Large Hadron Collider physicists discover three new strange particles

Corridor containing a section of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Corridor containing a section of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
picture: VALENTIN FLAURAUD / AFP (Getty Images)

pPhysicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced today thatDiscover three strange particles that may help detect How do quarks join together?

One particle is a five-quark (a hadron made of five quarks) and the other two are tetraquarks. Found by LHCb . cooperation at CERN, which is using a 5,600-ton detector on a portion of the Large Hadron Collider to investigate the differences between matter and antimatter.

last year , Cooperation found the first quadruple magic double quad, the longest-lived exotic matter particle to date. Newly discovered particles add to the collaborationAlien Particle Playlist.

Nils Toning, LHCb Physics Coordinator, said at CERN . version. “We are experiencing a period of discovery similar to the 1950s, when the discovery of the ‘particle zoo’ of hadrons began and eventually led to the quark model of conventional hadrons in the 1960s. We are making “Particle Zoo 2.0”.

Hadrons interact strongly with subatomic particles made of quarks and antiquarks. The protons and neutrons you are familiar with are both hadrons. Each is made of three quarks.

Quarks come in six flavors (up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom), which can combine in different ways to make up unique particles.

For example, the recently discovered pentaquark is made of strange, up, down and charm quarks, as well as a charm antiquark. It’s 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.

Side-by-side illustrations of the two newly discovered tetraquarks.

“Finding new kinds 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 spokesperson Chris Parkes said in the CERN release. “It will also help to better understand conventional hadrons.”

ten Years ago, yesterday, The theme of confirming the existence of the Higgs bosonPhysicists at the Large Hadron Collider continue to find new particles. sixty six Hadrons have so far been detected in the collider, and the LHCb has been responsible for 59 of them. The The third operation of the Large Hadron Collider begins todayphysicists expect that the highly energetic collisions will provide better data to dismantle the bunker pillars of our universe.

There is a lot of useful data that can be collected besides the new particles that come out of the collisions. “The search for new particles is not even half of everything we do at the LHC,” Freya Blickmann, a particle physicist at the University of Hamburg and a contributor to the CMS and FCC-ee collaboration, told Gizmodo in a video call last week. . “We’re also doing a lot of studies regarding how matter sticks together and how these known nuclear forces work at a more detailed level.”

With the high brightness of the Large Hadron Collider looming, 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?

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