Who can resist such grand underground daring do?


Boffins cross atom-smasher streams, 'excited' beauty pops into being

Topflight scientists operating vast, difficult-to-comprehend machines located in an underground cavern laboratory say that an "excited beauty" has been called into existence after they crossed the streams emanating from two unprecedentedly powerful particle accelerators.

Sadly for devotees of such films as Weird Science, the beauty in question – though describable in scientific terms as quite hefty, and also exceedingly hot – was sub-atomic in size. ...


All grand and exciting very serious stuff! And all liquid helium super cool!! ;-)

A real gem out of that lot has just got to be:

CMS physicists found the Ξb*0 [excited beauty baryon] signal in a sample of about 530 trillion proton—proton collisions (an integrated luminosity of 5.3 inverse femtobarns) which were delivered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operating at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV in 2011.


Compare that with the rather irreverent:

... the twin streams of contra-rotating charged particles which howl around the LHC's two supercryogenic superconducting magnetic tunnel tracks at a whisker less than light speed are crossed over each other. This results in large numbers of unbelievably violent head-on collisions between protons (as we have here) or sometimes lead ions when the directing boffins fancy a bit of a change.

CMS scientists have submitted a paper describing their discovery, readable here (as ever, we recommend that non-physicists peruse this only after donning a sturdy, snugly-fitting hat of some type in case of incipient brain explosion).

Meanwhile the quest to overturn the whole of physics as we know it continues...


Notice which is the 'official' and 'unofficial' comment?

A few good beers might help! ;-)

(As always, the comments to that article make for fun and sometimes illuminating reading...)


Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Is this new baryon really called "beauty"?

Is this new baryon really called "beauty"?

Why no. And it isn't so new. Up, Down, Charm, Strange are pretty set. Truth and Beauty have been renamed to Top and Bottom. You can tell the age of the person by what he calls them.

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The people that sold the idea of the LHC to the various governments around Europe ought to be hired by NASA to promote the return to the Moon to the American public and congress.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.