What to Know About the Newly-Discovered Tetraquark at the Large Hadron Collider
TheMightyChickadee writes:
They just keep banging them out at the LHC! Story at Gizmodo.
CERN's Large Hadron Collider-b (LHCb) experiment presented its latest discovery last week at a meeting of the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics. Meet the double-charm tetraquark, the longest-lived exotic matter particle yet discovered.
Quarks are the building blocks of all matter; they're subatomic particles that combine to form hadrons, the group that includes the familiar protons and neutrons. (In other words, quarks are smaller than small.) Protons and neutrons are both made up of three quarks, but the newly discovered hadron particle is made of four, making it a species of tetraquark. The first tetraquark was officially discovered in 2003.
Quarks have antimatter partners-evil twins, if you will. This new tetraquark is made up of two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks, stuck together into one particle.
How big is this discovery?
The findings from particle colliders advance physicists' understanding of how fundamental particles interact. If you really want to know somebody, you put them in extreme situations. What we're doing with these tetraquarks and pentaquarks is we're putting the theory in extreme situations, which aren't the run-of-the-mill that we have observed for the last 60 years," Marek Karliner, a particle physicist at Tel Aviv University who was not affiliated with the recent research, explained in a video call. It turned out that this particular design of the LHCb experiment is ideal for searching for new hadrons."
Other coverage at Phys.org, Scientific American, and Sci-news.
Announcement at European Physical Society conference on high energy physics 2021, pdf is here.
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