N*3245 announced 50 years ago. Ratner's particle?

Nuclear Scientists Find New, Very Heavy Particle

CHICAGO (AP) — The most massive nuclear particle yet known—nearly four times as massive as the proton—has been discovered by the Argonne National Laboratory scientists.

The team of physicists who made the discovery call the new particle N-asterisk-3245.  They say N-asterisk-3245 is a mass of frozen energy—and the number “3245” stands for the amount of its energy, 3,245 million electron volts.

Its discoverers—Alan D. Krusch, John R. O’Fallon, Keith Ruddick and Steven Kormanyos, all of the University of Michigan, and Lazarus G. Ratner of Argonne—published their discovery in Physical Review Letters, a scientific journal.

They said N-asterisk-3245 is a proton in an energized state.  It belongs to a family of particles called nucleon resonances, they said.

Its life is only one-ten thousandth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second.

So far as is known, nucleon resonances do not exist in nature—only in atom smashers.

--Associated Press article printed on page 2 of the Pine Bluff Commercial on 18 April 1966. The date is the 11th anniversary of Albert Einstein's death.  The 3,245 MeV energy or "mass" of N*3245 is better expressed today as 3.245 GeV (3.245 billion electron-volts).

A Higgs boson, which is considered to be experimental proof for the existence of the Higgs field, is also a "resonance," lasting only about 10-to-the-minus-24th of a second and identifiable only by its predicted decay products such as muons, photons and other detectable particles. More specifically, the Higgs boson is a resonance in the proton-proton scattering cross-section, occurring at an energy of 125 GeV.