A corridor containing a section of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.Picture: VALENTIN FLAURAUD / AFP (Getty Images)
Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider today announced the discovery of three exotic particles that can help reveal how quarks bind.
One particle is a pentaquark (a hadron made up of five quarks) and the other two are tetraquarks. They were found by CERN’s LHCb Collaboration, which uses a 5,600-ton detector in a part of the Large Hadron Collider to investigate the differences between matter and antimatter.
Last year, the collaboration found the first double-charm tetraquark, the longest exotic matter particle ever found. Newly discovered particles are added to the collaboration’s list of exotic particles.
“The more analysis we do, the more types of exotic hadrons we will find,” Niels Tuning, LHCb physics coordinator, said in a statement from CERN. “We are witnessing a period of discovery similar to that of the 1950s, when a‘ particle zoo ’of hadrons began to be discovered which eventually gave rise to the quark model of conventional hadrons in the 1960s. We are creating the “Particle Zoo 2.0”.
Hadrons are highly interacting subatomic particles formed by quarks and antiquarks. Your known protons and neutrons are hadrons; each consists of three quarks.
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Quarks have six flavors (up, down, charm, weird, top, and bottom), which can be combined in different ways to form unique particles.
For example, the recently discovered pentaquark is made of strange quarks, up, down and charm, as well as an antiquark charm. It is the first known pentaquark to contain a strange quark. The two new tetraquarks are a pair: one is doubly charged and the other is its neutral partner.
“Finding new types of tetraquarks and pentaquarks and measuring their properties will help theorists develop a unified model of exotic hadrons, the exact nature of which is largely unknown,” LHCb spokesman Chris Parkes said in a statement. of CERN. “It will also help to better understand conventional hadrons.”
Ten years ago, the existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed and LHC physicists continue to find new particles. So far sixty-six hadrons have been discovered in the collider, and the LHCb has been responsible for 59 of them. The LHC’s third race has begun today and physicists hope that high-energy collisions will provide even better data to unpack the hidden foundations of our universe.
And there is a lot of useful data to collect in addition to the new particles coming out of the collisions. “The search for new particles is not even half of everything we do at the LHC,” Freya Blekman, a particle physicist at the University of Hamburg and a contributor to the University of Hamburg, told Gizmodo in a video call last week. CMS and FCC-ee collaborations. . “We also do a lot of studies on how matter binds together and how these known nuclear forces work on a much more detailed level.”
With the High-Brightness Large Hadron Collider on the horizon, the future of particle physics is as bright as ever.
More: 10 years after the Higgs boson, what’s the next big thing for physics?