Making Matter Out of Extra Particles

[Ontophobe]

Have we ever observed or created atoms with nuclei made up of charmed and strange quarks, surrounded by a muon "cloud" or "shell"? Or perhaps an atom with a top-and-bottom-quark-nucleus and a tau particle orbiting it?

 

[Vanadium 50]

You can have muons in atomic orbitals and you can have strange quarks in the nucleus - these are called hypernuclei. Both are very short lived because they are made of unstable particles.

 

[BvU]

I don't think we have. Muons live long enough to make e.g. muonium, but the heavier quarks (or the nucleus candidates they can form) live too shortly to play these games.

 

[mfb]

Both hypernuclei (at least two nucleons, and at least one of them with a heavier quark) and muons are rare products of high-energetic collisions, getting two of them close enough in phase-space to get bound will happen extremely rarely. I don't know numbers - we might have produced them, but I don't think there are experimental results. Such a study will have a hard time finding a few events in a huge background.

Individually, they have been observed of course.

The top-quark is too short-living to get bound in hadrons.

 

[Ontophobe]

Thanks a lot guys. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your straightforward answers :)