A plot of the invariant mass of muon pairs, from the Upsilon particle discovery paper. The peak at about 9.5 GeV is due to the contribution of the Upsilon meson.
|
|
Composition |
b b |
---|---|
Statistics | Bosonic |
Symbol | ϒ |
Antiparticle | Self |
Discovered | E288 experiment |
Mass | 30(26) GeV/c2 9.460 |
Electric charge | 0 e |
Spin | 1 |
The Upsilon meson (
ϒ
) is a quarkonium state (i.e. flavourless meson) formed from a bottom quark and its antiparticle. It was discovered by the E288 experiment team, headed by Leon Lederman, at Fermilab in 1977, and was the first particle containing a bottom quark to be discovered because it is the lightest that can be produced without additional massive particles. It has a lifetime of ×10−20 s and a mass about 1.21GeV/c2 in the ground state. 9.46