Re: Sodaplay: Tacoma Narrows resonator

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@SFU.CA>]

> And will someone who IS familiar with the Particle Physics use of the
> term 'resonance' please comment on this 'distinction'.

Since I taught particle physics once, perhaps I can comment. I always
thought those things were called "resonances" because the occurred at
specific energies (or frequencies) of the instrument in question. For
example, the psi/J resonance was found at Stanford by carefully tuning
the center of mass energy of the electron positron collision through
a progression of energies. Of course this tuning was greatly assisted
by the leaked information from Sam Ting's group at BNL which had found
it in a much dirtier experiment. Why is that fundamentally different
from what the rest of us call a resonance? There's a curve, cross-
section vs. center of mass energy, a small bump* in the curve at the
energy at which charmonium** happens, not unlike the bump one sees in
tuning a VFO through a resonance of an RLC circuit.

Professor Uretsky should now jump in and assist us by correcting all
my errors. It has been a long time since I taught that course. In fact
Richter's group found the resonance while I was teaching it! I hate to
leave errors hanging when someone can step in and fix them. Jack?

Leigh

*Particle physicists routinely trotted out much smaller bumps as
resonances in PRL (if they could get them past the referees). At one
time these guys were known derisively as "bump hunters".

**It wasn't enough that Richter and Ting had different pet names (Psi
and J) for this particular bump. It was later dubbed "charmonium" and
decomposed into a charm-anticharm quark combination.