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RE: Charmonia, bottomonia & toponia - the fantastic beasts of particle physics

in StemSocial3 years ago

In my publication, we have shown that if we focus on the right property of the top-antitop decay products and that if we consider a specific subset of recorded collisions in which a top-antitop pair is produced, then toponium effects could have an impact of about 10%.

Kudos to you and your team for the contribution made to the knowledge of particle physics. How is the toponium effect likely to affect our understanding of matter given the fact that with only a few elementary particle we can describe all the matter around us.

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 3 years ago (edited) 

We can see the toponium story in four steps.

  • Toponium effects are predicted by the Standard Model. They are there, no matter what.
  • Those effects are expected to be tiny from earlier computations. For that reason, they have been ignored so far.
  • We have discrepancies between data and theory for various measurements related to top quark physics.
  • Those discrepancies can potentially be explained by toponium effects that are globally tiny (when we sum all effects) but locally visible (in the sense of the measurement of a property after a selection of subset of all collisions featuring top-antitop production).

We can see that our understanding of how matter works is unchanged. It is more a matter that some effects were completely ignored so far, as assumed negligible. This is however not always the case.

Does it clarify?

We have discrepancies between data and theory for various measurements related to top quark physics.
Those discrepancies can potentially be explained by toponium effects....

Yes, your answer is clear and straightforward, but why did you choose the words potentially with respect to the toponium effects explaining the discrepancies between data and theory for various measurements related to top quark physics? Of course, I know that you wrote in your blog that it was not time to open the champagne bottle yet.

 3 years ago  

Toponium could explain what we have seen. This is what we have shown in our article.

To conclude about that fact, we need more precise theory predictions, as we only did back-of-the-envelope calculations. We are currently busy with those more precision computations, but they take time.

This is the reason why I used the word potentially (maybe there is something else hidden in data ;) ).

Thank you for the clarification sir.