The Discovery of the Peloton
"Working in a variety of multi-national collaborations, DESY has made
significant contributions to our understanding of the fundamental particles
and their behavior. DESY scientists, for example, were the first to discover
gluons, the exchange particles that transmit what physicists have named the
strong force which binds quarks and their anti-quarks to form protons and
neutrons. Scientists have identified six flavors of quarks and named them
up,
down, strange, charm, bottom and the recently verified top quark. DESY was
first to determine indirectly the strength of the transition between the
bottom quark and the top quark and first to measure the bottom quark's
transformation into the up quark. DESY has carried out extensive
investigations into the physics of charm and of the tau lepton, an
electron-like particle."
An independent group in Mountain View, CA has announced the discovery
of a new subatomic particle, dubbed the peloton. This particle has
the unique property that it is never found alone. When generated in
boson-boson collisions, up to 120 pelotons are emitted. Although the
group direction is random, the particles in the group travel coherently,
with a group velocity which increases with the number of particles.
The peloton comes in flavors similar to those of quarks, although
strange pelotons are much more common than those with charm. The
peloton also has spin, like the electron, but with a third state, known
as "hammer".
The theoretical peloton work done was done at Moffett Field, CA, but
actual pelotons have been observed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator.
Oddly, the pelotons were found on the surrounding roads, rather than
inside the SLAC facility itself.
AP - June 2, 1995
Written (or at least found) by Steve Ryan, ryan@nas.nasa.gov