Three never-before-seen particles have been observed by the international Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The discovery includes a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks,” which includes a new type of tetraquark. The
are elementary particles and can be classified in six flavors: 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 comprise atomic nuclei. However, on rare occasions, they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, known as “tetraquarks” and “pentaquarks.
The discoveries announced today by the LHCb collaboration 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.
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 new tetraquarks, observed with a statistical significance of 6.5 and 8 standard deviations, represent the first time a pair of tetraquarks has been observed.
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