Nuclear Physics: The Search for *

The Search for

In the alphabet-soup world of subatomic physics, only one letter was missing. The equations of quantum theory had indicated the existence of 17 pairs of basic "building blocks"—particles and antiparticles, balanced by opposite electrical charges, and physicists had long since spotted and labeled the 17 normal particles. Once they got their huge, high-energy accelerators working in the late 1950s, they matched 16 of these bits of matter with their antiparticle mates. All that remained was the elusive (anti-Xi-zero). In September 1961, a group of Yale University and Brookhaven...