Word: omega
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Omega-Minus Signature. The unknown particle predicted by the eightfold way was named omega minus, and both CERN Laboratory in Geneva and Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island started elaborate campaigns to find it. Brookhaven's apparatus was built around the 33-bev (billion electron volt) Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, and it used a line of magnets and electrostatic separators 400 ft. long to isolate negative K-mesons. Ten of the K-mesons were allowed to enter Brookhaven's 80-in. liquid-hydrogen bubble chamber every 2½ seconds, and pictures were taken of the results. Two pictures...
...Omega-minus particles will never be made into rocket fuel or nuclear weapons. Their life (10 -10 sec., as predicted) is too short. But their discovery by a guiding theory has given an enormous boost to physics. Now that the eightfold way has been checked by this striking success, it can be used as a trusty tool in the search for more discoveries...
...were so short-lived that their age was measured in less than a billionth of a second, their very existence inferred from the erratic tracks they left in bubble and cloud chambers. Some left no tracks at all. The list proliferated to the sound of Greek letters-eta, rho, omega, lambda, sigma, xi-until it seemed that the alphabet might...
...thousand-billion-billionth) seconds. It travels only one ten-billionth of a centimeter before it disintegrates. But in the precise world of physics, this short life is enough to get a particle classed as actual matter. The Berkeley physicists decided that their invisible particle was the long-sought omega...
...Eternal. Despite its name, omega will probably not be the last new particle to be discovered. Physicists now believe that protons may contain as many subatomic particles as the 90-odd chemical elements that were once thought to be the basic stuff of the universe. Some physicists are playing with the idea that newfound particles, such as omega, may have complicated structures of their own. Some of the experts suspect that there may never be an end of this process of peeling onionlike skins from the mystery of matter. "This means," says Professor Luis W. Alvarez, who along with...