Physicists discover new, exotic flavor of tetraquark

[Judi Lynn]

By Lorenzo Capriotti - Research fellow in Particle Physics, Università di Bologna, Harry Cliff - Particle physicist, University of Cambridge 6 hours ago

The particle is made of 4 charm quarks.

.webp

Illustration of a tetraquark composed of two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks, detected for the first time inside CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
(Image: © CERN)

The LHCb collaboration at CERN has announced the discovery of a new exotic particle: a so-called "tetraquark." The paper by more than 800 authors is yet to be evaluated by other scientists in a process called "peer review," but has been presented at a seminar. It also meets the usual statistical threshold for claiming the discovery of a new particle.

The finding marks a major breakthrough in a search of almost 20 years, carried out in particle physics labs all over the world.

To understand what a tetraquark is and why the discovery is important, we need to step back in time to 1964, when particle physics was in the midst of a revolution. Beatlemania had just exploded, the Vietnam war was raging and two young radio astronomers in New Jersey had just discovered the strongest evidence ever for the Big Bang theory.

On the other side of the US, at the California Institute of Technology, and on the other side of the Atlantic, at CERN in Switzerland, two particle physicists were publishing two independent papers on the same subject. Both were about how to make sense of the enormous number of new particles that had been discovered over the past two decades.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/physicists-discover-rare-tetraquarks.html

[qazplm135]

1. oddly enough...

it tastes like chicken.

[Miguelito Loveless]

2. Can I borrow some?

For me Lucky Charms cereal.