A corridor containing part of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Photo: VALENTIN FLAURAUD / AFP (Getty Images)
Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced today the discovery of three exotic particles that may help reveal how quarks bind together.
One particle is a pentaquark (a hadron made up of five quarks) and the other two are tetraquarks. They were discovered by the LHCb Collaboration at CERN, which uses a 5,600-tonne detector on part of the Large Hadron Collider to study the differences between matter and antimatter.
Last year, the collaboration discovered the first doubly charmed tetraquark, the longest-lived exotic matter particle ever discovered. The newly discovered particles add to the collaboration’s current list of exotic particles.
“The more analyzes we do, the more types of exotic hadrons we find,” Niels Tuning, LHCb physics coordinator, said in a CERN release. “We are witnessing a period of discovery similar to that of 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”.
Hadrons are strongly interacting subatomic particles composed of quarks and antiquarks. Your familiar protons and neutrons are hadrons; each of them is made up of three quarks.
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Quarks come in six flavors (Up, Down, Charm, Weird, Top, and Bottom), which can be combined in different ways to make unique particles.
For example, the recently discovered pentaquark is made of strange, up, down, and charm quarks, as well as a charm antiquark. It is 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.
“Finding new types of tetraquarks and pentaquarks and measuring their properties will help theorists develop a unified model of exotic hadrons, whose exact nature is largely unknown,” LHCb spokesman Chris Parkes said in the CERN announcement. “It will also help to better understand conventional hadrons.”
Ten years ago yesterday, the existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed, and physicists at the LHC continue to discover new particles. Sixty-six hadrons have been detected at the collider so far, and LHCb is responsible for 59 of them. The third cycle of the LHC began today, and physicists expect that the high-energy collisions will offer even better data to unpack the hidden foundations of our universe.
And there’s a lot of useful data that can be collected beyond 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 Blackmann, a particle physicist at the University of Hamburg and a CMS and FCC-ee contributor, told Gizmodo in a video call last week. “We’re also doing a lot of research on how matter sticks together and how these well-known nuclear forces work at a much more detailed level.”
With the Large Hadron Collider on the horizon, 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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