Thursday, December 29, 2011

LHC detects long predicted b-anti-b meson

In further proof that the Standard Model works, the Large Hadron Collider has found a heavy and quickly decaying meson made of a bottom quark and anti-bottom quark that had long been predicted by QCD but had never been observed. There are about a dozen dozen hadrons predicted by the Standard Model, and most have been observed already, but a few of the heavier ones remain well characterized but undiscovered. This finding narrows the ranks of the missing hadrons. Analysis of the importance of the new find can be found here.

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