Latest Meson Stories

Recently analyzed data from the BaBar experiment may suggest possible flaws in the Standard Model of particle physics, the reigning description of how the universe works on subatomic scales. The data from BaBar, a high-energy physics experiment based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, show that a particular type of particle decay called “B to D-star-tau-nu” happens more often than the Standard Model says it should. In this type of decay, a...

A University of Warwick physicist has produced a galaxy sized solution which explains one of the outstanding puzzles of particle physics, while leaving the door open to the related conundrum of why different amounts of matter and antimatter seem to have survived the birth of our Universe.Physicists would like a neat universe where the laws of physics are so universal that every particle and its antiparticle behave in the same way. However in recent years experimental observations of particles...

Physicists study rare particles to learn why the universe has more matter than antimatterUsing data from experiments performed in 2010 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, scientists are studying rare particle decays that could explain why the universe has more matter than antimatter.Led by Sheldon Stone, a physicist at Syracuse University, a group of scientists recently published their first observations of two different...

UC Riverside physicists involved in the international research; new result brings us closer to understanding the universe and its originsWhy is there matter in the universe and not antimatter, its opposite?Physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, including John Ellison, a professor of physics at UC Riverside, have announced that they have found evidence for a significant violation of matter-antimatter symmetry in decays of B-mesons, which are exotic particles produced in high...

Force of interaction between magnetic particles grows stronger with increasing distanceAn experiment has confirmed that spinons, particle-like magnetic excitations, can be confined in a magnetic insulator similar to the way elementary quarks are confined within individual protons and neutrons. The finding, in a well-described magnetic system, may offer new ways to explore Quantum Chromodynamics, the theory that describes the fundamental interactions of quarks.The observations of spinon...

Scientists of the CDF experiment at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced March 17 that they have found evidence of an unexpected particle whose curious characteristics may reveal new ways that quarks can combine to form matter. The CDF physicists have called the particle Y(4140), reflecting its measured mass of 4140 Mega-electron volts. Physicists did not predict its existence because Y(4140) appears to flout nature's known rules for fitting quarks and...

Soeren Prell and a team of Iowa State University researchers are part of an international research team testing a theory that led to a share of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for Japanese researchers Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa.Prell, an Iowa State University associate professor of physics and astronomy, is part of the BaBar experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif. Prell returned to Iowa State this summer after a year...

High-energy physicists devoted to recreating the conditions at the beginning of the universe have for the first time observed a new way to produce those basic particles of atoms, protons and neutrons.Confirming a decades-old prediction, the physicists with the CLEO collaboration say they observed a rare and extremely short-lived subatomic particle with the unusual name of "charmed-strange meson" decay into a proton and anti-neutron.Detection of the event, which the collaboration made public...

Its name is Y(4260) and it is not a new humanoid of Stars Wars, but a particle identified for the first time by BaBar experiment: an international collaboration - formed by the large participation of the Italian physicists of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (Infn) - that has its seat in Stanford (California). Y(4260) represents an interesting element with respect of particles' field and it will provide very useful signs about character of the strong force, that is the force that...