The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #59418   Message #1868627
Posted By: Amos
25-Oct-06 - 05:47 PM
Thread Name: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
One thing you should know:

THE PERIODIC TABLE OF BARYONS has now been supplemented with several
heavyweight members. Like the addition of two new elements (116 and
118) to the chemical periodic table, the new members of the baryonic
periodic table are unstable and ephemeral, but their observed
existence serves to expand our understanding of matter in the
universe.

The new baryons, the heaviest yet with masses around 5.8
GeV, were sifted from trillions of proton-antiproton collisions
conducted at an energy of 2 TeV at Fermilab. According to the
toolbox of the standard model, all matter is assembled from a family
of six leptons or a family of six quarks. Among the leptons, only
the electron is of account in ordinary atoms, and among the quarks
only the up (u) and down (d) quarks help to fill out protons and
neutrons. Thus the proton is really a u-u-d quark troika while the
neutron‚s lineup is d-d-u. But one can imagine other baryons
(particles made of three quarks) made of different quark
combinations, or with different spin values (the proton and neutron
both have a nominal spin value of 1/2).

Although they can be made
artificially in particle collisions, baryons containing the other
quarks---strange (s), charm (c), bottom (b), or top (t)---are
unstable and quickly decay. Still, to understand the strong force
that governs nuclear matter, physicists strive to create and measure
all those other candidate baryons. (For a picture of the baryon
hierarchy see http://www.aip.org/png/2006/270.htm )