

LHC: First reconstructed Beauty Particle - helium
http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/#current_news

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Create
Yes, essentially what this is supposed to mean, is that the detector is
(statistically speaking :) working.

Although B - or beauty - physics was the selling point at the time for the
experiment, very few are deeply excited about it (SLAC BaBar did the same, and
some CDF/D0 experiments). But perhaps the most intriguing was the beautiful
Belle, from Japan. And don't forget, that ATLAS and CMS can do the same B
physics also, being General Purpose detectors. So nobody is expecting great
surprises, therefore people would rather focus on (very) _rare decays_ , for
which this detector is very well suited for, in hoping to find (another) thing
not fitting the Standard Model (current holy grail, somewhat crippled anyway).
All other GP detectors are "matroska"-like, trying to fish in a big soup of
collision-events (many wonder about the event trigger on ATLAS, meaning how
would they pick out interesting events from all the mess of the collisions...)

This detector is more like a fixed-target experiment detector (albeit working
with colliding beams from the collider: actually the beams are defocused to
generate _less_ collisions, to have a "cleaner" picture). It is a "single arm
spectrometer", used by those, who are leading experts in particle oscillations
(B_0-s oscillate between states, useful for matter-antimatter studies).
Antimatter and symmetry violations were proven with K oscillations; then
around 1 TeV, B (particle) factories became "common place". And now, one might
expect some particle oscillation at higher energies also, currently at 2x3.5
TeV, which is in the making...

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abyssknight
What does this mean? I mean, I guess this tells us the LHCb is working
correctly, but other than that I'm not sure what this tells us.

~~~
fhars
Yes, it just tells you that the detector seems to work. High energy physics
experiments mostly rely on statistical analysis of large numbers of events
these days. There are occasionally situations where there may be a single
decisive "golden event", but b-quark physics left that stage decades ago. Now
it is mostly about tiny, tiny differences between normal matter and antimatter
that only manifest themselves in b and anti-b quark decays and which may
explain why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe.

[And ugh, when did CERN PR resurrect that stupid "beauty" moniker, everybody
has been using bottom and top instead of the pretentious beauty and truth for
the third generation quarks since I can remember.]

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retube
As an ex (european) physicist, my experience is beauty/bottom have always been
used interchangeably.

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hendler
From what I can gather "Beauty Particle" is the newer name for popular
culture's "God Particle"?

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sp332
No. Did you read the description on the page?

 _The Beauty Particle (called B+) is composed of an anti-quark b (that has a
very short lifetime of 1.5 thousandth of a nanosecond!) and a quark u."_

The God Particle (the Higgs Boson) is a fundamental particle, it is not
composed of smaller particles.

