The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration has said that three new strange particles have been found. Up until recently, these kinds of strange particles had only been thought about. Quarks are the building blocks of these strange particles.
“Like the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus of an atom, these new particles are made up of quarks,” said Chris Parkes, Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at The University of Manchester. “Protons and neutrons, on the other hand, are made up of three quarks, while strange particles are made up of four or five quarks.”
Theorists thought that exotic particles were possible about 60 years ago, but they have only been seen in the last 20 years by LHCb and other experiments.
Professor Parkes says, “Finding strange particles and measuring their properties will help theorists build a model of how these particles are made, even though the exact nature of these particles is mostly unknown.” “It will also help us understand the theory behind everyday particles, like the proton and neutron, better.”
The results, which were shown today at a CERN seminar, add three more strange particles to the list of new ones that have been found at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). They will help physicists figure out how quarks come together to make these bigger particles.
The LHCb collaboration is a group of over a thousand scientists from twenty different countries. It made one of the four big detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and runs it. Professor Parkes is in charge of the collaboration, and more than twenty staff and PhD students from The University of Manchester work on the project.
The new research shows that the international LHCb collaboration has seen three particles that have never been seen before: a new type of “pentaquark” and the first pair of “tetraquarks.”
Finding exotic particles and measuring their properties will help theorists build a model of how these particles are made, the exact nature of which is mostly unknown. This will also help theorists better understand the theory for common particles like the proton and neutron. – Chris Parkes is a professor.
Quarks are basic particles that can be up, down, charm, strange, top, or bottom. They usually come together in groups of two or three to make hadrons, like the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. They can also combine less often to make four-quark and five-quark particles, called “tetraquarks” and “pentaquarks,” respectively. Hadrons are things that are made up of quarks.
Some theories say that exotic hadrons are made up of a single unit of tightly bound quarks, while other theories say that they are made up of two standard hadrons that are loosely bound together in a molecule-like structure. Time and more research into exotic hadrons are the only ways to find out if these particles are one, the other, or both.
Most of the strange hadrons found in the last 20 years are tetraquarks or pentaquarks with a charm quark and a charm antiquark and an up, down, strange, or antiquark for the other two or three quarks. But in the last two years, LHCb has found different types of strange particles called “exotic hadrons.”
Two years ago, the group found a tetraquark made up of two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks, as well as two “open-charm” tetraquarks made up of a charm antiquark, an up quark, a down quark, and a strange antiquark. Last year, it found the first “double open-charm” tetraquark, which is made up of two charm quarks, an up antiquark, and a down antiquark. Open charm means that the particle has a charm quark but does not have an antiquark that is the same as it.
The LHCb collaboration announced today that it has found new types of strange particles called hadrons. The first kind is called a pentaquark. It is made up of a charm quark, a charm antiquark, an up quark, a down quark, and a strange quark. It was found by looking at the “decays” of negatively charged B mesons. It is the first time a strange quark has been found in a pentaquark. The statistical significance of the finding is a huge 15 standard deviations, which is a lot more than the 5 standard deviations that are needed to say that a particle was seen in particle physics.
The second kind is a tetraquark with two electric charges. It is an open-charm tetraquark made up of a charm quark, a strange antiquark, an up quark, and a down antiquark. It was found along with its neutral counterpart when the decays of positively charged and neutral B mesons were looked at together. The new tetraquarks are the first pair of tetraquarks to be seen. They were found with a statistical significance of 6.5 (for a double-charged particle) and 8 (for a neutral particle).
The LHCb experiment hopes to find more strange particles in the future and begin to figure out how they group into families. For LHC Run 3, the group will start collecting data with its new detector today. Over the past seven years, important parts of this new detector have been designed and put together in Manchester.