They just keep banging them out at the LHC! Story at Gizmodo.
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider-b (LHCb) experiment presented its latest discovery last week at a meeting of the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics. Meet the double-charm tetraquark, the longest-lived exotic matter particle yet discovered.
Quarks are the building blocks of all matter; they’re subatomic particles that combine to form hadrons, the group that includes the familiar protons and neutrons. (In other words, quarks are smaller than small.) Protons and neutrons are both made up of three quarks, but the newly discovered hadron particle is made of four, making it a species of tetraquark. The first tetraquark was officially discovered in 2003.
Quarks have antimatter partners—evil twins, if you will. This new tetraquark is made up of two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks, stuck together into one particle.
How big is this discovery?
The findings from particle colliders advance physicists’ understanding of how fundamental particles interact. “If you really want to know somebody, you put them in extreme situations. What we’re doing with these tetraquarks and pentaquarks is we’re putting the theory in extreme situations, which aren’t the run-of-the-mill that we have observed for the last 60 years,” Marek Karliner, a particle physicist at Tel Aviv University who was not affiliated with the recent research, explained in a video call. “It turned out that this particular design of the LHCb experiment is ideal for searching for new hadrons.”
Other coverage at Phys.org, Scientific American, and Sci-news.
Announcement at European Physical Society conference on high energy physics 2021, pdf is here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03 2021, @08:15PM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03 2021, @09:41PM (3 children)
Don't anthropomorphize elementary particles. They don't like that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03 2021, @10:32PM
Anthropomorphize elementary particles puts them in extreme situations. That's how we get to know them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03 2021, @11:42PM (1 child)
In the grimcute world of the future, all concepts will be anthropomorphized, and represented by cute anime girls. Indeed, the very idea of resisting the total anthropomorphization of all thoughts will itself be anthropomorphized, and she will be really really cute.
There is no hope. Well, there is hope, but she has low numbers of followers on social media.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 04 2021, @08:28PM
How would you represent the Tetraquark in cute anime girls? Something like this? [data]
(Score: 2) by corey on Tuesday August 03 2021, @10:32PM (6 children)
> This new tetraquark is made up of two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks, stuck together into one particle.
That’s interesting, I understand that matter and anti-matter particles annihilate each other when they come into contact. I guess this doesn’t occur for quarks?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 04 2021, @12:03AM (1 child)
It does, but most of the time you have two quarks that are not antiparticles of each other, so you can have an up quark paired with an anti-down quark, so they won't annihilate each other. If an opposite pair does bind, they don't last very long as they will annihilate, so they would make a very unstable particle with a short lifetime. The new tetraquark has two charm quarks, an anti-up, and an anti-down, so no threat of annihilation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 04 2021, @02:11AM
They're always after me lucky charms!
- tetraquark
(Score: 5, Interesting) by dltaylor on Wednesday August 04 2021, @12:05AM (3 children)
Only opposite but mostly identical particles (electron and positron, for example) can annihilate that way. Quarks come with many attributes: mass, "color", charge, ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark [wikipedia.org]. An up quark can annihilate with an unti-up quark, but not with an anti down quark; they are too dissimilar. The newly-identified tetraquark has two "charm" (heavy) quarks, an "up" (light) and a "down" (also light) quark, so there's no possibility of a matter-antimatter annihilation.
There are some two-quark particles (mesons) with a quark and anti-quark, and for the ones that have quarks that could annihilate, I suppose they have sufficient energy to decay into some other particles before that happens.
In the quantum world, not much that is "intuitive" seems to happen. There are constraints that prevent it. Electrons are attracted to protons because of their opposite charges, but they do not "fall into" an atomic nucleus. There are quantum constraints the confine them to what are called "orbitals", surrounding, but not quite touching, the nucleus. (Question for the math experts: is there any known case wherein the wave function of an electron in an orbital intersects the wave function of a nuclear proton?)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 04 2021, @01:30AM
The electron and proton wavefunctions overlap. Just look at the shapes of the s and p orbital shells and see that they cover the inside of the nuclei. Nuclear decay actually depends upon it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 04 2021, @02:04AM (1 child)
That's some quirky logic
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 04 2021, @04:13AM
*quarky
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 04 2021, @02:42PM
They are shit!