New Subatomic Particle Zc(3900) Hints at Four-Quark Matter

So, let me get this straight.
When the quarks get together. They form a Voltron?

reply to post by grey580


BAhahahah

Seriously cool stuff though.

Originally posted by theabsolutetruth
I love the fact that the new hypothetical all gluon particle has the moniker ''glueball''. Yay!, double yay at the possibility that it is likened to an atom of pure light.

It's an interesting find.

I'm not sure where you got the idea the hypothetical glueball is "new", but Morningstar and Peardon computed glueball masses in 1999 or 14 years ago so that idea isn't new at all.

The new particle Zc(3900) isn't a glueball.

Glueballs are very difficult to detect, so while they've been hypothesized for quite some time, that's the reason they haven't been confirmed yet in experimental observations.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


I am aware of both those things, Zc(3900) is new and I like ''glueball'' which I know has been around a while, especially if it's hypothesis can be proven. I think I already commented on it somewhere on ATS on my first screen name, some years ago, if I recall correctly. It is very interesting science, one step closer to understanding the machinations of the Universe

Thanks for the heads, up, this deserves a few more replies from the erudite and knowledgeable here.....
The prospect of another natural building block just adds that much more intensity to the very bizarre picture we have of the sub atomic universe.
One thing i must say, is that the damn thang must be veeery small..................
Wonder what this will do for chemistry etc?

oops my bad

Originally posted by stirling
Thanks for the heads, up, this deserves a few more replies from the erudite and knowledgeable here.....
The prospect of another natural building block just adds that much more intensity to the very bizarre picture we have of the sub atomic universe.
One thing i must say, is that the damn thang must be veeery small..................

Wonder what this will do for chemistry etc?

You're welcome.

Yep, a few insights from those in the know would be good, perhaps a few ideas and possibilities on the effects of such a find would be nice!

I guess this will affect a lot of science, there's so much advance in areas like nano particles that there is possibly an eager scientist somewhere just looking for such a development to prove something else.

Originally posted by stirling
Wonder what this will do for chemistry etc?

This will probably do nothing for what most consider chemistry, which looks at the nucleus as sort of a black box with a certain number of protons and neutrons, and doesn't care much about quarks.

But in particle physics it could be an advance in our understanding. I can't really think of any immediate practical applications, it may be knowledge just for the sake of knowing.

I had a brief foray into quantum mechanics during engineering school, so I do try to follow the field and it is definitely fascinating. Theoretical physics is far from my specialty, however, so I was unable to catch the full significance of the discovery. It sounded like this may be a possible insight into the mysterious "gluons" that hold subatomic particles together?

I thought it was interesting they said there were infinite possible arrangements of subatomic particles. Unless I am mistaken, it sounds like they could be referring to unstable combinations that break apart after a few femtoseconds (or whatever unit of time is appropriate for quantum reactions).

What also caught my attention was the sharing of photons between electrons, which I had never heard before. It seems like this is a common theme in atomic systems - chemical bonds forming by sharing electrons, electrons sharing photons, and subatomic particles sharing gluons.

I hope this isn't too off topic..... but do any of you detect the possibility that the subtle energy so often examined, utilized, realized, and implied in occultism, spirituality, esoterics, reiki, etc - could perhaps actually be tiny packets of information/light similar to quarks that we just haven't detected yet?

What if we are getting really close to understanding the nature of "energies" that has been the entire basis of many spiritual concepts?

reply to post by apcbm4


Yep, sounds like you read the article right, the arrangements of quarks and gluons including shared gluons is basically the jist, as well as the fact this 'matter' held for nano measurements, still a good leap in understanding matter and the 'glue' that keeps matter together.

Originally posted by supermarket2012
I hope this isn't too off topic..... but do any of you detect the possibility that the subtle energy so often examined, utilized, realized, and implied in occultism, spirituality, esoterics, reiki, etc - could perhaps actually be tiny packets of information/light similar to quarks that we just haven't detected yet?

What if we are getting really close to understanding the nature of "energies" that has been the entire basis of many spiritual concepts?

It isn't off topic in my opinion, I have always felt that religion and science are trying to understand the same thing, essentially.

I wrote on a thread a while ago that inspiration is likened to a 'lightbulb', and that words sometimes describe things more accurately than just on the surface, ''seeing the light'', ''light at the end of the tunnel'' ''light of day'' etc, so pretty much something I think is true, that light is part of spirituality ''the light of god'', ''the life, the light'' etc or from a more holistic point of view, the essence of everything, creation etc, the fact that science is studying light and the very particles and how they are held together for life and finding such things validates the other, in ways that make more sense, than just man made religion as per churches. There are a lot of teachings from the bible and other religions that accurately describe scientific processes with the use of allegory or a story involving G*d and people. Almost as if the ancients knew of science but didn't realise it, or at least some were in such a state of tuning in to such energies to know and relay the truth of such, albeit in a fashion they knew of instead of the scientific wordings.

Another article on the ''charmed particle'' here.

www.space.com...

The new particle has been dubbed Z_c(3900). The physicists can't be sure what Z_c(3900) is made of, but they are fairly sure it exists. The Belle experiment found 160 of the particles, and BESIII found 300. Both discoveries are statistically significant, and are extremely unlikely to turn out to be a fluke. The findings were described in two papers published June 17 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Bound states like this have never been observed before, so many in the particle physics community have been left scratching their heads," physicist Eric Swanson of the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in either project, wrote in an essay about the discoveries published in the same journal issue.

"If the four-quark explanation is confirmed, our particle physics zoo will need to be enlarged to include new species," Swanson added. "And our understanding of quark taxonomy will have expanded into a new realm"

BESIII is the latest iteration of a project that began at the Beijing Electron Positron Collider in the 1990s. Only recently has the experiment been targeting the byproducts of Y(4260) particles, and its initial findings on the Z_c(3900) are based on just two months of data collection, Harris said. With more time, the physicists expect to gain a clearer picture of what the particle is made of and what other strange combinations of quarks might be possible.

We're quite excited," Harris said. "We started doing the X-Y-Z physics recently, and I think we're going to be very successful," he added, referring to the mysterious family of quark-containing particles with names beginning with the letters X, Y and Z.

The first version of Belle, located at the KEKB particle accelerator in Tsukuba, Japan, shut down in 2010, and the new discovery is based on data acquired before then. The project's successor, Belle 2, is currently under construction and expected to start up in 2015. The experiment was chiefly designed to study the differences between matter and antimatter.

When we first built Belle we never in our wildest dreams anticipated we'd find something like this," Piilonen said. "We were not looking for these particular states, but all these fascinating discoveries came about serendipitously.