A New Tetraquark, Possibly

[Recusant]

Not that I'd been aware of the existence of tetraquarks before reading about this one.    Most of the known matter in the Universe is composed of particles made up with three quarks.

"Physicists Discover Exotic, New 'Tetraquark' Particle We've Never Seen Before" | ScienceAlert

There's a new exotic subatomic particle on the atom smasher. Physicists working with CERN's Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration have found a new form of the elusive four-quark particle called a tetraquark that they have never seen before.

The newly identified particle is made up of four quarks of the same flavour and is likely, scientists say, to be the first of a previously undiscovered class of particles.

The paper describing it has been uploaded to arXiv, and is yet to be peer-reviewed, but joins a growing body of evidence supporting the existence of exotic particles.

Quarks are elementary particles that are one of the fundamental building blocks of matter. Protons and neutrons - the subatomic particles in the atomic nuclei that make up all visible matter (including us) - each contain three quarks, bound together by the strong nuclear force.

Particles that contain other configurations, such as four-, five- and six-quark particles, are a lot rarer (and six-quark particles are still hypothetical). These kinds of particles are so rare that we didn't even have confirmation of the existence of tetraquarks until just a few years ago.

Quarks can be categorised a few different ways. There are six different types, or flavours - these are up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charm. Each of these flavours has its own antiquark particle. And they have different masses - top, charm, and bottom quarks are the 'heavy' quarks.

[Continues . . .]

I think that the way the varieties of quark are understood is somewhat more complex than the explanation given by writer of the article would lead the reader to believe. Good enough for pop science, I suppose.

[Randy]

Stuff like this fascinates me.

[hermes2015]

I'm trying to think of a suitably Joycean comment in the Wake of this.

[Recusant]

We're not too far past Bloomsday.