred to as Xi(b)* (pronounced "csai bee-star"). This new particle is a baryon i.e. a type of matter having three quarks that are even smaller pieces of atom. Protons and Neutrons are also the types of baryons.
Xi(b)* is a type of beauty baryon containing a beauty quark. This is the first time that this theoretical particle has been observed practically and this discovery could help scientists to solve the puzzle of the matter formation. Beauty baryons are extremely short lived particles unlike protons and neutrons. It takes fractions of seconds for these particles to be decayed into 21 other short-lived particles. These particles need extremely high energies to be created and that’s why they are found in the large atom smashers such as LHC run by the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.
This particle has been observed in the proton-proton collision in the facility's Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector.
"Finding this particle is really very hard," CMS physicist Vincenzo Chiochia, a co-discoverer of the new particle, told Symmetry Breaking magazine.
"Finding this complicated decay in such a messy event makes us confident in our abilities to find other new particles in the future."
Researchers have submitted a paper regarding the discovery of this new particle to the Physical Review Letters.
(Picture Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN)
Read more: http://technorati.com/technology/articl ... z1tjAGg9dG