cardsforscience/html/Jpsi.html

<p class="lead">You discovered the J/ψ meson.</p>
<h5><b>The J/ψ meson</b></h5>
<img class="img-responsive" src="assets/info/jpsi.png" alt="A plot from one of the original publications" align="center">
<p>The J/ψ is a meson consisting of a charm quark and a charm antiquark. It is the first excited state of the charmonium (the bound state of a charm-anticharm state), that was discovered independently by two research groups in 1974: one at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, headed by Burton Richter, and one at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, headed by Samuel Ting of MIT. Richter and Ting were rewarded for their shared discovery with the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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<h5><b>History of the name</b></h5>
<p>
Because of the nearly simultaneous discovery, the J/ψ 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 "ψ" – a name which, as Gerson Goldhaber pointed out, contains the original name "SP", but in reverse order.<br>Since the scientific community considered it unjust to give one of the two discoverers priority, most subsequent publications have referred to the particle as the "J/ψ"
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<h5><b>Resources</b></h5>
<ul>
  <li><a href="http://prl.aps.org/pdf/PRL/v33/i23/p1404_1" target="_blank">The original presentation of J. J. Aubert et al.</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.33.1404" target="_blank">The original presentation of J.-E Augustin et al.</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J/psi_meson" target="_blank">J/psi meson on Wikipedia</a></li>
</ul>