Méson J/ψ

The _J/psi (J/psi) meson ˈdʒeɪ_ˈsaɪ_ˈmiːzɒn is a subatomic particle, a flavor-neutral meson consisting of a charm quark and a charm antiquark. Mesons formed by a bound state of a charm quark and a charm anti-quark are generally known as "charmonium" or psions. The _J/Psi is the most common form of charmonium, due to its spin of 1 and its low rest mass. The _J/Psi has a rest mass of 3.0969GeV/c2, just above that of the _charmed eta (2.9836GeV/c2), and a mean lifetime of 7.2e-21s. This lifetime was about a thousand times longer than expected. Its discovery was made independently by two research groups, one at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, headed by Burton Richter, and one at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, headed by Samuel Ting of MIT. They discovered they had actually found the same particle, and both announced their discoveries on 11 November 1974. The importance of this discovery is highlighted by the fact that the subsequent, rapid changes in high-energy physics at the time have become collectively known as the "November Revolution". Richter and Ting were awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics. The background to the discovery of the _J/Psi was both theoretical and experimental. In the 1960s, the first quark models of elementary particle physics were proposed, which said that protons, neutrons, and all other baryons, and also all mesons, are made from fractionally charged particles, the "quarks", which come in six types or "flavors", called up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm. Despite the ability of quark models to bring order to the "elementary particle zoo", they were considered something like mathematical fiction at the time, a simple artifact of deeper physical reasons. Starting in 1969, deep inelastic scattering experiments at SLAC revealed surprising experimental evidence for particles inside of protons. Whether these were quarks or something else was not known at first. Many experiments were needed to fully identify the properties of the sub-protonic components.