The "double-charmed tetra quark"
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I find the whole subject of particle physics both baffling and fascinating.
I just finished a course on "The Particle Zoo" that did a pretty good job of explaining some things. Remember, when I was in college, we were taught that the atom was like a small solar system. Quarks, mesons, etc were not even discussed.
So, at the Large Hadron Collider, they've discovered a new type of quark: Newly Discovered Tetraquark at the Large Hadron Collider
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider-b (LHCb) experiment presented its latest discovery last week at a meeting of the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics. Meet the double-charm tetraquark, the longest-lived exotic matter particle yet discovered.
Quarks are the building blocks of all matter; they’re subatomic particles that combine to form hadrons, the group that includes the familiar protons and neutrons. (In other words, quarks are smaller than small.) Protons and neutrons are both made up of three quarks, but the newly discovered hadron particle is made of four, making it a species of tetraquark. The first tetraquark was officially discovered in 2003.
Quarks have antimatter partners—evil twins, if you will. This new tetraquark is made up of two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks, stuck together into one particle.
Exotic particles like this can be created within accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, but they pop into and out of existence extremely quickly. This new particle is considered to have a long lifespan before it decays, but “long” in this case is still so short it can hardly be measured in human terms. Its lifespan is probably a little longer than one-quintillionth of a second, said Patrick Koppenburg, physicist at the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics and a member of the LHCb team at CERN.
"Long-lived," LOLGF
