Particle physics- Large Hadron Collider experiment

Introduction

On March 23, a wave of excitement propagated through the particle physics community when researchers from the LHCb experiment at CERN, situated in the Franco-Swiss border, announced the results of their latest analysis of data.

Verge of discovery

While the findings were not sufficiently strong to be counted as a discovery, CERN scientists were excited enough to reveal that if the anomaly they had detected was confirmed, “It would require a new physical process, such as the existence of new fundamental particles or interactions.”

What was this excitement all about? It is necessary to delve into the world of elementary particles to understand this.

Elementary particles: Broadly speaking, elementary particles are classified into the particles called baryons – which include:
- protons,
- neutrons and
- their antiparticles the antiprotons etc.
Middle-class particles: The “middle mass” particles, roughly speaking, are called the mesons and they include members such as the K and B particles.
Leptons: Leptons include:
- electron and
- its cousins the muon and tau particles and
- the anti-particles.
Quarks and gluons: At a still smaller scale, there are tiny particles called quarks and gluons.
- There are six flavours of quarks: up, down, truth, beauty, charm and strange.
- They too have antiquarks associated with them.

Note: While the baryons are made up of combinations of three quarks, the mesons contain two quarks, more accurately a quark and antiquark pair, and the leptons are truly fundamental and are thought to be indivisible.

Do you know?

Until now it is believed that the electron, muon and tauon and their antiparticles, though they differ in mass, behave similarly in particle interactions.

Lepton universality principle.

The muons are not essentially different from the electrons as per the Standard Model, the presently accepted theoretical model of all elementary particle interactions.
This is called the lepton universality principle.

Source: TH

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