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Physics Highlights – May 2009 June 2, 2009

Posted by dorigo in news, physics, science.
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Here is a list of noteworthy pieces I published on my new blog site in May. Those of you who have not yet updated their links to point there might benefit from it…

Four things about four generations -the three families of fermions in the Standard Model could be complemented by a fourth: a recent preprint discusses the possibility.

Fermi and Hess do not confirm a dark matter signal: a discussion of recent measurements of the electron and positron cosmic ray fluxes.

Nit-picking on the Omega_b Discovery: A discussion of the significance of the signal found by DZERO, attributed to a Omega_b particle.

Nit-picking on the Omega_b Baryon -part II: A pseudoexperiments approach to the assessment of the significance of the signal found by DZERO.

The real discovery of the Omega_b released by CDF today: Announcing the observation of the Omega_b by CDF.

CDF versus DZERO: and the winner is…: A comparison of the two “discoveries” of the Omega_b particle.

The Tevatron Higgs limits strenghtened by a new theoretical study: a discussion of a new calculation of Higgs cross sections, showing an increase in the predictions with respect to numbers used by Tevatron experiments.

Citizen Randall: a report of the giving of honorary citizenship in Padova to Lisa Randall.

Hadronic Dibosons seen -next stop: the Higgs: A report of the new observation of WW/WZ/ZZ decays where one of the bosons decays to jet pairs.

What is the Y(4140)? The plot thickens April 6, 2009

Posted by dorigo in news, physics, science.
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I read with interest -but it would probably be more honest to say I browsed, since I could understand less than 50%- a preprint released three days ago on “The hidden charm decay of Y(4140) by the rescattering mechanism“, by Xiang Liu, from Peking University (now at Coimbra, PT). The Y particle has been recently discovered by CDF.

The existence of the several new resonances of masses above 3 GeV recently unearthed by B factories and by the CDF experiment poses a challenge to our interpretation of these states as simple quark-antiquark bound states, because of their properties -in particular, their decay pattern and their natural widths.

Already with the first “exotic” meson discovered a few years ago (and recently measured with great precision by CDF), the X(3872), the puzzle was evident: at a mass almost coincident with twice the mass of conventional charmed mesons (states which are labeled “D”, which are composed of two quarks: a charm and a up or down quark, like D^+ = c \bar d or D^\circ = c \bar u), the X was immediately suggested to be a molecular state of two D particles. I wrote an account of the studies of the nature of the X particle a few years ago if you are interested -but mind you, the advancements in this research field are quick, and I believe the material I wrote back then is a bit aged by now.

The paper by Liu tries to determine whether the interpretation of the Y particle as a pure second radial excitation of P-wave charmonium (\chi_{cJ}'', with J=0,1) holds water once the observed branching ratio of the Y into the final state seen by CDF (Y \to J/\psi \phi), and the measured decay width, are compared to a theoretical calculation.

The nice thing about the decay of the Y into the observed final state is that it occurs only through a so-called “rescattering” mechanism, by means of the diagrams shown in the graph below (the ones shown refer to the J=0 hypothesis of the \chi_{cJ}'', but similar diagrams are discussed for the J=1 state in the paper).

As you can see, the Y produces the two final state particles by means of a triangle loop of D mesons. These diagrams usually describe rare processes, and in fact Liu’s calculations end up finding a small branching fraction. I am unable to delve into the details of the computation, so I will just state the result: the typical values of the branching ratio B(Y \to J/\psi \phi) depend on a parameter, \alpha which, if taken in a “reasonable” range of values, provides estimates in the ballpark of a few 10^{-4}. This appears inconsistent with the observation provided by the CDF experiment.

Clearly, work is in progress here, so I would abstain from concluding anything definite on the matter. So, for now, let us call this an indication that the simple interpretation of the Y as a excited charmonium state is problematic.