Comments on: Particle Physicists Discover Lowest Energy "Bottomonium" Particle

By: website design

website design — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:46:14 +0000

Not a new particle per se, but just a higher excited state of a bottom quark and a bottom anti-quark.

By: Hunnter

Hunnter — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:48:42 +0000

neoguru:

Well, with negative energy, things defy common sense laws of the world we are used to.
The Wikipedia article on it explains it fairly well, my explanation was much much worse… heh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_matter

If matter like this could exist and used, it could potentially be the biggest breakthrough since electricity.
There are a bunch of things that could be created to (ab)use the "negative" properties.
One could be near-perfect frictionless surfaces, lightweight too since the negative mass would repel itself as well, as long as you create a strong-enough bond that is.

By: neoguru

neoguru — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:23:12 +0000

Since energy is motion or the capacity to move, theh how can you have "negative energy"? How do you move slower then standing still?

By: Chuck Lam

Chuck Lam — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:14:03 +0000

A wild thought! Can any three dimension particle be split if enough energy is available to do the job? If so, is there a finite limit to this "splitting?"

By: Sean Ellis

Sean Ellis — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:20:56 +0000

We have observed quarkonium states for all of the quarks except the top quark.

up, down: Mix together to make the neutral pion
strange: Phi meson
charm: J or Psi meson
bottom: B or Upsilon meson

Source: http://everything2.com/title/meson

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:32:38 +0000

There is indeed mixed family mesons. The kaon for example has one strange or anti-strange quark bound to either an up or down (or anti) quark. This is not quarkonium since it is not a bound state of a same quark with it's anti-quark. As to what is emitted when a positron jumps to a lower state in anti-hydrogen it's the same as hydrogen (as far as can be determined)… i.e. a photon with a specific energy. Since a photon can be considered as it's own anti-particle it makes sense that both electrons and positrons emit (or absorb) a photon when transitioning to a different energy level.

By: Ian O'Neill

Ian O'Neill — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:28:34 +0000

Hi Hunnter: I'm no expert either, but I think anti-matter pretty much acts in the same way as matter. So you can expect positrons and electrons to emit radiation as they drop through energy levels.

To Sili: Apparently toponium is not possible as the top quark's mass is too large. There is quite a nice writup on Wikipedia (I know the purists out there don't like Wikipedia, but it is a good source if all the references are stated): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarkonium

Hope that helped a little

Ian

By: Sili

Sili — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:43:52 +0000

So what about "toponium"?

Can't an anti-charm and a bottom come together to form a meson too? Or does it have to be two of the same 'kind'?

By: Hunnter

Hunnter — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:57:10 +0000

I was thinking of why there is less anti-matter, or at least, more hidden or whatever.
Not an expert at this mind you (been out of particle physics for awhile to learn other things), but i will explain as best as possible.

Matter emits radiation as it looses energy, right?
What does anti-matter emit?
If a positron were to fall a level, would it emit something similar to that of an electron falling through the same level? (does anyone even *know* this yet? Didn't some guys create anti-hydrogen awhile back? What happened there?)

Matter can absorb electromagnetic radiation and gain energy, does anti-matter do the same, the exact same way?

I bring this up because there are all these ideas about negative mass, negative energy and so on.

Hopefully LHC will bring more insight into this.