What is toponium?

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24:32All right. So we just talked about the experiments that Rutherford did to show that atoms have sort of structure, like there's a nucleus. So now let's talk about how we figured out the structure of the proton. Yeah, exactly. We basically copied Rutherford's strategy, and we've been doing that for decades, which is shoot stuff at it and see what happens. And by the angles at which stuff comes out, you can tell the structure of something. So that works for gold. You can shoot particles of gold and see the nucleus. How do you probe the proton? Well, one thing you can do is smash protons together.

25:03That's really messy because protons are big bags of goo. So to make it a little bit cleaner, what people did is they shot electrons at protons. Because electrons don't feel the strong nuclear force. They only feel electromagnetism and the weak force. And we think they're fundamental. So they don't break up into other stuff. they're cleaner. So it's really like poking your finger at a proton the best way that we can. And so these were experiments done at Stanford in the late 1960s. They're called deep inelastic scattering, if you want to learn more about them. Deep because they're very high energy and they're probing the structure of the proton.

25:37Inelastic because what happens is not that the electron and the proton bounce off each other, but that the electron shatters the proton and interacts with the stuff inside of it. In physics, we distinguish between elastic collisions where things just bounce off and inelastic where we've like changed the structure or broken something or things stick together. Those are inelastic. I feel like it should have been explosive and not explosive, but that's because you're thinking about diarrhea, right? That's a good way to categorize diarrhea. Not I am a biologist. I think we have eight different ways of characterizing feces or something like that.

26:09There's the Bristol scale. I've read it. Yes, absolutely. Oh yeah. You, you married a poop person. Wow. I'm going to take that in the positive way it was intended. Good, good. I adore Katrina. All right. We had a biologist over for dinner the other night and she just moved down here from Stanford and she had to bring all of her poop samples. So she had to drive them down from Stanford to Southern California, 150 pounds of poop in dry ice. That's a lot of poop. And they had to keep the windows down because the dry ice of sublimates into CO2, which will kill you if you keep the car closed into a literally crappy flaming disaster.

26:45I once took a box of infected fish brains across the Atlantic and had to declare it. And anyway, that was an adventure. Biologists go on so many adventures. Okay, so inelastic, it breaks it apart. And so this is late 1960s, and we probed the structure of the proton with electrons, and we saw three hard centers. The way Rutherford saw like one hard center for every atom, we saw three hard centers. Like we can tell by the angle at which the electron comes back out, whether it's really bounced off something hard or mostly flown through. And we can tell by the rate at which that happens that there are three hard centers.

27:23So Google deep and elastic scanning if you want to learn more about that. But that was proof to us that protons do have structure inside, that there really are physical things inside the proton. It's not fundamental. And at this point where all of the physicists like, all right, awesome. I'm totally convinced. No, unfortunately. No. People were still reluctant. They were like, yeah, I mean, I guess so. But like, are they real? Physicists are conservative folks in the sense that it's hard for them to like accept a new idea. They need a lot of data. And so at this point, we actually only had three ideas in mind for quarks.

27:54The up quark and the down quark that make up the proton. And then the strange quark, which make up these new weird particles like the omegas and the chaons. So we had three particles. And theorists were like, three is weird because the up quark and the down quark make a very nice pair together. but then having the strange quark by itself, that's strange. And it makes all sorts of bizarre calculations and the physics doesn't actually work. There's nothing there to like balance the strange quark. You predict all sorts of weird behavior. So they said, well, you know, for things to make more sense, there should be a fourth one.

28:25There should be a partner. This is another great example of like physicists following their mathematical intuition. They're like, the universe should make sense. It should be orderly. This whole puzzle would look more sensible. It would make more sense to me sort of mathematically and aesthetically if it were complete. So the physicist said, we think that there's a fourth quark out there and they called it the charm quark. So this is a purely theoretical prediction to solve some theoretical problems, right? We have three quarks up, down, strange, and they predicted the existence of this charm quark just to solve these theoretical problems.

28:58Is there an interesting story behind why they decided to name it charm? I'm still upset about that particle zoo thing. The reason they named it Charm is that they liked it, and it brought some new symmetry to the subnuclear world. You know, there was this imbalance, and it sort of was there like balance, the strange quirk. And so, you know, some people call it the Charm Quirk. Some people call it the Charmed Quirk. But yeah, sort of like a lucky charm to make the universe make sense. Like it would be charming if the universe made sense? It would be charming, wasn't it? I find the universe pretty charming.

29:31Yeah, sure. It's both strange and charming at the same time. All right, we agree. So then the race is on to look for this new particle. Does the charm quark exist? And the theorists predicted that if it does exist, you can't see it individually. You can never see quarks by themselves. But it would click together with itself in this way so that a charm quark and an anti-charm quark would come together to make a new particle, a particle we could call charmonium. Oh, it sounds like Charmander. I feel like now we're in the world of Pokemon. But all right, charmonium. Yeah. So if you take a quark and you bind it with its antiparticle, you call that onium.

30:09So charmonium would be a charm quark and an anti-charm quark. And so this is one of the most dramatic and colorful stories in the history of particle physics. There were folks at MIT trying to discover this thing. At the same time, people at Stanford trying to discover this, looking for charmonium. And they had very, very different devices. So Burt Richter at Stanford had a whole accelerator, and he could collide electrons and positrons together. When that happens, it annihilates and can turn into some new particle, which can then decay. And this is a very effective way to discover new particles if you know already how much mass that new particle has, because then you can tune your beams, your electron and positron beams, to have just the right energy, so you're making a bunch of these new particles, and then you can see them decay.

30:54So Burt Richter could discover this thing in like a day if he knew what the mass was. So they scanned the mass from low values to high values, and they didn't see anything. So they were like, hmm, that's weird. The same time across the country, Sam Ting was doing a very, very different experiment. He was shooting protons on a target, hoping that charm quarks would come out and would make charmonium and then would decay in a way that he could see it. It was a much lower rate experiment, but it was more broadly sensitive. Like he didn't have to know in advance, what is the mass of this thing. If it was there, it would be made.

31:26But the data was sort of peter out very gradually. And so he was desperate to win this race. He knew he had a very effective technique, but it was going to take a long time. And while Burt Richter was very fast, but he needed to know where to look. And so Sam Ting really wanted to win this race and win the Nobel Prize. So he needed as much beam time as possible. And so there's a story about how he made sure he got enough beam time. And it's not a story that I know to be true, but it's a story that exists in particle physics, popular culture. And I think we should find somebody to fact check this, but the version of the story I heard from a particle physicist when I was an undergrad was that the person Sam Ting was sharing beam time with kept having electronics difficulties.

32:09Like they would come in, they were supposed to be have time in the beam, stuff wouldn't work up, it's down. Oh, Sam, you can use the beam. How nice. And apparently they installed a video camera and they discovered that someone was urinating on the competing experiment at night so that the electronics wouldn't work. And then Ting and his experiment got more time. Wait, okay, hold on. All right. So why? Why? All right. You've explained why. This is crazy. Nobel Prize. That's why. Okay, right. I guess if you needed any reason, Nobel Prize is the reason. But why pee on it? Why not just like pour a little bit of your water on it or something like, because pee has a smell.

32:49You're more likely to like get someone to realize something wonky is going on. Like why not just pour a little of your coffee or your wine on it? This is weird. It is weird. And that's the detail that makes me suspect maybe this is an urban legend, you know, because that's the detail that makes the story juicy. It's like a little bit gross and animalistic and whatever. And I've spoken to other particle physicists about this and some of them suggest that this story might be made up. And it might reflect like anti-Asian racism in particle physics. Because, you know, particle physics for a long time was Western, Europeans and Americans and Chinese physicists have contributed great things, made a lot of discoveries, but they haven't always been as accepted.

33:29And so it could be that this is just a product of that. And so, you know, I tell you this story because it's out there, not because I know that it's true. But that's not the end of the drama. There's reported bad behavior on both sides of the aisle. Oh, all right. So what did the Richter lab do that was piss poor? So Sam Ting starts to see evidence of this particle, but it's still data is collecting very slowly. You know, it's like you're waiting for the water to drain and you're seeing the land features that emerge and the water is just raining very, very gradually. And the longer you wait, the more precise your results are.

34:04But obviously you also open the door to your competition. And so Sam Ting eventually decides, OK, we have enough data we're going to publish. and he sets a press conference for like, you know, a few days later. And then Burt Richter knows somehow exactly where to look, tunes his collider to exactly the mass of the particle Sam Ting is about to announce, runs data for one day, gets enough data to discover this particle, writes the paper the same day and has a dueling press conference the same day as Sam Ting. So you have MIT announcing, we discovered this new particle. We call it the J particle.

34:41particle and Stanford same day discovering the same particle and they call it the psi particle. Oh my gosh. So many questions. Okay. So is the idea here that the Richter lab got some like whiff of the data coming out from the Ting lab and that's how they figured out the mass to look for? How would that data have slipped out? I guess there's lots of ways. Yeah. A phone call from somebody in the Ting lab, you know, somebody disgruntled or like an ex-partner of somebody in that lab? I don't know. But, you know. Loose lips sink particle ships. Loose lips share Nobel prizes. Exactly. So they did get to share the prize?

35:15Did they both get it? They shared the prize and the particle shares those two names. So even to this day, we haven't decided like who gets primacy. So we call it the J slash Psi particle. Oh, it should have been like Rick Ting or Tingter. Yes. Why did Ting name it J and Richter name it Psi? Because the character in Chinese for Sam Ting's name looks a little bit like a J. Oh, cool. And if you look in the detector, when you create one of these particles at Stanford, it looks a little bit like the Greek letter psi. All right, fine. Good names. Descriptive. So that means we have created charmonium.

35:49We have created charmonium, exactly. And this was all announced on November 11th, 1974. And this is what particle physicists call the November revolution, because at that moment, everybody who had any residual doubts about whether quarks are real finally gave it up. And they're like, okay, this is it. We're in a new era where quarks are real because we predicted the existence of this quark and what it would do. And then people went out and found this thing. It was all very, very compelling. The quarks are real. They are the underlying fabric of all this stuff because we had predicted and discovered charmonium, a kind of quarkonium.

36:25Do you all realize you were like 50 to 60 years behind the first November revolution when the Weimar Republic came into existence? Yes. Thank you very much. We have our own parallel stories. Okay. All right. All right. Not quite as dramatic, but like Greg Landsberg, he's a physicist I know at Brown. His father was a particle physicist also. And Greg remembers being a kid in the early seventies and his father getting a phone call and his mom saying like, it's a phone call about something called Charmonium. And his father leaps naked and wet out of the shower to go get this phone call because this is a big day.

37:00And that made an impression on Greg. I actually read this story in Greg's thesis in the acknowledgement section, which is super fun. I don't know if people realize, but every famous scientist out there wrote a PhD and their PhD has an acknowledgement section, which is very personal and written when they were young and really fun to read. So you should like go read like Paul Dirac's acknowledgement section, you know, it's all out there. And it's always amazing to hear that anyone ever reads any theses ever. Because in our field, it's like, oh yeah, just put it in the thesis. It doesn't matter. No one reads those anyway.

37:34Yeah, that's true. So I tell you this whole story to give you a flavor of like how we learned what the universe is made out of. But also in the context of toponium, right, this is the beginning of quarkonia. This is like we can't see quarks directly because they're never by themselves. but we can see what quarks do together. And quarkonia is when you take a quark and you combine it with the anti-quark and you make a special particle out of that. And so that's charmonium is really the beginning of this quarkonia era. So does charmonium evolve into toponium? Because I want to lean into this Pokemon thing.

38:07Is that what it evolves into? No. No, charmonium is very unstable. It decays very quickly, often into like an electron positron pair. So it would be a mistake if you were like, Charmonium, I choose you. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Exactly. But there are other quarks out there. So at this point, we have up, down, charm, and strange. And people are like, oh, that's nice. That's cute. I was about to say, oh, you physicists are cute. But we just finished a story about possibly y 'all peeing on each other's experiments. So that's less cute. But people were wondering, hmm, is there another set of these particles?

38:42Right. is there an additional pair? Because we had up, down, charm, strange. And on the lepton side of the world, we had the electron, we had the muon. Those guys had a third column. We had the tau particle. So people were like, well, if there's three kinds of leptons, are there also three kinds of quarks? So they predicted the existence of this pair. And one of them was called the bottom particle. And so then the hunt was on in the 70s for what we call bottomonium, right? a bottom-anti-bottom pair come together to make a particle we now call the oopsalon. And so this was discovered at Fermilab in 1977.

39:19And people were like, oh, wow, so bottoms are real. As a mom, I can tell you I always knew bottoms were real. But in the outline... Another poop joke. Wow, I'm impressed. Yeah, yep, yep. Well, I mean, that's a hiney joke. But anyway, so the outline says botomium. And you said botonium. You added some syllables. What is it? How is the longest we could make it? Botomonium? I think it should be botomonium, right? Because the particle is a bottom particle. And then you add onium. So botomonium. Botomium? Botomium. Botomonium. Got it. Botomonium. That's pretty cute. And then there's a whole spectrum of particles that include the B quark.

40:01They're called B mesons, where you can combine Bs with ups or Bs with downs or Bs with strange, all sorts of particles you can make if you have the B particle. And now we've seen all those particles and we study the wazoo out of them. There's a whole experiment at CERN called LHC-B, which exists just to study the bottom quark and all the weird stuff it does with other particles. All right. So let's take a break. And when we get back, let's focus on top quarks and answer our question, what the heck is toponium?

40:36We'll be right back.

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43:51All right, we're back, and it's the moment you've all been waiting for. Daniel is going to lead up to his explanation of what is toponium. Right. And so far we've been setting the context, right? We've been explaining what quarkonium is, what charmonium was, what bottomonium is. So now we can say what toponium would be if it exists. Toponium, if it exists, should be a bound state of top quarks and anti-top quarks because charm and anti-charm make a particle, bottom and anti-bottom make a particle, up and anti-up make a particle. why can't you make a particle with top and anti-top? And that would be toponium based on the naming scheme, yeah?

44:28That would be toponium. But the top quark is different from all the other particles. It wasn't discovered until the mid-90s, 95, because it's super duper massive. Like the quarks are all very, very light, except for the bottom quark, which has five times the mass of the proton, which is like, that's very heavy for a quark. But the top quark is much more massive than the bottom. It has 175 proton masses. So like an individual top quark has more mass than like the nucleus of a gold atom. And this is why it took us 20 years to find the top quark after the bottom quark was discovered. Wait, if the top quark is so much bigger, why was it so hard to find?

45:05Because it takes much more energy to make it. Like the bottom quark, you can make it a pretty low energy collider. You only need like protons accelerated a little bit. But to make the top quark, you've got to really zoom those protons together to have enough energy to make two top quarks. Because you can never just make one. You've got to make a top and an anti-top. So it's a huge amount of energy. There's a whole set of colliders built under the assumption that the top quark was going to be like maybe a little heavier than the bottom. And then they didn't find anything. So it wasn't until the Fermilab Tevatron in the late 90s that we made top quarks and saw them.

45:38And that's actually what my PhD thesis was about. seeing the top quark and measuring its properties back when we'd only ever made a few of them. Oh, wait, wait. Were you the first one to describe the top quark? Or like after it was seen? I was not the first one. No, but I remember the day I was an undergrad when my particle physics professor came and said, hey, today's a big day. We're announcing the discovery of the top quark because it took 20 years to find this thing. It was really exciting when people found it. I mean, we knew it had to be there to complete the symmetry, but it took a long time.

46:07So it was really exciting. But the top quark's mass doesn't just mean it takes a lot of energy to make. It also means that it's really, really, really unstable. Like the top quark decays really, really quickly. Like when you create it, it only lasts for like 10 to the minus 23 seconds. Like it basically almost instantly decays into a bottom quark and a W and other stuff. So it only briefly exists. That is pretty incredible. That's something that exists for such a short amount of time we're able to measure and capture at all. Yeah. And so we've never seen a top cork directly. We've only seen what it turns into and indirect evidence for its existence, right?

46:43It's like we've seen the hair and the footprints of Bigfoot. We never actually captured one and like hung out with it. Bad example, Daniel. Bigfoot doesn't exist. Do top corks exist? You hope so. Well, we've seen its hair and footprints, so we think that it exists. We're pretty confident. And so other quarks last much longer. Like a bottom quark will last much longer, long enough to hang out, find an anti-bottom quark, and form a new particle, bottomonium. Top quarks don't do that. Top quarks decay almost instantly, so there's really almost no time for it to form toponium, right? Even if you have a top quark and anti-top quark and they're near each other, it takes time for things to find each other, settle down into a bound state.

47:24It's like if you have a proton and an electron, it takes them a while to figure out that they're a match and to settle into hydrogen. In our universe, it took hundreds of thousands of years for things to cool down and settle into neutral hydrogen. For a long time, the lore was toponium is impossible because top quarks don't last long enough. They explode into other particles before they form toponium. So we were stuck at bottomonium. That was the concept people had until about last year. Whoa. Okay, wait. So you told us that you can't see top quarks happen too fast. You can't see, what are they called?

47:59Negative top quarks? Anti-top quarks. Anti, thank you. Anti-top quarks. Have we actually seen toponium? Or is this another hair and footprints situation? So have we actually seen toponium? We've seen a sort of maybe version of it. We haven't seen top quarks and anti-top quarks settle down into a new stable particle that compares to the japsi or the upsilon, these other bound states of quarks. But people had this idea last year that maybe top quarks don't have time to settle into some new state, but maybe they can talk to each other. Maybe they exchange some gluons and influence each other. Maybe there's some like cross talk between the top and the anti-top after they're made and before they decay.

48:45So maybe they don't have time to fully settle into like a cozy homey existence together, but they at least, you know, exchange a few DMs. That was the idea. And so we looked for evidence of this at the Large Hadron Collider. What we did is we said, well, what would top quarks look like if they didn't exchange any information? And then what would they look like if they did exchange some information? And it turns out if they talk to each other even a little bit, then it makes their spins point in different directions. All these particles have fundamental spin. Spin is not something we understand deeply.

49:13It's just like an arrow we put on these particles to represent some kind of angular momentum they carry. But if they talk to each other, then their spins can change a little bit. And spin is something we can measure of a top quark. We don't see the top directly, but we see what it decays into. And so from that, we can deduce what the spin was from like the angles of the stuff that flies out of the top quark. So you measure the spin of one top quark and you measure the spin of the anti-top quark. And then you ask, are those spins more likely to come from top quarks that did talk to each other or top quarks that didn't talk to each other?

49:45I'm just going to note, I didn't like stuff my anger down far enough because I'm still keeping track of every time you're like, well, we don't really understand what this means. And we haven't actually seen this other thing, but go ahead, keep pooping on biologists. But anyway, I'm glad you guys maybe saw this. Who knows, but you don't understand it. So we looked at all the data. We studied a huge number of top quarks. And it looks like they do talk to each other. There's evidence there that the top quarks do interact and it changes the direction of their spin as they decay. And so people called this toponium and sort of toponium with an asterisk, because again, it's not like a stable particle in the same way that other quarkonia are, but it is an interaction.

50:26And so they gave it a name, eta sub T, like a top quark kind of inspired particle. And it made a big splash. And because, you know, people were excited about the work they did, they fluffed it up in the popular literature. And so in a lot of popular science articles, you see it as like, as if we have discovered this new stable form of matter or this new way for top quarks to come together to make a particle, that didn't happen. What we did see is top quarks for the first time interacting with each other before they were decaying, which is still a big deal. Yeah. So if I'm trying to put this big deal in context, so we have a better understanding of how our universe works now.

51:01But if we needed such a fancy collider to make it happen, how often is this happening? Let's first talk about our planet and then maybe like elsewhere in the solar system. Where would you expect to see it happening? Yeah, great question. You know, top quarks are probably created naturally all the time in cosmic rays. We talked about how we built particle accelerators because we didn't want to have to rely on cosmic rays. But it's not because cosmic rays don't have enough energy. Cosmic rays are hugely, massively energetic. They're much more energetic than our particle colliders. They're just harder to control, and the really high energy particles are rarer.

51:35So colliders are good at controlled experiments, but if you want to go really high energy, cosmic rays are the way to go. So all the time, top quarks are made in the atmosphere when protons smash into other particles way, way, way above the clouds. But you know, they last for 10 to the minus 23 seconds, and probably they're creating pairs, and they talk to each other a little bit before they decay. Does this make any difference in the world? If we lived in a universe where top quarks didn't talk to each other before they decayed, would ice cream taste worse? Would biologists be less awesome? No.

52:06Biologists would still be awesome and ice cream would still be delicious. I think it's a very, very subtle effect. Thank you, Daniel. That's good. I've forgiven you. The anger has gone away. All right. That was my goal, yes. But it satisfies our curiosity. We want to understand all the details of how these fields come together. How do they interact? Are there any surprises? because we expected to see this. And if we hadn't, we would have been surprised. We would have said, hmm, something's going on that we don't understand and dug into it more. Maybe that would have been evidence that there's some other field preventing tops from talking to each other or some other particle out there that's doing something.

52:40Anytime you see something unexpected, it's a sign that there's something new to learn about the universe, a thread to unravel. So this is just another example of scientists like being clever and trying to find ways to ask the universe a question we can't ask directly. We can't see quarks directly. So we have to be indirect and understand how they click together to make particles. We can't see top quarks directly. So we had to see how they decay and infer their existence. And so now we're trying to figure out like how top quarks talk to each other by looking at the patterns of those decays. It's all very subtle stuff.

53:13But to me, it's a testament of like the cleverness of experimentalists. You know, you have a question, you want an answer to it. You got to figure out a way to force the universe to share that data with you. And that's the joy of science is outsmarting the universe, forcing it to answer your questions. There's such a beauty in cleverly designed experiments. And are you still working on toponium? So I don't personally work on toponium, but there's still people definitely studying this and digging deeper into it. And so you expect to hear more about it in the coming years. But I think I want to underscore the point that you just made, that there really is beauty and creativity in experiments.

53:47I think people often feel like theoretical physics is where the thinking is and experimental physics is like where the engineering is like, yeah, build the thing, get it to work. But also there's creativity in experimental physics, right? You need to be creative, figure out like, hey, how do we see this thing? How do we force the universe to reveal this? How do we trick it? How do we corner it so that we learn the answer to our question? A lot of the great discoveries in experimental science come from somebody being really clever about finding a new way to answer a question people have long had.

54:18I love hearing stories about how science is done and the culture of science and seeing how human nature layers upon it. You know, we heard a story about one person maybe stealing someone else's data or a piece of their data to make their discovery. Someone else may be peeing on someone's experiment. And here it sounds like there is even within the field of physics a hierarchy for who's the smartest, who's the most clever, whose field is doing the best stuff. And I think it would be very nice if we could remove some of that. But in the meantime, it is a it's a human endeavor and we do do beautiful things.

54:52It is. Absolutely. Yeah. And there's jealousy and there's backstabbing and there's people spreading terrible stories about the other folks, you know, these anti Stanford stories and anti MIT stories and all of that stuff. And, you know, you can't remove that from science because science is by the people of the people. It's for the people. Right. If we made it sterile and it was all done by AIs, it'd be a lot less fun. Yep. It is a human endeavor with all of our foibles sort of layered in. All right. Well, thanks for taking this journey with us on the human discovery of quarks and the latest research on how top quarks talk to each other just before they perish.

55:27And thanks, Kelly, for pushing down your anger by shade at biologists. My anger has left me because you said something nice about biologists. And at the end of the day, we're both friends and it's OK. All right. Thanks, everybody. This podcast serves to educate and it's a cheap form of therapy. The cheapest form there is. Thanks, everyone.

56:15We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D &K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. Aging is real. And so are the benefits of adding vital proteins, collagen, peptides to your daily routine. Because around the age of 30, your body needs backup to keep your collagen up to help support healthy hair, skin, nails, bones, and joints. Available in the classic collagen peptides, collagen and protein shakes, and new Vital Proteins Collagen Sparkling Waters.

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