The physics laboratory, which is home to the world’s largest atom smasher, has announced the observation of three new, never-before-seen “exotic particles” that could provide clues about the force that binds subatomic particles together.
A research collaboration called the Large Hadron Collider (LHCb) experiment, located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, has observed a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first duo of “tetraquarks”.
Quarks are elementary particles that CERN explains 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 four-quark and five-quark particles, or “tetraquarks” and “pentaquarks”.
The announcement comes amid a flurry of activity this week at CERN as scientists resumed smashing particles in what is expected to be nearly four years of work in “Run 3” – the third time the LHC has carried out collisions since its debut in 2008 ..
The so-called “Run 3” ends a three-year pause for maintenance and other checks and operates at an unprecedented energy of 13.6 trillion electron volts, which will offer the prospect of new discoveries in particle physics.
Earlier this week, CERN marked the 10th anniversary of the confirmation of the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that is central to the so-called Standard Model, which explains the foundations of particle physics.
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