Glasgow scientists predict mass of new particle
January 26, 2010

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of physicists from the University of Glasgow has predicted the mass of a new particle which would help explain one of the fundamental forces of the universe.

The scientists say the Bc* meson will have been produced fleetingly in collisions in the Tevatron accelerator in Illinois, USA and at CERN in Switzerland, but has not yet been spotted by experimentalists searching through the debris.

However, a team led by Professor Christine Davies, head of the University's Particle Physics Theory Group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and an expert in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) theory, used supercomputers to predict the mass of the meson, which might help scientists understand the strong force that dictates the behaviour of particles at the sub-atomic level.

The strong force is one of the four fundamental forces of the universe and is what holds quarks together - the smallest units of matter found to date. It is this force that QCD theory seeks to understand.

The other fundamental forces are:

* Gravitation - the phenomenon where bodies of mass are attracted to each other,
* Electromagnetic - the attraction that exists between electrically charged particles such as electrons and protons,
* Weak - which is involved in some forms of particle decay, most notably nuclear beta decay

Prof Davies said: "Although this meson has not yet been shown to exist, our calculations have allowed us to predict not only its existence but also its mass. Two previous predictions we've made have been shown to be true so we are confident with this one. We predict the mass of the particle to be 6.330 GeV/c2 with an error of 9 MeV/c2. This is 6.75 times the mass of the proton with an error of 1% of the proton's mass. We predict that this particle is heavier than its cousin the Bc (whose mass we predicted five years ago) by 53(7) MeV/c2."