ATLAS Discovers New Chi_b Resonance
Just as you thought it was over for 2011, and you proceeded to hung the Higgs mass plots on the christmas tree as a wish for stronger signals next year, ATLAS comes out with a new particle discovery. That's what I like of particle physics - there's always so much going on that the excitement is never really over.The new particle is not anything we doubted should exist: it is a bound state of a bottom and a anti-bottom quarks just as others we have found in the past 34 years (starting with Lederman and collaborators' discovery of the Upsilon); however, it is the first time it is seen, and this adds to our knowledge of heavy meson spectroscopy a small but not negligible bit of information. A small step for mankind, a boldface line in the CV of a few colleagues in ATLAS. read more