J/psi meson

The background to the discovery of the 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", originally with three types or "flavors", called up, down, and strange. (Later the model was expanded to six quarks, adding the charm, top and bottom quarks.) 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. To a first approximation, they indeed were a match for the previously described quarks. On the theoretical front, gauge theories with broken symmetry became the first fully viable contenders for explaining the weak interaction after Gerardus 't Hooft discovered in 1971 how to calculate with them beyond tree level. The first experimental evidence for these electroweak unification theories was the discovery of the weak neutral current in 1973. Gauge theories with quarks became a viable contender for the strong interaction in 1973, when the concept of asymptotic freedom was identified. However, a naive mixture of electroweak theory and the quark model led to calculations about known decay modes that contradicted observation: In particular, it predicted Z boson-mediated flavor-changing decays of a strange quark into a down quark, which were not observed. A 1970 idea of Sheldon Glashow, John Iliopoulos, and Luciano Maiani, known as the GIM mechanism, showed that the flavor-changing decays would be strongly suppressed if there were a fourth quark (now called the charm quark) that was a complementary counterpart to the strange quark. By summer 1974 this work had led to theoretical predictions of what a charm + anticharm meson would be like. The group at Brookhaven, were the first to discern a peak at 3.1 GeV in plots of production rates. Ting named it the "J meson". == Decay modes ==

Hadronic decay modes of are strongly suppressed because of the OZI rule. This effect strongly increases the lifetime of the particle and thereby gives it its very narrow decay width of just . Because of this strong suppression, electromagnetic decays begin to compete with hadronic decays. This is why the has a significant branching fraction to leptons. The primary decay modes are: == melting ==

In a hot QCD medium, when the temperature is raised well beyond the Hagedorn temperature, the and its excitations are expected to melt. This is one of the predicted signals of the formation of the quark–gluon plasma. Heavy-ion experiments at CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron and at BNL's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have studied this phenomenon without a conclusive outcome as of 2009. This is due to the requirement that the disappearance of mesons is evaluated with respect to the baseline provided by the total production of all charm quark-containing subatomic particles, and because it is widely expected that some are produced and/or destroyed at time of QGP hadronization. Thus, there is uncertainty in the prevailing conditions at the initial collisions. In fact, instead of suppression, enhanced production of is expected in heavy ion experiments at LHC where the quark-combinant production mechanism should be dominant given the large abundance of charm quarks in the QGP. Aside of , charmed B mesons (), offer a signature that indicates that quarks move freely and bind at-will when combining to form hadrons. == Name ==

Because of the nearly simultaneous discovery, the is the only particle to have a two-letter name. Richter named it "SP", after the SPEAR accelerator used at SLAC; however, none of his coworkers liked that name. After consulting with Greek-born Leo Resvanis to see which Greek letters were still available, and rejecting "iota" because its name implies insignificance, Richter chose "psi"a name which, as Gerson Goldhaber pointed out, contains the original name "SP", but in reverse order. Coincidentally, later spark chamber pictures often resembled the psi shape. Ting assigned the name "J" to it, saying that the more stable particles, such as the W and Z bosons had Roman names, as opposed to classical particles, which had Greek names. He also cited the symbol for electromagnetic current j_{\mu}(x) which much of their previous work was concentrated on to be one of the reasons. The "J" is not used, since Richter's group alone first found excited states. The name charmonium is used for the and other charm–anticharm bound states. This is by analogy with positronium, which also consists of a particle and its antiparticle (an electron and positron in the case of positronium). == See also ==