The J/Psi particle original papers
May 16, 2008 | 6:48 am
On November 10, 1974, SLAC’s Burton Richter and colleagues found evidence for a particle they called the Ψ (the Greek letter Psi). Meanwhile on the east coast of the United States, Samuel Ting and his colleagues found comparable evidence for a particle they called the J. Both were the same particle and papers from both groups were published in Physical Review Letters on 2 December, 1974, as the first evidence for what is now known as the J/Ψ. Richter and Ting were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976 for the discovery, a mere two years after the work was done.
As part of PRL’s 50-year anniversary, the American Physical Society has now made those papers freely accessible to everybody. You can read both the Richter and colleagues, and Ting and colleagues papers via this introductory page. Back in September 2005, we published a reproduction plot of Richter’s logbook with the original data for the Ψ particle in symmetry.
David Harris
Posted in Uncategorized |
May 16th, 2008 at 8:28 am
Hi David,
This whole celebration of PRL’s 50 years, http://prl.aps.org/50years , has been a great thing; and the public availability of the “Milestone Letters” is a fantastic decision.
But, more to the point of this publication, “Symmetry Breaking”, I think are the papers by Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble, Higgs and Brout-Englert about Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and the so-called “Higgs” boson, which are also all available from the website above.
This is made even a bit more acute in light of recent events — check the links (and comments therein) that follow:
http://apetrov.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/moriond08-day-1/ ,
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/urpas/news/Hagen_030708 ,
http://chep.het.brown.edu/stlouis-v4.pdf .
Now, as the LHC approaches, this controvery gets more and more heated!
Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble (GHK) did their work entirely independently and without knowledge of BEH. They understood the whole phenomena in the spring of 1964, but did not submit for publication until much later as they were trying to extend their results to non-relativistic problems. The publication of GHK was delayed because Guralnik was working hard with Robert Lange in order to try and solve this problem in Condensed Matter systems — a feat that Lange accomplished later, after discovering the
subtle limiting processes that allowed the solution to this question (in CM systems).
Guralnik explained GHK to many people in England and Europe before the submission of any of the papers.
After the publication, Guralnik gave a talk at Edinburgh (November 23, 1964), where he was invited by Kemmer and, while there, he had discussions with Higgs. Later, Higgs published a Phys.Rev. paper (whose content was largey based on those talks) where he acknowledges Guralnik.
Anyway, these were clearly very exciting times and PRL’s attitude is a very memorable one!
Cheers.
May 17th, 2008 at 9:08 am
I’m sitting in a hotel at LAX and it seems that all of the “milestone letters” at http://prl.aps.org/50years require a PROLA login. They don’t seem to be available for just anyone to read.
May 17th, 2008 at 10:26 am
@Chris: I checked and found the same thing now. They were freely accessible for a time but now seem not to be. I’ll check with the APS on this.
May 18th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
[...] The J/Ψ particle original papers [...]
May 18th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Our intention is to have the “milestone letters” free if you come at them from the PRL50 Web site. I just checked, and they seem to be working, but if you have problems, please send email to “help@aps.org”, and we will fix it.
Gene D. Sprouse, Editor in Chief, APS
May 18th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Thanks for pointing that out, Gene. I have corrected the post to point to the milestone page and hope that there will be a direct link to the J/Psi section at some point to make it easy for people to find when you have a longer list of milestones. We certainly appreciate you making these papers available to everybody.
May 19th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Thanks to the folks at APS for establishing permalinks so we can direct people straight to these papers. The post has been modified to include that link.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:22 am
[...] up the APS milestone about the 1974 papers that heralded the discovery of the J/Ψ, the paper chosen to represent 1975 was for work also done on the SPEAR storage ring at Stanford [...]
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:56 pm
The Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble deserves as much, if not more, credit as Higgs and Brout-Englert. Not sure why the international physics community just let that happen. But in the end only three can get the Nobel Prize and an experimentalist probably gets some credit also. Hagen, Kibble, and Guralnik probably have had better overall physics careers than Higgs, Brout, and Englert.