The subatomic world has always been fascinating for the scientific community. Physicists study this subatomic world by bombarding the beam of subatomic particles on the subject. But obtaining the beams of every subatomic particle is not easy. These include beams of hyperons, their antiparticles and antineutrons. Even though it is possible to get these beams, it is a difficult process. Traditional setups need to produce many different kinds of beams for different dedicated experiments. This requires large resources in terms of manpower and funding, impeding such experiments.
There comes the importance of a recent research work carried out by Prof. Chang-Zheng Yuan from the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. Marek Karliner from the School of Physics and Astronomy of the Tel Aviv University of Israel. They pointed out a new high-quality source for the hyperons, their antiparticles and antineutrons. According to the researchers, the decay of mesons produced in an electron-positron annihilation experiment can be used for this purpose. Mesons are subatomic particles constituting a charm quark and a charm antiquark. The physicists confirm that antineutrons produced in decay and the particles and antiparticles of hyperons produced in similar decays at the tau-charm factory, like BESIII or super-tau-charm factory, like STCF can act as a source for carrying out a variety of experiments in nuclear and particle physics. The physicists have used Beijing Spectrometer III (BESIII) at Beijing Electron-Positron Collider II (BEPCII) in the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IHEP) for carrying out the study. In the research paper, they have compared the performance of the new source with the traditional sources.
The advantage of this source lies in the fact that there is a high production rate of mesons in electron-positron annihilation. Moreover, the momentum and direction of these rare particles – hyperons, their antiparticles and antineutrons can also be determined. The researchers also point out that high precision measurements can be made by using these sources and by making some modifications in the detectors. The antinucleon-nucleon interaction, OZI violation, (multi-strange) hypernuclei, exotic light hadron spectroscopy are some areas where this novel source can contribute to.
References:
Chang-Zheng Yuan, Marek Karliner. (2021, June 30). Cornucopia of Antineutrons and Hyperons from a Super J/ψ Factory. Physical Review Letters. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.012003
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