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Heads up! New physics results to be announced



Hi all-
Experimentalists working at the HERA accelerator (DESY at Hamburg)
are expected to publicly announce new results next Wednesday. Rumours have
been floating that at least one collaboration will announce that they have
found evidence for a new kind of particle - a "leptoquark" - in high energy
electron-proton collisions. HERA collides 30 GeV electrons (or positrons)
with 800 GeV protons. Two of the collaborations working at HERA, each with
its own detector, are ZEUS and H1. Members of the Zeus collaboration are
at here at ANL and have been putting pictures of their events on the web
(www.hep.anl.gov, and go from there).
I think of a leptoquark, naively, as a bound state of a lepton
and a quark. The quark carries color, so it must manifest itself as a
jet (no free quarks). The experimental signature for a leptoquark, I'm
guessing, would be a very energetic jet in close company (in momentum
space) with an energetic lepton.
Stay tuned.
Regards,
Jack