Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider today announced the discovery of three exotic particles that may help reveal how quarks are bound together. One particle is a pentaquark (a hadron made up of five quarks) and the other two are tetraquarks. They were found by the LHCb Collaboration at CERN, which uses a 5,600-ton detector in a section of the Large Hadron Collider to investigate the differences between matter and antimatter. Last year, the collaboration found the first doubly charmed tetraquark, the longest-lived exotic matter particle found to date. The newly discovered particles are added to the list of current cooperation with exotic particles. “The more analyzes we do, the more exotic hadron species we find,” LHCb physics coordinator Niels Tuning said in a CERN release. “We are witnessing a period of discovery similar to the 1950s, when a hadronic ‘particle zoo’ began to be discovered and eventually led to the quark model of conventional hadrons in the 1960s. We are creating ‘particle zoo 2.0.’ Hadrons are strongly interacting subatomic particles composed of quarks and antiquarks. Your familiar protons and neutrons are both hadrons. they each consist of three quarks. G/O Media may receive a commission UNDER $1 99¢ Prime Video Channels Prime contentAdd Showtime, Starz, Paramount+, Discovery and more to your Prime Video account for less than $1 each for the first two months of your subscription. Quarks come in six flavors (up, down, charm, weird, up and down), which can be combined in different ways to create unique particles. For example, the recently discovered pentaquark consists of strange, up, down, and charm quarks, as well as a charm antiquark. It is the first known pentaquark containing a strange quark. The two new quarks are a pair: one is doubly charged and the other is its neutral partner. “Finding new species of tetraquark and pentaquark 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 the CERN announcement. “It will also help to better understand conventional hadrons.” Ten years ago yesterday, the existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed, and physicists at the LHC continue to find new particles. Sixty-six hadrons have so far been discovered at the accelerator, and LHCb is responsible for 59 of them. The LHC’s third run began today, and physicists expect the highly energetic collisions to provide even better data to unpack the hidden underpinnings of our universe. And there is a lot of useful data to be collected in addition to the new particles that come from the collisions. “The search for new particles is not even half of what we do at the LHC,” Freya Blekman, a particle physicist at the University of Hamburg and a partner in the CMS and FCC-ee collaborations, told Gizmodo in a video call last week. . “We’re also doing a lot of studies on how matter is held together and how these familiar nuclear forces work at a much more detailed level.” With the high-luminosity 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?
