Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have announced that they have discovered three exotic particles that could help reveal how quarks are bonded together when the giant machine is restarted.
One of these particles is a pentaquark (a hadron made up of five quarks) and the other two are tetraquarks. The particles were found by the LHCb Collaboration at CERN while investigating the differences between matter and antimatter using a 5,600-tonne detector in part of the Large Hadron Collider.
Last year, the first double attractive tetraquark, the longest-lived exotic matter particle ever found, was found. The newly discovered particles have been added to the list of exotic particles.
“The more analysis we do, the more exotic hadron species we find,” Niels Tuning, LHCb physics coordinator, said in a CERN publication. A “particle zoo” of hadrons began to be discovered in the 1950s, and eventually the quark model of traditional hadrons emerged in the 1960s.
Hadrons are made up of quarks and antiquarks and are strongly interacting subatomic particles. The protons and neutrons you know are both hadrons and are made up of three quarks each.
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