Exotic Particles and Strange Discoveries
- Anna Oliva
- Jul 22, 2022
- 2 min read
I was first drawn to science, particularly astrophysics, after watching the documentary Particle Fever about the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) experiments at CERN that led to the discovery of the Higgs Boson. This year marks the tenth anniversary of that discovery, and a successful decade of expanding knowledge and finding new particles. Among these new particles are several exotic hadrons.
As indicated by their names, exotic hadrons differ from their “well-known” hadron counterparts. They have more than three constituent quarks and behave differently than “well-known” hadrons. Exotic hadrons also behave a bit oddly. These particles have a non-relativistic velocity, one that is much slower than the speed of light, despite the fact that a quark’s low mass within a proton should cause hardons to behave according to relativity. Their structure could be a “bag” of several different quarks, a pair of connected hadrons, or they could have both structures at the same time. Since hadron properties are already difficult to predict and exotic hadrons deviate from the supposed norm, much of our knowledge of exotic hadrons comes from studying newly discovered particles. These studies attempt to understand these particles enough to get a better overarching theory, since the Standard Model currently used has some discrepancies. Indeed, this is part of why studying particles is so fascinating, so much is known, yet at the same time incredibly little is understood. Each new particle discovered brings us closer to a complete understanding of all particles.
A week ago, three new exotic particles were discovered at the LHC: a pentaquark with a strange quark and a pair of tetraquarks. I find the tetraquark pair very interesting because of the theory that their structure is already composed of several associated quarks. If quarks could already connect as strongly as that theory predicts, why can’t this tetraquark pair also be as strongly connected? And what is the difference, then, between atomic nuclei and exotic quarks? I tried looking for answers and, happily, the latter question was also discussed in a Science.org article, which I linked below, along with some further reading. I hope this sparks your interest as it did mine!
The CERN announcement:
The Science.org article and some further reading:
Comments