Physicists discover new particle
US: Physicists at U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a new particle made of three
quarks, the Omega b baryon, the lab’s leading scientist Qian Jianming
told Xinhua Wednesday.
The particle contains two strange quarks and a bottom quark. It is an
exotic relative of the much more common proton and weighs about six
times the proton mass.
Qian, originally graduated from University of Science and Technology
of China and now a professor at University of Michigan, played a leading
role in the discovery of this new particle. It was detected for the
first time in a particle accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois. The heavy
particle is scarce today, but scientists believe it was abundant soon
after the Big Bang.
“This discovery helps us understand how matter was formed in the
universe. It shows the critical success of the quark model and gives us
new insight into the strong force, which binds quarks together to form
larger particles,” said Qian.
Qian is among 600 physicists from 90 institutions involved in DZero,
the international experiment at Fermilab that produced these results.
Qian said detecting the Omega b baryon was like finding a needle in a
haystack. They developed algorithms that allowed them to analyze almost
100 trillion particle collisions to find 18 events with the distinctive
characteristics expected from the decay of the Omega b baryon.
Washington, Thursday, Xinhua
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