IF EVER a nickname was appropriate it is this one. In a race to announce the discovery of the particle dubbed the “triple scoop”, a team at Fermilab have controversially scooped some of their closest colleagues.
On 13 June, Fermilab’s DZero collaboration announced that they had found the “cascade b baryon” – containing an up, strange and bottom quark – at the Tevatron accelerator in Batavia, Illinois. Quarks fall into three families according to their mass, and cascade b is the first particle found to contain a quark from each family, hence the nickname “triple scoop”.
Finding the particle was far from…
