A surprising new particle — Science News, November 23, 1974
To add to the current excitement and uncertainty in particle physics, nature has unveiled the most peculiar new particle to emerge in many years...
Theorists are momentarily baffled about how to interpret it...
The new particle is the heaviest discovered so far... and its lifespan of 10-18 seconds... is unusually long for a particle of such mass. There must be an unprecedented type of structure to sustain the particle for so long.
This newly discovered subatomic particle, named J/psi, could only be explained by the combination of a novel type of quark, the charm quark, and its antimatter counterpart. This finding, dubbed the November revolution, led to further discoveries that ultimately confirmed quarks as the fundamental constituents of matter — a cornerstone of the standard model of particle physics (SN: 4/8/21). J/psi continues to puzzle scientists. For example, researchers involved in the ATLAS experiment, a particle detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, are striving to understand precisely how these particles are generated in high-energy proton collisions.
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