The "omega-minus" - the last piece in a puzzle

11 February 1998

Display the high resolution version

On 11 February 1964, a team from the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York, sent an historic paper to the journal Physical Review Letters*, announcing the discovery of the particle dubbed the "omega-minus". It was the last piece in a subatomic puzzle put together independently by theorists Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman. Their puzzle related different particles through their properties of electric charge and "strangeness", but one particle, with negative charge and three units of strangeness was missing. This was the particle Gell-Mann called the omega-minus, and this week's image shows that historic first observation, recorded in Brookhaven's 80-inch hydrogen bubble chamber. The trail of the omega-minus, about 2-cm long, can be seen as the short track just below the track that abruptly heads off to the right, in the lower half of the image (see here for a detailed diagram). This discovery confirmed the importance of the relationships between many particles, which was soon to be understood in terms of their underlying structure in the form of quarks.

(* See Physical Review Letters 12 204 (1964))

Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
Please contact person or institution named for information about permission for public or commercial use.