RE: Charmonia, bottomonia & toponia - the fantastic beasts of particle physics

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RE: Charmonia, bottomonia & toponia - the fantastic beasts of particle physics

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mobbs SteemSTEMin StemSocial • 7 months ago

bottomonia

lol. How creative.

Reading this, like agmoore says, was surprisingly easy to grasp. Parts of the way these particles behave seem reminiscent to how half-lives work in chemistry. But the amount of times i've read 'Quark' how now destroyed all meaning of the word for me... XD

Loosely related - assuming Time is functionally infinite, when working on these timescales, is there a supposition that, if you could access even smaller divisions of time, there would be more secrets to unravel that might undermine or advance your work?

7 months ago in StemSocial by mobbs SteemSTEM

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lemouth SteemSTEM 7 months ago (edited)

Nice to see you here (and unexpected :) ). Thanks for your feedback.

Decay time and decay length are a bit different and here connected to a survival probability as a function of time. So yeah, there is a connection with what you remember :)

lol. How creative.

I can feel some irony here... But I guess this is well deserved. Physicists are not so good in names and acronyms, but sometimes a good one pops up.

I actually never asked myself why quarkonia (the generic name behind any quark-antiquark composite object) are called that way. I checked it out, and it turns out that this word comes from quark (obviously) and onium. The latter stands for a bound state of a particle and its antiparticle, according to Wikipedia. This is not very enlightening I must admit, but this comes from IUPAC who did that well before bound states became bread and butter....

Loosely related - assuming Time is functionally infinite, when working on these timescales, is there a supposition that, if you could access even smaller divisions of time, there would be more secrets to unravel that might undermine or advance your work?

I am not sure to understand this question, and I am afraid you will have to elaborate a little. Sorry :)

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mobbs SteemSTEM 7 months ago

Nice to see you here (and unexpected

I'm trying to get back into being more active beyond my own postings these days =D I noticed the quality of content seems to be thriving... seemingly better than latter Steem days.

I am afraid you will have to elaborate

Well, since you work on such tiny timescales you presumably have extremely sensitive equipment to measure such things, combined with a lot of maths. But how short a timescale can particle physics currently, and usefully, work with? Close to Planck time?

Or, am I getting it wrong, and these timescales are only derived from maths?

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lemouth SteemSTEM 7 months ago

I'm trying to get back into being more active beyond my own postings these days =D I noticed the quality of content seems to be thriving... seemingly better than latter Steem days.

Yes this is true, although the Steem bar was pretty low (I will always remember the banana story, one of the greatest moments of the good old Steem chat :D )

Well, since you work on such tiny timescales you presumably have extremely sensitive equipment to measure such things, combined with a lot of maths. But how short a timescale can particle physics currently, and usefully, work with? Close to Planck time?
Or, am I getting it wrong, and these timescales are only derived from maths?

Those tiny time scales are in fact too small to be observed. From the electronic point of view, everything happens as instantaneous. What we actually see is the decay products of the top quarks and antiquarks. However, measuring the properties of these decay products allows us to conclude very solidly that we had intermediate top quarks and antiquarks in the process.

For that reason, we are very far from the Planck scale and not even close to it. The time scales there are predictions from quantum field theory (which be seen sometimes as math ;) ).

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