Word: muons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...members of the other two families are even more elusive. Some have never been directly observed, and the others have only been spotted fleetingly in cosmic rays or high-energy particle accelerators. The second family consists of so-called "charmed" and "strange" quarks, muons and muon neutrinos. The third is made up of "top" and "bottom" quarks, tau particles and tau neutrinos. Last week's announcements do not preclude the possibility that other types of particles could be discovered, but they raise the odds against that happening, by Stanford's estimate, to better than...
...computer firm in California, and Jack Steinberger, 67, a research physicist in Geneva, Switzerland, won the award for their groundbreaking contributions to particle physics. In 1962 the three developed techniques to capture neutrinos and use them to discover other particles in the subatomic world, including the muon neutrino, believed to be one of the dozen building blocks of matter...
...barrier shattered atomic nuclei, releasing new particles, including neutrinos. The particles then hit a wall of steel that absorbed all but a single beam, which carried billions of neutrinos into a + detector. Studying the debris at 3 o'clock one morning, Lederman found the footprints of a high-energy muon. Not only had the physicists developed a useful tool for exploring matter by means of neutrino streams, but they had also discovered a new animal in what physicists call "the subatomic...
This discovery eventually led to the simple model of the atom which is still taught in high school physics courses: the nucleus consists of positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons, around which negatively charged electrons orbit. Yet the continuous discovery of new particles, such as the unstable muon, challenged this simple theory. In addition, this theory raised further theoretical questions: how was the nucleus held together? Why did radioactive decay exist...
...their surprise, the scientists counted fewer than half the electron neutrinos anticipated. Reines speculates that they had changed flavors, or oscillated, turning into muon or tau neutrinos during their short journey. If such a switch had occurred, the neutrinos must have mass (since physics dictates that one kind of particle must have mass to turn into another). Said Reines: "The simple view [of the massless neutrino] does not square with experimental facts...