Two new subatomic particles discovered at CERN
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What I find more interesting is that LHCb is licensing their eprint as CC-BY-4.0. I wonder how PRL feels about this.
That said, it is important, interesting research because if there are important deviations from the standard model, it is likely to be hinted at by the actual mass values among other things.
Are they any less particle-like than an electron? Than a proton?
Even though a proton isn't fundamental, it's still considered a particle.
Of course the PRL version will not be CC-BY and citations that reference it will likely not find the CC-BY version. I wonder if it will matter in any material way to PRL - no more so at least than the situation where papers are available direct from a repository on an author's personal webpage. The pre-print already being on Arxiv.org probably makes far more impact than the use of a CC license?
CERN additionally funds the open-access fees for papers to help them offset publishing costs over the life of the paper.
http://cds.cern.ch/record/1955574/files/CERN-OPEN-2014-049.p...
The approach seems to be we observe a lot of behaviour, then build up models to explain that behaviour. If particles need to be made up to balance an equation then they get made up.
You project that model into some scenario to say "If this model is right, the following ... will happen" and observe. If you're right then work goes on for further evaluate "What about this scenario" and finally a big machine gets built to directly work out, from all that's prior, if a particle that needs X,Y,Z properties really does exist is should be seen in the measurements that are supposed create it.
So to answer your question; Both?
E.g You could take the model, put it in a computer. Simulate what the LHC does and look at that graph of kind of particles it makes. Then you build the LHC, actually smash some things together. Same graph?
So the SM is a map telling you where to look, but a very sneaky kind of map. In the sector where the strong force matters, it's as if someone encrypted a map, and for every new destination you want to find out about, you have to expend computational resources to decrypt it. In principle, you have all the information, but in practice it is hard to extract predictions from the theory. That is a very peculiar situation for scientists to be in: to have a definite, precise theory, and the opportunity to do experiments, but to struggle to compare the two!
Anyway, these particles are predicted by the SM, where "predicted by" means after expending a lot of computation to understand the strong dynamics one finds out that these particles (which are quarks held together by gluons) should be there.
There are three "generations" of quarks, each one heavier than the last but otherwise identical in properties. These are charm and strange followed by top and bottom. These new particles are a mix of generations: bds (bottom, down, strange). They are predicted by the Standard Model, but their detailed properties (particularly their branching ratios to various decays into other particles) will be slightly different in theories of "physics beyond the Standard Model", so by looking at them in detail, including a precision measurement of their masses, it may be possible to kill off some alternative theories.
Though the OP does say "The discovery of the particles, known as Xi_b'- and Xi_b*-, were announced by CERN [...]"
饾洴鈥测伝 works in unicode, but I can't get the subscript b nor superscript asterisk in there (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_superscr...).
> The particles, known as the Xi_b'- and Xi_b-, were predicted to exist by the quark model but had never been seen before. A related particle, the Xi_b0, was found by the CMS experiment at CERN in 2012. The LHCb collaboration submitted a paper reporting the finding to Physical Review Letters.*
0: http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2014/11/lhcb-observes-...
* some of the formatting of the particle names got borked by the HN comment system limitations--I tried using <sup> tags but they don't appear to work. The correct spelling/representation of the particle names can be found in [0]