Archive for baryons

CP Violation in Baryons

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , on July 21, 2025 by telescoper

I was (pleasantly) surprised to learn a few weeks ago that I shall be teaching particle physics again next academic year. That means that I’ll have to update to the notes to reflect the latest news from CERN. Researchers from the LHCb collaboration have published evidence for CP violation in baryons. The paper is published in Nature here.

For those of you not up with the lingo, CP is an operator that combines C (charge-conjugation, i.e. matter versus anti-matter) and P (parity, i.e. inversion of coordinates). Parity has been known since the 1950s to be violated in weak interactions, so the weak nuclear force distinguishes between states of odd and even parity. CP violation was first demonstrated in the 1960s CP in the decays of neutral kaons resulted in the Nobel Prize  in 1980 for its discoverers Cronin and Fitch. CP violation has subsequeuntly been seen in many other meson decays.

But the mesons (consisting of a quark and an antiquark) are only half of the family of particles made from quarks; the others are the baryons which are made of three quarks (c.f. James Joyce’s “Three quarks for Muster Mark” in Finnegans Wake). Antibaryons consist of three antiquarks, but such are not mentioned in Finnegans Wake.

The baryons concerned in the LHCb experiment contain an up quark, a down quark and a beauty quark and were produced in proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider in 2011–2018. These baryons and antibaryons can decay via multiple channels. In one, a baryon decays to a proton, a positive K-meson and a pair of pions – or, conversely, an antibaryon decays to an antiproton, a negative K-meson and a pair of pions. CP violation should create an asymmetry between these processes, and the researchers found evidence of this asymmetry in the numbers of particles detected at different energies from all the collisions.

Figure 1 from https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09119-3

A problem with calculating the magnitude of this effect for baryons is that there is a contribution from the strong force – see the curly line indicating a gluon in the lower panel on the left above – and that is much harder to compute than a pure weak force (represented by the wavy lines indicating W– bosons. Yo will see that the tree and loop diagrams involve quark mixing, a process that allows quarks of different generations to couple via weak interactions; there is a buW vertex in the top panel and a tsW vertex in the bottom one. Given the uncertainties, it seems the results are consistent with the level of CP violation predicted in the Standard Model of particle physics.

The big question surrounding this result is whether it can account for the fact that our Universe – or at least our part of it -contains a preponderance of baryons over anti-baryons, so somehow the interactions going on during the Big Bang must have shown a preference for the former over the latter. This problem of baryogenesis is not explained in the Standard Model and, since these results are consistent with the Standard Model, the answer to that question is “no”…

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Cosmology Examination Results

Posted in Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on July 14, 2020 by telescoper

The examination season in Maynooth being now over, and the results having been issued, I thought I’d pass on the results not for individual students but for the Universe as a whole.

As you can see Dark Energy is top of the class, with a good II.1 (Upper Second Class). A few years ago this candidate looked likely to get a mark over 70% and thus get First Class Honours, but in the end fell just short. Given the steady performance and possible improvement in future I think this candidate will probably be one to reckon with in a future research career.

In second place, a long way behind on about 27%, is Dark Matter. This candidate only answered some of the questions asked, and those not very convincingly. Although reasonably strong on theory, the candidate didn’t show up at all in the laboratory. The result is a fail but there is an opportunity for a repeat at a future date, though there is some doubt as to whether the candidate would appear.

At the bottom of the class on a meagre 5% we find Ordinary Matter. It seems this candidate must have left the examination early and did not even give the correct name (baryons) on the script. Technically this one could repeat but even doing so is unlikely even to get an Ordinary Degree. I would suggest that baryons aren’t really cut out for cosmology and should make alternative plans for the future.

 

P.S. Photons and neutrinos ceased interacting with the course some time ago. Owing to this lack of engagement they are assumed to have dropped out, and their marks are not shown.

 

 

 

 

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A New Baryon on the Block

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on April 29, 2012 by telescoper

I just chanced upon the news that a new particle has been discovered at the Large Hadron Collider. This is probably old hat for people who work at CERN, but for those of us following along in their wake it definitely belongs to the category of things marked Quite Interesting.

The new particle is a baryon, which means that it consists of three quarks. These quarks are held together by the colour force (which I refuse to spell the American way); baryonic states exist by virtue of the colours of constituent quarks being a red-green-blue mixture that is colourless.

Quarks are fermions with spin 1/2. The new particle has spin 3/2 which contrasts with the most familiar baryons, the proton and the neutron, which also consist of three quarks but which have spin 1/2. The difference can be understood from basic quantum mechanics: spins have to be added like vectors, so the three individual quark spins can be added to produce total spin 3/2 or 1/2.

The most familiar spin 3/2 baryons are made from the lightest quarks (the up, down and strange) as shown in the diagram below:

The top row contains no strange quarks, only up and down. In fact the Δ0 and Δ+ contain exactly the same quark compositions as the proton and the neutron (udd and uud respectively), but differ in spin. The next row down contains one strange quark (e.g. uds) , the one below two (e.g uss), and the particle at the bottom is a very famous one called the Ω– which is entirely strange (sss). For reasons I’ve never really understood, a strange quark carries a strangeness quantum number S=-1 (why not +1?) and the electrical charge is labelled by q in the diagram.

There are six quark flavours altogether so one can construct further baryonic states by substituting various combinations of heavier quarks (c,b and t) in the basic configurations shown above. There are also excited states with greater orbital energy; all the particles shown above have quarks in the lowest state of orbital angular momentum (L=O). There is then a potential plethora of baryonic particles,  but because all are unstable you need higher and higher energies to bring them into existence. Bring on the LHC.

The new particle is called the Ξb*, and it consists of a combination of up, strange and bottom quarks that required collision energies of 7 TeV to make it. The nomenclature reflects the fact that this chap looks a bit like the particles in the third row of the figure, but with one strange quark replaced by a much more massive bottom quark; this one has zero electrical charge because the charges on the u, s and b are +2/3, -1/3 and -1/3 respectively.

Anyway, here’s the graph that represents the detection of the new baryon on the block:

Only 21 events, mind you, but still pretty convincing. For technical details, see the arXiv preprint here.

Whether you really think of this as a new particle depends on how fundamental you think a particle should be. All six quark species have been experimentally detected and in a sense those are the real particles. Things like the Ξb* are merely combinations of these states. You probably wouldn’t say that an excited state of the hydrogen atom (say with the electron in the 2s energy level) is actually a different particle from the ground state so why do different permutations of the same quarks warrant distinct names?

The answer to this I guess is the fact that the mass of an excited hydrogen atom differs from the ground state by only a tiny amount; electronic energy levels correspond to electron-volt scales compared to the 1000 MeV or so that is the rest-mass energy of the nucleus. It’s all very different when you’re talking about energy levels of quarks in baryonic particles. In such situations the binding energies of the quarks are comparable to, or even larger than, their rest masses because the colour force is very strong and the quarks are whirling around inside baryons  with correspondingly enormous energies. When two creatures have enormously different masses, it’s difficult to force yourself to think of them as different manifestations of the same beast!

Anyway, the naming of this particle isn’t really the important thing. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. What matters is that existence of this new quark state provides another example of a test of our understanding of quark-quark interactions based on the theory of quantum chromodynamics. You might say that it passed with flying colours…

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