Amid all the talk about strangelets that may or may not destroy the earth, there's some real news about strange matter: Researchers at Fermilab's DZero experiment say they have detected a new type of particle that contains two strange quarks as well as a bottom quark, known as the Omega-sub-b (Ob).
Quarks - the constituents of protons, neutrons and more than 200 other subatomic particles - come in six "flavors": up and down, charm and strange, bottom and top. The proton, for example, has two up quarks and a down quark. When the DZero team went through about 100 trillion proton-antiproton collisions from Fermilab's Tevatron atom-smasher, they found 18 events that carried the signature of the unstable Omega-sub-b. The mass of the particles matched what theorists had predicted (about 6.165 GeV/c2, if you must know).
Fermilab says the Omega-sub-b is a relative of the even stranger Omega-minus, which is made up of three strange quarks and was discovered back in 1964. Finding the strange-strange-bottom combination fills in one more slot in what scientists consider a "periodic table" of quark combinations. It also confirms that one of the scientific world's most successful theories is on the right track, even if scientists don't exactly know why.
For more, check out the DZero Web site and the team's research paper, which has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.
