Just in case you wanted more confirmation that even physicists are far from knowing everything about how the micro-world works, along with its numerous elusive and weird particles, here it comes! The LHCb collaboration from the Large Hadron Collider can now boast about finding three new particles in nature.
According to Phys.org, the scientists presented at the CERN seminar their new discoveries: the first pair of tetraquarks found that also includes a new type of the exotic meson, as well as a new type of pentaquark. Quarks usually come in groups of twos and threes, so tetraquarks and pentaquarks don’t represent something that you can find every day.
An explosion of quantic discoveries
About a hundred years ago, renowned physicists such as Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, Paul Dirac, and others were astonished by the stubbornness of the atom that made it defy pretty much any possible law of nature. The atom cannot even be graphically represented in a completely accurate way. It seems that even its components are giving physicists a very hard time.
Niels Tuning, who is physics coordinator at LHCb, explained as Phys.org quotes:
The more analyses we perform, the more kinds of exotic hadrons we find,
We’re witnessing a period of discovery similar to the 1950s, when a ‘particle zoo’ of hadrons started being discovered and ultimately led to the quark model of conventional hadrons in the 1960s. We’re creating ‘particle zoo 2.0.’
Protons and neutrons in the atomic nuclei contain quarks. Scientists are confident that thanks to the new findings of LHCb, they will get to understand in a better way how quarks are able to unite. Let’s not forget that quarks are also the smallest particles that humans know about.
