J/psi meson

The
J/ψ
(J/psi) meson /ˈdʒeɪ ˈsaɪ ˈmiːzɒn/ or psion^[1] is a subatomic particle, a flavor-neutral meson consisting of a charm quark and a charm antiquark. Mesons formed by a bound state of a charm quark and a charm anti-quark are generally known as "charmonium". The
J/ψ
is the most common form of charmonium, due to its spin of 1 and its low rest mass. The
J/ψ
has a rest mass of 3.0969 GeV/c², just above that of the
η
_c (2.9836 GeV/c²), and a mean lifetime of 7.2×10⁻²¹ s. This lifetime was about a thousand times longer than expected.^[2]

Its discovery was made independently by two research groups, one at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, headed by Burton Richter, and one at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, headed by Samuel Ting of MIT. They discovered they had actually found the same particle, and both announced their discoveries on 11 November 1974. The importance of this discovery is highlighted by the fact that the subsequent, rapid changes in high-energy physics at the time have become collectively known as the "November Revolution". Richter and Ting were awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Background to discovery[]

The background to the discovery of the
J/ψ
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", which come in three types or "flavors", called up, down, and strange. 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.^[3]

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 predictions were ignored.^{[citation needed]} The work of Richter and Ting was done mostly to explore new energy regimes, not to test the theoretical predictions.^{[citation needed]}

The group at Brookhaven,^[a] were the first to discern a peak at 3.1 GeV in plots of production rates, first recognizing the