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Posts Tagged ‘CMS’

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has already delivered more high energy data than it had in 2015. To put this in numbers, the LHC has produced 4.8 fb-1, compared to 4.2 fb-1 last year, where fb-1 represents one inverse femtobarn, the unit used to evaluate the data sample size. This was achieved in just one and a half month compared to five months of operation last year.

With this data at hand, and the projected 20-30 fb-1 until November, both the ATLAS and CMS experiments can now explore new territories and, among other things, cross-check on the intriguing events they reported having found at the end of 2015. If this particular effect is confirmed, it would reveal the presence of a new particle with a mass of 750 GeV, six times the mass of the Higgs boson. Unfortunately, there was not enough data in 2015 to get a clear answer. The LHC had a slow restart last year following two years of major improvements to raise its energy reach. But if the current performance continues, the discovery potential will increase tremendously. All this to say that everyone is keeping their fingers crossed.

If any new particle were found, it would open the doors to bright new horizons in particle physics. Unlike the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, if the LHC experiments discover a anomaly or a new particle, it would bring a new understanding of the basic constituents of matter and how they interact. The Higgs boson was the last missing piece of the current theoretical model, called the Standard Model. This model can no longer accommodate new particles. However, it has been known for decades that this model is flawed, but so far, theorists have been unable to predict which theory should replace it and experimentalists have failed to find the slightest concrete signs from a broader theory. We need new experimental evidence to move forward.

Although the new data is already being reconstructed and calibrated, it will remain “blinded” until a few days prior to August 3, the opening date of the International Conference on High Energy Physics. This means that until then, the region where this new particle could be remains masked to prevent biasing the data reconstruction process. The same selection criteria that were used for last year data will then be applied to the new data. If a similar excess is still observed at 750 GeV in the 2016 data, the presence of a new particle will make no doubt.

Even if this particular excess turns out to be just a statistical fluctuation, the bane of physicists’ existence, there will still be enough data to explore a wealth of possibilities. Meanwhile, you can follow the LHC activities live or watch CMS and ATLAS data samples grow. I will not be available to report on the news from the conference in August due to hiking duties, but if anything new is announced, even I expect to hear its echo reverberating in the Alps.

Pauline Gagnon

To find out more about particle physics, check out my book « Who Cares about Particle Physics: making sense of the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider and CERN », which can already be ordered from Oxford University Press. In bookstores after 21 July. Easy to read: I understood everything!

CMS-lumi-17juin

The total amount of data delivered in 2016 at an energy of 13 TeV to the experiments by the LHC (blue graph) and recorded by CMS (yellow graph) as of 17 June. One fb-1 of data is equivalent to 1000 pb-1.

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Le Grand collisionneur de hadrons (LHC) du CERN a déjà produit depuis avril plus de données à haute énergie qu’en 2015. Pour quantifier le tout, le LHC a produit 4.8 fb-1 en 2016, à comparer aux 4.2 fb-1 de l’année dernière. Le symbole fb-1 représente un femtobarn inverse, l’unité utilisée pour évaluer la taille des échantillons de données. Tout cela en à peine un mois et demi au lieu des cinq mois requis en 2015.

Avec ces données en réserve et les 20-30 fb-1 projetés d’ici à novembre, les expériences ATLAS et CMS peuvent déjà repousser la limite du connu et, entre autres, vérifier si les étranges événements rapportés fin 2015 sont toujours observés. Si cet effet était confirmé, il révèlerait la présence d’une nouvelle particule ayant une masse de 750 GeV, soit six fois plus lourde que le boson de Higgs. Malheureusement en 2015, il n’y avait pas suffisamment de données pour obtenir une réponse claire. Après deux ans de travaux majeurs visant à accroître sa portée en énergie, le LHC a repris ses opérations l’an dernier mais à faible régime. Si sa performance actuelle se maintient, les chances de faire de nouvelles découvertes seront décuplées. Tout le monde garde donc les doigts croisés.

Toute nouvelle particule ouvrirait la porte sur de nouveaux horizons en physique des particules. Contrairement à la découverte du boson de Higgs en 2012, si les expériences du LHC révèlent une anomalie ou l’existence d’une nouvelle particule, cela modifierait notre compréhension des constituants de base de la matière et des forces qui les régissent. Le boson de Higgs constituait la pièce manquante du Modèle standard, le modèle théorique actuel. Ce modèle ne peut plus accommoder de nouvelles particules. On sait pourtant depuis des décennies qu’il est limité, bien qu’à ce jour, les théoriciens et théoriciennes n’aient pu prédire quelle théorie devrait le remplacer et les expérimentalistes ont échoué à trouver le moindre signe révélant cette nouvelle théorie. Une évidence expérimentale est donc absolument nécessaire pour avancer.

Bien que les nouvelles données soient déjà en cours de reconstruction et de calibration, elles resteront “masquées” jusqu’à quelques jours avant le 3 août, date d’ouverture de la principale conférence de physique cet été. D’ici là, la région où la nouvelle particule pourrait se trouver est masquée afin de ne pas biaiser le processus de reconstruction des données. A la dernière minute, on appliquera aux nouvelles données les mêmes critères de sélection que ceux utilisés l’an dernier. Si ces évènements sont toujours observés à 750 GeV dans les données de 2016, la présence d’une nouvelle particule ne fera alors plus aucun doute.

Mais même si cela s’avérait n’être qu’une simple fluctuation statistique, ce qui arrive souvent en physique de par sa nature, la quantité de données accumulée permettra d’explorer une foule d’autres possibilités. En attendant, vous pouvez suivre les activités du LHC en direct ou voir grandir les échantillons de données de CMS et d’ATLAS. Je ne pourrai malheureusement pas vous rapporter ce qui sera présenté à la conférence en août, marche en montagne oblige, mais si une découverte quelconque est annoncée, même moi je m’attends à entendre son écho résonner dans les Alpes.

Pauline Gagnon

Pour en apprendre plus sur la physique des particules, ne manquez pas mon livre « Qu’est-ce que le boson de Higgs mange en hiver et autres détails essentiels » disponible en librairie au Québec et en Europe, de meme qu’aux Editions MultiMondes. Facile à lire : moi, j’ai tout compris!

CMS-lumi-17juin

Graphe cumulatif montrant la quantité de données produites à 13 TeV en 2016 par le LHC (en bleu) et récoltées par l’expérience CMS (en jaune) en date du 17 juin.

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Has CERN discovered a new particle or not? Nobody knows yet, although we are now two steps closer than in December when the first signs of a possible discovery were first revealed.

First step: both the ATLAS and CMS experiments showed yesterday at the Moriond conference that the signal remains after re-analyzing the 2015 data with improved calibrations and reconstruction techniques. The faint signal still stands, even slightly stronger (see the Table). CMS has added new data not included earlier and collected during a magnet malfunction. Thanks to much effort and ingenuity, the reanalysis now includes 20% more data. Meanwhile, ATLAS showed that all data collected at lower energy up to 2012 were also compatible with the presence of a new particle.

The table below shows the results presented by CMS and ATLAS in December 2015 and February 2016. Two hypotheses were tested, assuming different characteristics for the hypothetical new particle: the “spin 0” case corresponds to a new type of Higgs boson, while “spin 2” denotes a graviton.

The label “local” means how strong the new signal appears locally at a mass of 750 or 760 GeV, while “global” refers to the probability of finding a small excess over a broad range of mass values. In physics, statistical fluctuations come and go. One is bound to find a small anomaly when looking all over the place, which is why it is wise to look at the bigger picture. So globally, the excess of events observed so far is still very mild, far from the 5σ criterion required to claim a discovery. The fact that both experiments found it independently is what is so compelling.

table-750GeV

 

But mostly, the second step, we are closer to potentially confirming the presence of a new particle simply because the restart of the Large Hadron Collider is now imminent. New data are expected for the first week of May. Within 2-3 months, both experiments will then know.

We need more data to confirm or refute the existence of a new particle beyond any possible doubt. And that’s what experimental physicists are paid to do: state what is known about Nature’s laws when there is not even the shadow of a doubt.

That does not mean than in the meantime, we are not dreaming since if this were confirmed, it would be the biggest breakthrough in particle physics in decades. Already, there is a frenzy among theorists. As of 1 March, 263 theoretical papers have been written on the subject since everybody is trying to find out what this could be.

Why is this so exciting? If this turns out to be true, it would be the first particle to be discovered outside the Standard Model, the current theoretical framework. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 had been predicted and simply completed an existing theory. This was a feat in itself but a new, unpredicted particle would at long last reveal the nature of a more encompassing theory that everybody suspects exists but that nobody has found yet. Yesterday at the Moriond conference, Alessandro Strumia, a theorist from CERN, also predicted that this particle would probably come with a string of companions.

Theorists have spent years trying to imagine what the new theory could be while experimentalists have deployed heroic efforts, sifting through huge amounts of data looking for the smallest anomaly. No need to say then that the excitement is tangible at CERN right now as everybody is holding their breath, waiting for new data.

Pauline Gagnon

To learn more about particle physics and what might be discovered at the LHC, don’t miss my upcoming book : « Who cares about particle physics : Making sense of the Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider and CERN »

To be alerted of new postings, follow me on Twitter: @GagnonPauline  or sign-up on this mailing list to receive an e-mail notification.

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Le CERN a-t-il découvert une nouvelle particule ou pas? Personne ne le sait encore, bien que nous ayons maintenant fait deux pas de plus depuis le dévoilement des premiers signes d’une possible découverte en décembre.

Premier pas : les expériences ATLAS et CMS ont montré hier à la conférence de Moriond que les signes d’un signal persistent après la réanalyse des données de 2015 à l’aide de calibrations et de techniques de reconstruction améliorées. Le faible signal est même légèrement renforci (voir tableau). CMS a ajouté de nouvelles données recueillies durant une défaillance de leur aimant. Après beaucoup d’efforts et d’ingéniosité, ceci ajoute 20 % de données supplémentaires. De son côté, ATLAS a montré que toutes les données accumulées à moindre énergie jusqu’à 2012 étaient aussi compatibles avec la présence d’une nouvelle particule.

Le tableau ci-dessous montre les résultats présentés par CMS et ATLAS en décembre 2015 et février 2016. Deux hypothèses ont été testées, chacune correspondant à des caractéristiques différentes pour cette hypothétique particule : “spin 0” correspond à un nouveau type de boson de Higgs, tandis que “spin 2” dénote un graviton.

Local” se réfère à l’intensité du signal lorsque mesuré pour une particule ayant une masse de 750 ou 760 GeV, tandis que “global” indique la probabilité de trouver un petit excès sur une large gamme de valeurs de masse. En physique, les fluctuations statistiques sont monnaies courantes. On trouve toujours une petite anomalie lorsqu’on cherche dans tous les coins. Il est donc sage de prendre en compte un intervalle élargi. Globalement donc, l’excédent d’événements observé est toujours très limité. On est encore bien loin de la barre des 5σ, le critère utilisé pour une découverte. Ce qui est très fort par contre, c’est que les deux expériences l’ont trouvé indépendamment.

tableau-750GeV

Le deuxième et bien plus grand pas franchi, c’est que la confirmation possible de la présence d’une nouvelle particule se rapproche simplement parce que la reprise du Grand Collisionneur de Hadrons est imminente. On attend les nouvelles données début mai. Dans 2 ou 3 mois, les deux expériences connaîtront enfin la réponse

Mais sans plus de données, impossible de confirmer ou réfuter l’existence d’une nouvelle particule avec certitude. Et c’est justement pour cela qu’on paie les physiciens et physiciennes: déterminer les lois de la Nature sans qu’il ne subsiste l’ombre d’un doute.

Cela n’empêche personne de rêver en attendant, car si ceci était confirmé, ce serait la plus grande percée en physique des particules depuis des décennies. Déjà, la frénésie s’est emparée des théoriciens et théoriciennes. On comptait en date du premier mars 263 articles théoriques sur le sujet. Tout le monde essaye de déterminer ce que cela pourrait être.

Pourquoi est-ce si passionnant ? Si elle existe, ce serait la première particule à être découverte à l’extérieur du Modèle Standard, la théorie actuelle. La découverte du boson de Higgs en 2012 avait été prévue et avait simplement complété une théorie existante. Un exploit, bien sûr, mais la découverte d’une particule imprévue révèlerait enfin la nature d’une théorie plus vaste dont tout le monde soupçonne l’existence, mais qui n’a pas encore été trouvée. Hier à la conférence de Moriond, Alessandro Strumia, un théoricien du CERN, a prédit que cette particule s’accompagnerait probablement d’une kyrielle de nouvelles particules.

Les théoriciens et théoriciennes ont passé des années à essayer d’imaginer cette nouvelle théorie tandis que du côté expérimental, on a déployé des efforts héroïques à trier des quantités faramineuses de données à la recherche de la moindre anomalie. Nul besoin de dire que l’atmosphère est fébrile en ce moment au CERN; tout le monde retient son souffle en attendant les nouvelles données.

Pauline Gagnon

Pour en savoir plus sur la physique des particules et les enjeux du LHC, consultez mon livre : « Qu’est-ce que le boson de Higgs mange en hiver et autres détails essentiels», en librairie en France et en Suisse dès le 1er mai.

Pour recevoir un avis lors de la parution de nouveaux blogs, suivez-moi sur Twitter: @GagnonPauline ou par e-mail en ajoutant votre nom à cette liste de distribution.

 

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@CMSVoices

Thursday, October 29th, 2015

Building on the success of rotating Twitter accounts like @realscientists, which I participated in last year, the CMS experiment has a new account: @CMSVoices.  The idea is that it’s an account for talking to CMS members and hearing about their day-to-day work, in contrast with the official news from the @CMSexperiment account.  Of course, you can already hear from many individual CMS physicists on Twitter (I’m normally @sethzenz), but the account gives you the chance to interact with a new person each month, and it might even help us get some new tweeters started!  I also tried to explain things in more detail and start some more general discussions, for example:

There weren’t too many discussions or too many followers so far, but we’re just getting started, and I’m looking forward to others taking the account over and seeing what the do with it.  The next holder of the CMSVoices account, starting in November, will be @matt_bellis.  Please welcome him next week, and let us know if you have any questions or ideas!

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I know what you are thinking. The LHC is back in action, at the highest energies ever! Where are the results? Where are all the blog posts?

Back in action, yes, but restarting the LHC is a very measured process. For one thing, when running at the highest beam energies ever achieved, we have to be very careful about how we operate the machine, lest we inadvertently damage it with beams that are mis-steered for whatever reason. The intensity of the beams — how many particles are circulating — is being incrementally increased with successive fills of the machine. Remember that the beam is bunched — the proton beams aren’t continuous streams of protons, but collections that are just a few centimeters long, spaced out by at least 750 centimeters. The LHC started last week with only three proton bunches in each beam, only two of which were actually colliding at an interaction point. Since then, the LHC team has gone to 13 bunches per beam, and then 39 bunches per beam. Full-on operations will be more like 1380 bunches per beam. So at the moment, the beams are of very low intensity, meaning that there are not that many collisions happening, and not that much physics to do.

What’s more, the experiments have much to do also to prepare for the higher collision rates. In particular, there is the matter of “timing in” all the detectors. Information coming from each individual component of a large experiment such as CMS takes some time to reach the data acquisition system, and it’s important to understand how long that time is, and to get all of the components synchronized. If you don’t have this right, then you might not be getting the optimal information out of each component, or worse still, you could end up mixing up information from different bunch crossings, which would be disastrous. This, along with other calibration work, is an important focus during this period of low-intensity beams.

But even if all these things were working right out of the box, we’d still have a long way to go until we had some scientific results. As noted already, the beam intensities have been low, so there aren’t that many collisions to examine. There is much work to do yet in understanding the basics in a revised detector operating at a higher beam energy, such as how to identify electrons and muons once again. And even once that’s done, it will take a while to make measurements and fully vet them before they could be made public in any way.

So, be patient, everyone! The accelerator scientists and the experimenters are hard at work to bring you a great LHC run! Next week, the LHC takes a break for maintenance work, and that will be followed by a “scrubbing run”, the goal of which is to improve the vacuum in the LHC beam pipe. That will allow higher-intensity beams, and position us to take data that will get the science moving once again.

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Ramping up to Run 2

Thursday, March 19th, 2015

When I have taught introductory electricity and magnetism for engineers and physics majors at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I have used a textbook by Young and Freedman. (Wow, look at the price of that book! But that’s a topic for another day.) The first page of Chapter 28, “Sources of Magnetic Field,” features this photo:

28_00CO-P

It shows the cryostat that contains the solenoid magnet for the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment. Yes, “solenoid” is part of the experiment’s name, as it is a key element in the design of the detector. There is no other magnet like it in the world. It can produce a 4 Tesla magnetic field, 100,000 times greater than that of the earth. (We actually run at 3.8 Tesla.) Charged particles that move through a magnetic field take curved paths, and the stronger the field, the stronger the curvature. The more the path curves, the more accurately we can measure it, and thus the more accurately we can measure the momentum of the particle.

The magnet is superconducting; it is kept inside a cryostat that is full of liquid helium. With a diameter of seven meters, it is the largest superconducting magnet ever built. When in its superconducting state, the magnet wire carries more than 18,000 amperes of current, and the energy stored is about 2.3 gigajoules, enough energy to melt 18 tons of gold. Should the temperature inadvertently rise and the magnet become normal conducting, all of that energy needs to go somewhere; there are some impressively large copper conduits that can carry the current to the surface and send it safely to ground. (Thanks to the CMS web pages for some of these fun facts.)

With the start of the LHC run just weeks away, CMS has turned the magnet back on by slowly ramping up the current. Here’s what that looked like today:

dbTree_1426788776816

You can see that they took a break for lunch! It is only the second time since the shutdown started two years ago that the magnet has been ramped back up, and now we’re pretty much going to keep it on for at least the rest of the year. From the experiment’s perspective, the long shutdown is now over, and the run is beginning. CMS is now prepared to start recording cosmic rays in this configuration, as a way of exercising the detector and using the observed muon to improve our knowledge of the alignment of detector components. This is a very important milestone for the experiment as we prepare for operating the LHC at the highest collision energies ever achieved in the laboratory!

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This article appeared in DOE Pulse on Nov. 10, 2014.

Fermilab's Oliver Gutsche leads worldwide computing operations for the CMS experiment. Photo: Reidar Hahn

Fermilab’s Oliver Gutsche leads worldwide computing operations for the CMS experiment. Photo: Reidar Hahn

Since he was a graduate student in Germany, Oliver Gutsche wanted to combine research in particle physics with computing for the large experiments that probe the building blocks of matter.

“When I started working on the physics data coming from one of the experiments at DESY, I was equally interested in everything that had to do with large-scale computing,” said Gutsche of his time at the German laboratory. Gutsche now works at DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. “So I also began working on the computing side of particle physics. For me that was always the combination I wanted to do.”

Gutsche’s desire to merge the two focuses has paid off. For the past four years Gutsche has been in charge of worldwide computing operations of the Large Hadron Collider’s CMS experiment, one of two experiments credited with the 2012 Higgs boson discovery. In December he was awarded the CMS Collaboration Award for his contributions to the global CMS computing system. And more recently, he has been promoted to assistant head of the Scientific Computing Division at Fermilab.

As head of CMS Computing Operations, Gutsche orchestrates data processing, simulations, data analysis and transfers and manages infrastructure and many more central tasks. Monte Carlo simulations of particle interactions, for example, are a key deliverable of the CMS Computing Operations group. Monte Carlo simulations employ randomness to simulate the collisions of the LHC and their products in a statistical way.

“You have to simulate the randomness of nature,” explained Gutsche. “We need Monte Carlo collisions to make sure we understand the data recorded by the CMS experiment and to compare them to the theory.”

When Gutsche received his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg in 2005, he was looking for a job to combine LHC work, large-scale computing and a U.S. postdoc experience.

“Fermilab was an ideal place to do LHC physics research and LHC computing at the same time,” he said. His postdoc work led to his appointment as an application physicist at Fermilab and as the CMS Computing Operations lead.

Today Gutsche interacts regularly with people at universities and laboratories across the United States and at CERN, host laboratory of the LHC, often starting the day at 7 a.m. for transatlantic or transcontinental meetings.

“I try to talk physics and computing with everyone involved, even those in different time zones, from CERN to the west coast,” he said. Late afternoon in the United States is a good time for writing code. “That’s when everything quiets down and Europe is asleep.”

Gutsche expects to further enhance the cooperation between U.S. particle physicists and their international colleagues, mostly in Europe, by using the new premier U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network recently announced in anticipation of the LHC’s restart in spring 2015 at higher energy.

Helping connect the research done by particle physicists around the world, Gutsche finds excitement in all the work he does.

“Of course the Higgs boson discovery was very exciting,” Gutsche said. “But in CMS Computing Operations everything is exciting because we prepare the basis for hundreds of physics analyses so far and many more to come, not only for the major discoveries.”

Rich Blaustein

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The World’s Largest Detector?

Wednesday, August 13th, 2014

This morning, the @CERN_JOBS twitter feed tells us that the ATLAS experiment is the world’s largest detector:

CERN_JOBS Tweet Largest Detector

Weighing over 7,000 tons, 46 meters long, and 25 meters high, ATLAS is without a doubt the particle detector with the greatest volume ever built at a collider. I should point out, though, that my experiment, the Compact Muon Solenoid, is almost twice as heavy at over 12,000 tons:

CMS

CMS is smaller but heavier — which may be why we call it “compact.” What’s the difference? Well, it’s tough to tell from the pictures, in which CMS is open for tours and ATLAS is under construction, but the big difference is in the muon systems. CMS has short gaps between muon-detecting chambers, while ATLAS has a lot of space in order to allow muons to travel further and get a better measurement. That means that a lot of the volume of ATLAS is actually empty air! ATLAS folks often say that if you could somehow make it watertight, it would float; as a CMS member, I heartily recommend attempting to do this and seeing if it works. 😉

But the truth is that all this cross-LHC rivalry is small potatoes compared to another sort of detector: the ones that search for neutrinos require absolutely enormous volumes of material to get those ghostlike particles to interact even occasionally! For example, here’s IceCube:

"Icecube-architecture-diagram2009" by Nasa-verve - IceCube Science Team - Francis Halzen, Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Icecube-architecture-diagram2009.PNG#mediaviewer/File:Icecube-architecture-diagram2009.PNG

Most of its detecting volume is actually antarctic ice! Does that count? If it does, there may be a far bigger detector still. To follow that story, check out this 2012 post by Michael Duvernois: The Largest Neutrino Detector.

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J/ψ

Wednesday, August 6th, 2014

The particle with two names: The J/ψ Vector Meson. Again, under 500 words.

jpsi_NOVA

Trident decay of J/Psi Credit: SLAC/NOVA

Hi All,

The J/ψ (or J/psi) is a very special particle. Its discovery was announced in 1974 independently by two groups: one lead by Samuel Ting at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York and the second lead by Burton Richter at Standford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. J/ψ is special because it established the quark model as a credible description of nature. Having been invented by Gell-Man and Zweig as a bookkeeping tool, it was not until Glashow, Iliopoulos and Maiani (GIM) that the concept of quarks as real particles was taken seriously. GIM predicted that if quarks were real, then they should come in pairs, like the  up and down quarks. Candidates for the up, down, and strange were identified, but there was no partner for the strange quark. J/ψ was the key.

ting-group-335px_BNL

Samuel Ting and his BNL team. Credit: BNL

Like the proton or an atom, the J/ψ is a composite particle. This means that J/ψ is made of smaller, more elementary particles. Specifically, it is a bound state of  one charm quark and one anticharm quark. Since it is made of quarks, it is a “hadron“. But since it is made of exactly one quark and one antiquark, it is specifically a “meson.” Experimentally, we have learned that the  J/ψ has an intrinsic angular momentum (spin) of 1ħ (same as the photon), and call it a “vector meson.” We infer that the charm and anticharm, which are both spin ½ħ, are aligned in the same direction (½ħ + ½ħ = 1ħ). The J/ψ must also be electrically neutral because charm and anticharm quarks have equal but opposite electric charges.

richter_SLAC

Burton Richter following the announcement of co-winning the 1976 Nobel Prize. Credit: SLAC

At 3.1 GeV/c², the J/ψ is a about three times heavier than the proton and about three-quarters the mass of the bottom quark. However, because so few hadrons are lighter than it, the J/ψ possesses a remarkable feature: it decays 10% of the time to charged leptons, like an electron-positron pair. By conservation of energy, it is forbidden to decay to heavier hadrons. Because there are so few  J/ψ decay modes, it is appears as a very narrow peak in experiments. In fact, the particle’s mass and width are so well-known that experiments like ATLAS and CMS use them as calibration markers.

Credit: CMS

Drell-Yan spectrum data at 7 TeV LHC Credit: CMS

The J/ψ meson is one of the coolest things in the particle zoo. It is a hadronic bound state that decays into charged leptons. It shares the same quantum numbers as the photon and Z boson, so it appears as a Drell-Yan processes. It established the quark model, and is critical to new discoveries because of its use as a calibration tool. In my opinion, not too shabby.

Happy colliding.

Richard (@BraveLittleMuon)

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