1. Background to Discovery

The background to the discovery of the J/ψ was both theoretical and experimental. In the 1960s, the first quark models of elementary particle physics were proposed, which said that protons, neutrons and all other baryons, and also all mesons, are made from fractionally charged particles, the "quarks", which come in three types or "flavors", called up, down, and strange. Despite the capability of quark models to bring order to the "elementary particle zoo", their status was considered something like mathematical fiction at the time, a simple artifact of deeper physical reasons.^[1]

Starting in 1969, deep inelastic scattering experiments at SLAC revealed surprising experimental evidence for particles inside of protons. Whether these were quarks or something else was not known at first. Many experiments were needed to fully identify the properties of the subprotonic components. To a first approximation, they were indeed the already-described quarks.

On the theoretical front, gauge theories with broken symmetry became the first fully viable contenders for explaining the weak interaction after Gerardus 't Hooft discovered in 1971 how to calculate with them beyond tree level. The first experimental evidence for these electroweak unification theories was the discovery of the weak neutral current in 1973. Gauge theories with quarks became a viable contender for the strong interaction in 1973 when the concept of asymptotic freedom was identified.

However, a naive mixture of electroweak theory and the quark model led to calculations about known decay modes that contradicted observation: in particular, it predicted Z boson-mediated flavor-changing decays of a strange quark into a down quark, which were not observed. A 1970 idea of Sheldon Glashow, John Iliopoulos, and Luciano Maiani, known as the GIM mechanism, showed that the flavor-changing decays would be strongly suppressed if there were a fourth quark, charm, that paired with the strange quark. This work led, by the summer of 1974, to theoretical predictions of what a charm + anticharm meson would be like. These predictions were ignored. The work of Richter and Ting was done for other^{[clarification needed]} reasons, mostly to explore new energy regimes.{{citation needed|date=April 2016} erhart, Terry Rhoades, Min Chen, and Ulrich Becker were the first to discern a peak at 3.1 GeV in plots of production rates. This was the first recognition of the "J".

2. Decay Modes

Hadronic decay modes of J/ψ are strongly suppressed because of the OZI Rule. This effect strongly increases the lifetime of the particle and thereby gives it its very narrow decay width of just 93.2±2.1 keV. Because of this strong suppression, electromagnetic decays begin to compete with hadronic decays. This is why the J/ψ has a significant branching fraction to leptons.

The primary decay modes^[2] are:

3. J/ψ Melting

In a hot QCD medium, when the temperature is raised well beyond the Hagedorn temperature, the J/ψ and its excitations are expected to melt.^[3] This is one of the predicted signals of the formation of the quark–gluon plasma. Heavy-ion experiments at CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron and at BNL's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have studied this phenomenon without a conclusive outcome as of 2009. This is due to the requirement that the disappearance of J/ψ mesons is evaluated with respect to the baseline provided by the total production of all charm quark-containing subatomic particles, and because it is widely expected that some J/ψ are produced and/or destroyed at time of QGP hadronization. Thus, there is uncertainty in the prevailing conditions at the initial collisions.

In fact, instead of suppression, enhanced production of J/ψ is expected^[4] in heavy ion experiments at LHC where the quark-combinant production mechanism should be dominant given the large abundance of charm quarks in the QGP. Aside of J/ψ, charmed B mesons (B_c), offer a signature that indicates that quarks move freely and bind at-will when combining to form hadrons.^[5][6]

4. The Name

Because of the nearly simultaneous discovery, the J/ψ is the only particle to have a two-letter name. Richter named it "SP", after the SPEAR accelerator used at SLAC; however, none of his coworkers liked that name. After consulting with Greek-born Leo Resvanis to see which Greek letters were still available, and rejecting "iota" because its name implies insignificance, Richter chose "psi" – a name which, as Gerson Goldhaber pointed out, contains the original name "SP", but in reverse order.^[7] Coincidentally, later spark chamber pictures often resembled the psi shape. Ting assigned the name "J" to it, which is one letter away from "K", the name of the already-known strange meson; possibly by coincidence, "J" strongly resembles the Chinese character for Ting's name (丁). J is also the first letter of Ting's oldest daughter's name, Jeanne.

Much of the scientific community considered it unjust to give one of the two discoverers priority, so most subsequent publications have referred to the particle as the "J/ψ".

The first excited state of the J/ψ was called the ψ′; it is now called the ψ(2S), indicating its quantum state. The next excited state was called the ψ″; it is now called ψ(3770), indicating mass in MeV. Other vector charm-anticharm states are denoted similarly with ψ and the quantum state (if known) or the mass.^[8] The "J" is not used, since Richter's group alone first found excited states.

The name charmonium is used for the J/ψ and other charm-anticharm bound states. This is by analogy with positronium, which also consists of a particle and its antiparticle (an electron and positron in the case of positronium).