LHCb announces a charming new particle | Hacker News Reader

LHCb announces a charming new particle

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68 pointslainon16 comments

Very cool! LHCb continues to put out some really awesome results. Here's to hoping for some more exciting results from the rest of the LHC programme in 2017 and 2018.

What surprised me most is that CERN shelled out for a TLD? Those things don't come cheap.

maybe they were offered a discount for inventing the web

Did they not name it?

Ξ++ cc or double charmed Xi.

That's neat. I see the Xi. Does the ++ mean double, and the cc mean charmed? Having trouble parsing that, even with the sub and superscripts from the article. I guess more concretely, would a triple charmed (if that means anything) be +++ cc or ++ ccc?

There are constraints on how quarks combine, according to the standard model, which mean (among other things) that you won't get three of the same quark combining to form a particle. The cc subscript indicates the presences of two charm quarks, and the ++ indicates the particle has an electric charge Q=+2. The subscript values show the presence of heavy quarks: charm (c), bottom (b) or top (t) quarks are heavy. The superscript is electric charge (Q), a value between -1 and +2 (-, 0, +, or ++).

++ means a charge of +2, cc means two charm quarks (doubly-charmed)

A triply-charmed baryon would be the Ωccc++

I believe it's called the double charmed Xi baryon, but I'm not sure if it has a pet name.

There's a whole bestiary of particles like this one that don't really stick out as particularly interesting, I imagine it's simpler to stick to the boring descriptive names.

composite particle... yawn

Mmm, what do you exactly mean by composite?

Most of well-known particles are composite of quarks (proton, neutron etc), so it's an exciting discovery indeed.

It would be yawn if if it was a composite of another particles, like Cooper pairs.

>"Most of well-known particles are composite of quarks"

And that's why they're boring.

At this point, bring me hints of supersymmetry or bring me pillows.

At this point, bring me hints of supersymmetry or bring me pillows.

What's the difference between sleeping forever and being dead? The history of science is rife with examples of people waiting for ages for evidence of their incorrect pet theories...

> What's the difference between sleeping forever and being dead?

That is not dead which can eternal lie. Charming particles may be sleep-inducing, but there's always a chance of a strange new one over the aeons.

Good thing science isn't done for your entertainment. What's the point of your comments other than to imply that physicists somehow aren't doing a good enough job?

My PhD was in a sister field to the one these researchers are in (we split when they built terrestrial particle accelerators, while we kept looking at the natural ones in the sky).

This is tongue in cheek stuff. The way one might speak to a colleague to give them a 'hard time' about their research. No offense intended!

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