Eggeron particle discovery at CERN on April 1st, 2018

  • Level: Graduate 
  • Thread starter Thread starter Wrichik Basu
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Cern Particle
Join the discussion
Registration is free. Start your own thread to ask a follow-up.
5 replies · 3K views
Science Advisor
Insights Author
Gold Member
Messages
2,188
Reaction score
2,694
As per news from the CERN, the Eggeron or the "Humpty-Dumpty" particle has been discovered. Quoting from the news article:

The LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has announced the discovery of Eggeron ##\eta_{gg}##, familiarly known as the “Humpty Dumpty” particle, the smallest lump of nuclear glue.

Hard-boiled scientists herald it as the most important result in particle physics since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. Eggerons, theoretically predicted more than forty years ago, are particles of pure force, constituted only by gluons, the quanta of the strong nuclear force that holds together all matter (protons, neutrons and atomic nuclei).

The ##\eta_{gg}##, is formed of two gluons and has a mass of ##1.8 GeV/c^2##, about twice the mass of the proton, as predicted by a team of INFN theorists using lattice calculations. It lives for a very short time and then decays into two photons. This feature prompted the name “Humpty Dumpty” – inspired by the character in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, who falls from a wall and is irretrievably broken into pieces. The LHCb collaboration produced the ##\eta_{gg}##, by colliding high-energy heavy-ion beams: this generated a tiny region of extremely hot and gluon-rich material, which allowed ##\eta_{gg}##, to coagulate.

“It is an eggstraordinary result,” explains Giovanni Passalova, chief of the LHCb collaboration and INFN researcher. “It took us some time to unscramble the data but sunny-side up we cracked it. This result was not over easy to achieve and when we started to hunt for the ##\eta_{gg}##, we did not believe we could succeed. At one point, we were treading on eggshells to prevent other collaborations from poaching the data. But, at the end of the day, you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Today, with the discovery of the ##\eta_{gg}##, we have finally opened up the path to the great unification between subatomic physics and molecular gastronomy”.

Read more about the experiment here.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Likes   Reactions: Fervent Freyja, DennisN and strangerep
Physics news on Phys.org
The LHCb webpage found even more eggscuses to include egg puns.
As April 1st is over in most of the world I added the date to the title.
 
  • Like
Likes   Reactions: Fervent Freyja, DennisN, nuuskur and 1 other person
And of course we all know about the moron, right? The exchange particle that holds administratium together? :oldwink:
 
  • Like
Likes   Reactions: DennisN