By Devin Powell
Scientists have found a previously unseen particle using the Tevatron, the most powerful particle accelerator in the United States.
Predicted by the standard model of particle physics, the new particle fills a blank space in the family tree of baryons, making it a distant cousin of the neutron and the proton. Baryons are made of three quarks, small, fundamental building blocks of matter that come in different flavors. The newly discovered xi-sub-b (Ξb0) contains a strange quark, an up quark and a bottom quark.
“There are no big surprises, but we have an obligation to look everywhere we can to confirm whether the particles we predict are there or not,” says Pat Lukens, a physicist with the Tevatron’s Collider Detector, or CDF, team. Lukens presented the result, submitted to Physical Review Letters, July 20 at the home of the Tevatron, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.