Quarks

Researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have identified two new subatomic particles, called sigma-sub-b particles. The short-lived particles decay in a fraction of a second, the team said. The particles consisted of two up quarks, the smallest units of matter, and a bottom quark, while the second contained two down quarks and a bottom quark.

Astronomers have found two collapsed stars that they say appear to be made of free-floating quarks, an exotic form of matter whose existence has been theorized but never before seen. If confirmed, the finding would enhance understanding of how matter behaves under extreme conditions. Earth-bound physicists have been trying to briefly create a form of quark matter at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Santa Monica College announced this week that it will reopen its planetarium on June 13 after being closed for almost five years. Renamed the John Drescher Planetarium, the facility has been technologically upgraded and can now show three-dimensional programs, said Bruce Smith, a spokesman for the college.

How many different particles make up the universe and everything in it? How many remain to be discovered? Physicists are now on the edge of getting some answers to those important questions. There are three classes of fundamental particles (particles that can't be broken down into anything simpler): 1) leptons, 2) quarks and 3) bosons. The most important lepton is the electron, which is found everywhere.

A paper published this week in a British science journal reports the first "indisputable evidence" for the existence of a very tiny and strange particle. Its entire lifetime lasts no more than a billionth of a second and it travels less than half a millimeter before decaying. It does not, in other words, seem like much of a mover and shaker in this world. However, the paper's author, Piyare Jain, a University of Buffalo particle physics professor, is rightly enthusiastic about his discovery.

A coalition of nuclear physicists is announcing today that it has gathered evidence of the existence of an entirely new state of high-energy matter--one that may have arisen in the first split seconds after the big bang. The finding, still hotly contested, would be the first experimental proof that such a state could exist and could eventually help explain how the stars and galaxies that make up the universe were formed.

Researchers smashing gold atoms together to mimic conditions in the first microseconds after the creation of the universe have observed an unexpected new state of matter. Instead of the thin, fiery gas of quarks and gluons that they expected, they found instead a dense drop of the elementary particles that behaves like a hitherto unseen "perfect fluid." It is "a truly stunning finding," said Raymond L. Orbach, director of the Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have smashed the nuclei of gold atoms together at near the speed of light to produce the highest density of matter ever artificially created, it was announced Tuesday. The density was more than 20 times as great as that within the nuclei of ordinary matter and produced temperatures above 1 trillion degrees.

All these years gone, and Richard Feynman is still a force. dead more than a dozen years, but an icon nonetheless. Wander through the Caltech bookstore, and there he is, enshrined in a floor-to-ceiling photograph that takes up much of a wall. The only other prominent images in the store are those of Albert Einstein, and those are just posters.

Researchers from Caltech, UC Santa Barbara and MIT will share the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for their studies of the "strong force," the powerful and mysterious energy that holds the nuclei of atoms together even as the electrical charges on protons try to blow them apart. The Nobel Foundation said Tuesday that the award would go to H. David Politzer, 55, of Caltech; David J.