Actual progress of the LHC-physics-programm

[Kasuha]

I wonder why do they call it "beautiful atom", I always thought bound states of a quark and an antiquark are called mesons (ϒ meson in this case).

[josch222]

And I wonder why they call it "beauty".

It seems as if Flip Tanedo was not quite right on the US/LHC blog:

The quarks have cute names: the up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Historically the t and b quarks have also been called “truth” and “beauty,” but—for reasons I don’t quite understand—those names have fallen out of use, thus sparing what would have been an endless parade of puns in academic paper titles.

I will ask him, perhaps he has an explanation.

[photino]

I wonder why do they call it "beautiful atom"

I suppose it was meant as an analogy - an atom is also a bound state of something positively charged with something negatively charged. Maybe not a very helpful one, though actually the mathematics is closely related in the sense that there is the same "shell structure" of excited states.

I wonder if it's the researchers actually working on b-quark physics that still like to call them "beauty"?

[Leptone]

You go that way and I'll go this way:

http://cms.web.cern.ch/cms/News/2010/QCD-10-002/