Scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have discovered three never-before-seen subatomic particles as they work to unlock the building blocks of the universe, the European Center for Nuclear Research CERN said on Tuesday.
The 27-kilometer (16.8-mile) long LHC at CERN is the machine that discovered the Higgs boson particle, which, along with its associated energy field, is believed to be vital to the formation of the universe after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
Now scientists at CERN say they have observed a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first ever pair of “tetraquarks”, adding three members to the list of new hadrons discovered at the LHC.
They will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into constituent particles.
Quarks are elementary particles that usually combine in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons like the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei.
Less commonly, however, they can combine into particles of four quarks and five quarks, or tetraquarks and pentaquarks. “The more analyzes we perform, the more types of exotic hadrons we find,” physicist Niels Tuning said in a statement.
“We are witnessing a period of discovery similar to the 1950s, when a ‘particle zoo’ of hadrons began to be discovered and eventually led to the quark model of conventional hadrons in the 1960s. We are creating a “Particle Zoo 2.0”.
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