Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have announced the discovery of three new ‘exotic particles’ that could help to explain how our universe was formed.
The new structures exist for just a hundred thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second and are built out of quarks, the tiniest particles ever discovered.
Atoms contain smaller particles called neutrons and protons, which are made up of three quarks each, while this ‘exotic’ matter is made up of four and five quarks – known as tetraquarks and pentaquarks.
The particles discovered are one new pentaquark and two tetraquarks, taking the total number found at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland to 21.
Researchers are excited about their new findings because there are now enough of these particles to begin grouping them together in a way that is similar to the chemical elements in the periodic table.
‘Finding exotic particles and measuring their properties will help theorists develop a model of how these particles are built, the exact nature of which is largely unknown,’ according to Chris Parkes, professor of experimental particle physics at the University of Manchester.
‘It will also help to better understand the theory for conventional particles such as the proton and neutron.’
The latest discovery comes almost exactly 10 years after the the Large Hadron Collider’s discovery of the famous Higgs boson, dubbed the ‘God Particle’.
Enlightening: Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have announced the discovery of three new ‘exotic particles’ that could help to explain how our Universe was formed
CERN is one of the largest scientific institutions in the world, home to over 2,000 scientists working on many physics projects. Pictured above is a chain of LHC dipole magnets inside a tunnel at the end of the second long shutdown, when the facility at CERN was updated for a few years so that protons could be slammed together at much higher energy ranges when run 3 begins in July
Exotic particles were first hypothesised by theorists about six decades ago, but only in the past 20 years have they been observed by Large Hadron Collider and other experiments.
Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom.
They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons, such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei.
More rarely, however, they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, or ‘tetraquarks’ and ‘pentaquarks’. Particles made of quarks are known as hadrons.
While some theoretical models describe exotic hadrons as single units of tightly bound quarks, other models envisage them as pairs of standard hadrons loosely bound in a molecule-like structure.
Only time and more studies of exotic hadrons will tell if these particles are one, the other or both.
Most of the exotic hadrons discovered in the past two decades are tetraquarks or pentaquarks containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark, with the remaining two or three quarks being an up, down or strange quark or an antiquark.
But in the past two years, the Large Hadron Collider has discovered different kinds of exotic hadrons.
Two years ago, it discovered a tetraquark made up of two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks, and two ‘open-charm’ tetraquarks consisting of a charm antiquark, an up quark, a down quark and a strange antiquark.
And last year it found the first-ever instance of a ‘double open-charm’ tetraquark with two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark.
Open charm means that the particle contains a charm quark without an equivalent antiquark.
The discoveries announced today by the Large Hadron Collider team include new kinds of exotic hadrons.
The first kind, observed in an analysis of ‘decays’ of negatively charged B mesons, is a pentaquark made up of a charm quark and a charm antiquark and an up, a down and a strange quark.
It is the first pentaquark found to contain a strange quark, while the second kind is a doubly electrically charged tetraquark.
It is an open-charm tetraquark composed of a charm quark, a strange antiquark, and an up quark and a down antiquark, and it was spotted together with its neutral counterpart in a joint analysis of decays of positively charged and neutral B mesons.
The results, which were presented at a CERN seminar, will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles.
The news comes a day after the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs Boson on July 4.
The discovery of the Higgs Boson in July 2012 forms the basis for the existence of all elementary particles in our universe. Pictured above is a visualisation of an event recorded at the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It shows the characteristics expected from the decay of the SM Higgs Boson to a pair of photons
The existence of the Higgs Boson, which is a subatomic particle that is the carrier particle for the Higgs Field, was first proposed by British physicist Peter Higgs in 1964. Pictured above is Higgs, who received a Nobel Prize in physics for proposing the existence of the Higgs Boson, at CERN in July 2012
The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 led to global headlines and the award of Nobel Prizes to, among others, the British theorist Peter Higgs.
Higgs had first predicted the existence of the particle in the 1960s, and theorised that we are surrounded by an ocean of quantum information known as the Higgs Field.
Since its discovery, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have probed the properties of this bizarre particle, which is so unstable it has never been directly observed.
The existence of the Higgs Boson is one reason why everything we see, including ourselves, all planets and stars, has mass and exists – hence why it was called the ‘God Particle.’
The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration, which made the new discovery, is comprised of more than 1,000 scientists from 20 countries across the world.
The collaboration built and operates one of the four big detectors at the CERN LHC particle collider.
It is led by Professor Parkes and the University of Manchester, which has more than 20 members of staff and PhD students working on the project.
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk