A surprising contemporary particle — Science Facts, November 23, 1974

So that you might add to the current ferment and confusion in particle physics, nature now items the oddest contemporary particle to point out up in a long time…. Theorists are at a loss for the second about what to pause with it…. The contemporary particle is the heaviest yet learned … and its lifetime of 10^-18 seconds … is long for a particle of that mass. There have to be some out of the ordinary roughly constructing to withhold the particle collectively for see you later.

Change

The newfound subatomic particle, called J/psi, can also very smartly be explained handiest as a mash-up of a contemporary form of quark, the charm quark, and its antimatter counterpart. This discovery, identified as the November revolution, spurred others that finally confirmed that quarks are indispensable constructing blocks of matter — a cornerstone of the fashioned mannequin of particle physics (SN: 4/8/21). J/psi quiet perplexes scientists. As an illustration, researchers with the ATLAS experiment, a particle detector at CERN’s Substantial Hadron Collider shut to Geneva, are working to work out how precisely the particles are produced in excessive-vitality proton smashups.