Scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have discovered three never-before-seen subatomic particles as they work to unlock the building blocks of the universe, European nuclear research center CERN said on Tuesday.
The 27 kilometer long LHC at CERN is the machine that found the Higgs boson particle, which along with its energy field is considered vital to the formation of the universe after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
Now, CERN scientists say they have observed a new type of “pentaquark” and the first pair of “tetraquarks”, adding three members to the list of new hadrons found at the LHC. They will help physicists better understand how quarks come together in composite particles.
Quarks are elementary particles that usually combine in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons, like the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei.
More rarely, however, they can also combine into particles of four and five quarks, or tetraquarks and pentaquarks.
“The more analyzes we perform, the more types of exotic hadrons we find,” physicist Niels Tuning said in a statement.
“We are witnessing a period of discovery similar to the 1950s, when a ‘particle zoo’ of hadrons began to be discovered and ultimately led to the quark model of conventional hadrons in the 1960s. We are creating the ‘particle zoo 2.0’ ‘” he added.
