Organizing the Particle Zoo

Abstract

As we saw in Chapter 2 the major discovery of the early 1950s was the V particle, so called because of the shape of the track they left behind on photographic plates. Actually, if you viewed the track in the right way it was an inverted V. To the scientist of the day the explanation of the V was obvious: a neutral particle (which left no track on the plate) had decayed to two charged particles. Of course they then had to identify the two charged particles. And they soon did. Some of the V’s decayed to a proton and a negative pion (they are now called neutral lambda particles) while others decayed to positive and negative pions (they are now called neutral kaons).