Decaying beauty spied for first time by LHC

[n2doc]

6:50 23 April 2010 by Kate McAlpine

A rare, fleeting "beauty" particle has been spotted in the first run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC started work on 30 March, and one of its four large detectors detected evidence of a beauty quark – also, less poetically, known as a bottom quark – on 5 April.

The find should be the first of many beauty decays that LHCb, the LHC's beauty experiment, will observe, and demonstrates the detector is working as planned.

This first recorded particle is a meson composed of an anti-beauty quark – the beauty quark's antiparticle – and an up quark – one of the two common quarks that make up protons and neutrons. While up quarks last for billions of years, the large beauty quarks swiftly decay into lower-energy particles in about 1.5 x 10-12 seconds.

After travelling only 2 millimetres in the accelerator, the beauty quark decayed to a lighter quark – still paired with the original up quark – and the extra energy was carried off in the form of electron-like particles called muons.

more

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18815-decaying-beauty-spied-for-first-time-by-lhc.html

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

1. "Dude looks like he got hit by an anti-beauty quark meson..."

Insults of the future.

[unpossibles]

2. Yes. I was going to say "well, now they can understand the science behind why I am so awesome"

Your joke is funnier though.

What about: "man, looks like he hit every anti-beauty meson in the collider!"

[Ready4Change]

3. My take...

Dude, looks like all your extra energy is being carried off in the form of electron-like particles called muons.

Take a shower or something.