Deconstruction: Event display
Finding new species of particles isn’t as easy as simply watching them fly out of a collider experiment. Usually all physicists see are the remnants of a new particle decaying into other types of particles. From that, they infer the existence of the new species and can determine some of its characteristics. This event display shows what happened during one collision of an electron with a positron in the BaBar detector at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The tree of arrows explains the stages of decay that must have led to the final products observed by BaBar. The D*sJ(2317)+ particle discovered here is interesting because it doesn’t fit into physicists’ current understanding of charm quark-based matter. |
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