The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) team at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland confirmed the discovery of two new particles and evidence of a potential third particle on Sept. 28. Mississippi State University nuclear physics scholars said the discovery is important and exciting for their field.
Ben Emmich, who is the president of the Society of Physics Students at MSU, called the finding inspirational for its impact on future physics careers.
“The fact that there are still great men and women working on these projects and are still finding new things is incredible and is inspiring for people like me who are interested in pursuing careers in research,” Emmich said.
The two new particles are known as ∑ (6097)+ and ∑ (6097)- and are classified as baryons, which are of the same family as the proton. Baryons, in fact, populate most of what is observed in the universe, and their structure consists of three quarks.
Now, quarks come in few different varieties and differ from each other in respect to their charge, spin and mass. There are the top and bottom quarks, the up and down quarks, and the charm and strange quarks. The proton consists of two ups and one down quark, where as these two new particles (∑ (6097)+ & ∑ (6097)-) consist of two ups and one bottom quark and two downs and one bottom quark, respectively. The fact that these two have bottom quarks have given them the name bottom baryons and give them a mass six times greater than the proton.
The third potential particle is named Z (4100), which could be a tetraquark containing four quarks or more, specifically a quark anti-quark pairing of two charm quarks. More experiments need to be conducted before more information on this particle can be given, according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
MSU nuclear physics professor Ben Crider said this discovery could help physicists go beyond the standard physics model.
“In a lot of ways, the standard model is working way too well,” Crider said. “This whole quark model, in terms of how we understand quantum mechanics, is kind of just way too successful; and so what we have been trying to do is find physics beyond this so-called standard model and find ways to break it.”
Many high energy “particle hunting” physics experiments have reaffirmed the standard model of physics, which is a large chart showing predicted fundamental particles and their masses. Confirming parts of the standard model allow for fine tuning of certain parameters which allow scientist to perform experiments more accurately and let the world know physicists are still hard at work.
Dipangkar Dutta, professor of nuclear physics at MSU, also gave some insight on these new scientific discoveries.
These particles stem from a set of six particle states in which four had already been discovered at Fermilab, a high-energy physics laboratory in Chicago, several years ago. These discoveries are more accurately excited states of already well-known particles, Dutta said.
“They are just kind of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of the standard model,” Dutta said. “So yeah, it is exciting in the sense that, ‘Okay, we understand something so well;’ however, it would be even more exciting if we found something beyond it.”