Exotic Never-Before-Seen Particle Discovered at CERN
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Exotic never before seen particle discovered at CERN:
The Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb) project has observed an exotic particle made up of four charm quarks for the first time.
[...] Quarks form together to form composite particles known as hadrons, which include protons and neutrons. This breakthrough new discovery can help scientists now understand the complex ways in which quarks bind themselves together to form these composite.
Quarks typically combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons. For decades, however, theorists have predicted the existence of four-quark and five-quark hadrons, which are sometimes described as tetraquarks and pentaquarks and in recent years experiments including the LHCb have confirmed the existence of several of these exotic hadrons.
[...] "Particles made up of four quarks are already exotic, and the one we have just discovered is the first to be made up of four heavy quarks of the same type, specifically two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks," says the outgoing spokesperson of the LHCb collaboration, Giovanni Passaleva. "Up until now, the LHCb and other experiments had only observed tetraquarks with two heavy quarks at most and none with more than two quarks of the same type."
[...] As with previous tetraquark discoveries, it is not completely clear whether the new particle is a "true tetraquark", that is, a system of four quarks tightly bound together, or a pair of two-quark particles weakly bound in a molecule-like structure. Either way, the new tetraquark will help theorists test models of quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong interaction.
Journal Reference:
LHCb collaboration, Aaij, R., Beteta, C. Abellan, et al. Observation of structure in the $J/$-pair mass spectrum, (arXiv: 2006.16957)
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