Higgs Hunters Talk

matched muons and bottom quarks?

  • Ptd by Ptd

    What happened here? I think the blue boxes mean bottom quarks?

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  • markbakovic by markbakovic

    I had this whole discussion of what might be going on written out for you but an errant "Backspace" keystroke lost it. The blue indicators do indeed mean the computer thinks bottom quark decays were likely (based on a lot of particle tracks filtered out of the events as we see them), while the geometry of the muon tracks suggests they could have come from the decay of a botom/antibottom pair, perhaps coming from a B-meson, perhaps from a Higgs boson decay, or perhaps unrelated. Google "Quarkonium" to find out more about bound quark/antiquark particles, or check out the LHCb experiment (located down the road from the ATLAS detector these images come from) for some cutting edge research into bottom-type quarks.

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  • Whoandwhatitis by Whoandwhatitis moderator

    Thanks for the great explanation, @markbakovic!

    What's also interesting is that it seems that most of the energy here appears to be in the bottom quarks and the other particles that traveled near it. We hardly see anything else in other areas of the detector. To me, that hints at these being bottom quarks because of their incredible mass (energy), which is probably a significant portion of the energy budget for this object.

    I also wanted to chime in here and drop a link for the LHCb experiment, just to make it easy to find:
    http://home.web.cern.ch/about/experiments/lhcb

    Two of the most recent updates are pretty impressive.

    LHCb's new analysis confirms old puzzle
    LHCb observes two new baryon particles

    I've spent a few hours poking around on their site over the last few weeks - I find it fascinating. I hope you do, too!

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  • markbakovic by markbakovic

    also LHCb's own website might be of interest, and there are also some learning resources and a secondary school masterclass available as part of CERN's outreach program accessible via the Open Data Portal.

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