Image of the week: bottomium suppression

By Colin Adcock on June 29, 2015

Bottomium is a kind of quarkonia, a particle made of a bottom quark and its own antiquark. It was the first particle containing a bottom quark to be discovered back in 1977.

These states which are also referred to as bottomonium, or upsilon mesons, are useful probes for researchers to study what happens in relativistic heavy ion collisions, like those at the large hadron collider. Felix Nendzig and Georg Wolschin studied this to further enhance our understanding of the processes involved.

Two dimensional profile for bottomium production. See figure 7 of the linked manuscript for details.

It turns out that most bottomium particles are generated at the centre of the heavy ion collisions, however a number of factors like the central temperature suppress this production. This causes the above dome shape to become squashed, or even ring shaped for various states and configurations. Check out the full multi image figure in the manuscript in JPhysG.

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