Word: mesons
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Last week, in trial runs with a pi meson beam, the whole weird contraption worked precisely. And over the glass cover, a stereoscopic camera takes pictures of meson tracks every twelve seconds, gathering 1,000 times more information for U.S. science than with the most sophisticated of earlier instruments...
...puzzle on the world's two most powerful atom-smashers, the Cosmotron at Brookhaven and the Bevatron at Berkeley, Calif. The atom-smashers have, in their few years of operation, raised more problems than they have solved. One of their most baffling stunts was to produce the K meson, a short-lived particle knocked out of atomic nuclei. In all significant ways K mesons are alike, but some of them, called "tau K mesons," decay into three pi mesons; others, called "theta K mesons," decay into only two pi mesons. For mathematical reasons which physicists can explain only...
Indirectly, Street played a part in the upheaval of the old theory, for the mu-meson, which he discovered several years ago, was instrumental in detecting the variation from the parity principle...
Methuselah of Space. Instead of sending a human subject into space at close to the speed of light and comparing him physically on his return with stay-at-home contemporaries, Dr. Crawford uses mu mesons. When these subatomic particles are at rest in relation to the earth, they disintegrate in an average earth time of less than two-millionths of a second. But when they are created by cosmic rays hitting atomic nuclei high in the atmosphere, they seem to have comparative immortality. Many of them reach the earth's surface more than ten miles below, although their short...
This is what was happening in the bubble chamber. Mesons were forming mesic atoms with the nuclei of heavy hydrogen (deuterium), which they prefer to ordinary hydrogen. A meson so occupied makes no bubbles, and this accounted for the gaps in the meson tracks. But when a mesic deuterium atom hits an atom of ordinary hydrogen, the nuclei fuse together, forming an atom of helium 3 and releasing 5.4 million electron-volts of energy. The meson shoots off, carrying the energy as velocity, and is none the worse for its experience. It may form another mesic atom and cause...