CERN confirms new exotic subatomic particle

CERN confirms new exotic subatomic particle

The new hadron Z(4430) has - hold onto your hats - two quarks and two anti-quarks, say scientists with 'unprecedented certainty.'


new form of exotic subatomic particle that upends particle-physics tradition was announced on Wednesday by scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The particle is a new type of hadron, which is a particle in the atom nucleus typically consisting of three quarks, or one quark and one anti-quark (which has the same mass as a quark, but the opposite charge). The form of hadron announced...

The remainder of the article links to a source where you need to pay to read the article. I am not a member so cannot access the remainder but still wanted to post due to the effects the discovery will have.


Secondary sources -
CERN finds ‘new class’ of subatomic particle

First conclusive proof after 40 years of searching

Scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have confirmed the existence of a new class of subatomic particles, exotic hadrons.

A new measurement performed by the LHCb collaboration, one of the four large experiments at the LHC at CERN, has confirmed the existence of the exotic object labeled the Z(4430)-. This particle does not fit into the pattern of particles we have seen up to now. The LHCb result confirms an observation made by the Belle collaboration in 2008 that was later questioned and so resolves this previously unclear situation.


“We and everything around us are made of atoms, and atoms are made in turn of smaller constituents. Atomic nuclei are orbited by electrons. The protons and neutrons that form atomic nuclei consist of three fundamental particles, called quarks, bound together. Other combinations of quarks can occur - particles containing two bound quarks (mesons) are also seen in nature. However, until now all particles containing quarks (hadrons) have conformed to one of these two types; quarks seem to like to come in twos or threes,” a press release from Science and Technology Facilities Council, which reported the discovery, stated.

However, the underlying theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) that describes the behaviour of quarks allows for many different quark combinations, such as four quark states, to bind together into hadrons. Over the last 40 years many searches for such exotic states have been performed but until now there was no conclusive proof of their existence. Several more mundane explanations for the Z(4430)- signal seen by Belle had been put forward, but the LHCb result establishes that for the first time we have seen the “smoking gun” signal for resonant behavior of a particle that contains at least four quarks/antiquarks.

The “4430” refers to the (approximate) mass of this state, corresponding to roughly four times the mass of a proton.

click link for remainder of article.

reply to post by Xcathdra


Pay 2 read?

Bull#.

If it was important it would be posted on Facebook.



Edit- Sorry.

Thanks for the update.

Big discovery! Now I wonder what they can do with this new found knowledge. CERN has big things on the horizon

minusinfinity
reply to post by Xcathdra

 

Pay 2 read?

Bull#.

If it was important it would be posted on Facebook.

Edit- Sorry.

Thanks for the update.

edit on 16-4-2014 by minusinfinity because: (no reason given)

Your good.. I was irritated as well, which is why I went and found another source.. I wanted to post the info as its important but I don't think people should be forced to pay for scientific information.

Shepard64
Big discovery! Now I wonder what they can do with this new found knowledge. CERN has big things on the horizon

Completely agree.. When I read about these discoveries I get that "we might be on the verge of something amazing" feeling.

Do you guys really understand this mumbo jumbo? If you do then why not explain it so the average person can understand?

minusinfinity
Do you guys really understand this mumbo jumbo? If you do then why not explain it so the average person can understand?

It has implications for particle physics. The new discoveries do not meet the established norms scientists have developed. It will change the "rulebook" so to speak. The particle located changes the way in which particles are looked at.

reply to post by minusinfinity


Basically from what I understand scientists only had there theories of the said quarks being there. They have now found definite proof that they exist, these things are extremely small and make up everything. If an atom (which is extremly small itself) was the size of a football field the quark would be a speck of dust. I don't fully understand it but thats what I gathered from this.

reply to post by Xcathdra


Okay thank you for the response.

Is this going impact the average person anytime soon.

Curious.

reply to post by Xcathdra


Lets cut to the chase.
Can we develop speed of light travel now?

reply to post by minusinfinity


This can be compared to the splitting of the atom, scientists did it but did not know what we could do with it. It didn't take long for the military to turn it into a bomb but we also got nuclear power out of it. So I guess time will tell what implications this will have.

reply to post by minusinfinity


I wouldn't say I understand it, but I was under the impression that whatevers and antiwhatevers convert eachother's mass 100% to energy every time, never work together to create a particle. If I've got that right then it seems to me it might provide new insight into the relationship between matter and energy.

Aside from what I posted I have no idea on any other questions asked....

where is Phage when you need him?

ETA - I sent him a U2U asking him to drop in.

Xcathdra
The new discoveries do not meet the established norms scientists have developed.

I hope all those who say "It cant work because of the law of physics" read that!

Free energy? "It cant work because of the law of physics"
Anti gravity? "It cant work because of the law of physics"

Read it again folks - "The new discoveries do not meet the established norms scientists have developed.".
What else will be turned on its head?

3rd repost of this... I repost something once and i get pounced on...? odd right?

minusinfinity
reply to post by Xcathdra

 

Okay thank you for the response.

Is this going impact the average person anytime soon.

Curious.

If they can create a 5 quark hadron, then they can make an honest politician and cure international banking psychopathy. Unfortunately 5 quark hadrons are unstable, only exist for 10^-21 seconds and do not exist naturally in a stable ground state in this reality.

Cheers - Dave

OH F#! Now we gonna get the quark bomb!

VoidHawk

Xcathdra
The new discoveries do not meet the established norms scientists have developed.

I hope all those who say "It cant work because of the law of physics" read that!

Free energy? "It cant work because of the law of physics"
Anti gravity? "It cant work because of the law of physics"

Read it again folks - "The new discoveries do not meet the established norms scientists have developed.".
What else will be turned on its head?

Saying something does "not meet the established norms" is a far cry from saying the laws of physics need to be rewritten.

Also I never heard anti-gravity can't work because of the laws of physics, where did you get that? "Free energy" may be contradicted by the second law of thermodynamics and we've found an exception to that law, but nobody is making any free energy. If someone demonstrates free energy or anti-gravity it will be interesting to see if any physics needs to be re-written as a result, but there are no reliable experimental results of such known despite repeated efforts spanning centuries.

To summarize, they knew of 2-quark and 3-quark states, so it's not a total shocker that a 4-quark state can be found and don't freak out if a 5-quark state is found either. It doesn't mean you can get free energy or perpetual motion.

ErosA433
3rd repost of this... I repost something once and i get pounced on...? odd right?

I wouldn't take it personally, some duplicate threads get closed right away, some never get closed because the mods can't find them all and sometimes members report them, sometimes not.

I only recall seeing this one and the title is so much different people might not recognize it's the same topic just by looking at teh title and a search probably wouldn't be too helpful:

LHCb/CERN: Particle composed of 4 quarks found.

But doesn't it make sense to discuss a topic in one thread rather than 4? The mods can't do it all, did you help them? Links to the other reposts?

Actually i didn't because im an idiot haha.

But the above explains the discovery very well.

In the standard model it is what is known as QCD or Quantum Chromodynamics it is what commands the propagation of quark colour charge. Each Quark has a quantum property or quantum number known as colour and it is such that bound states must be colourless. While this sounds quite honestly like something someone made up, (it is quite approximately true) it helps explain how quarks interact with each other and how properties transfer and propagate through interactions. The book keeping and implications of it do give rise to testable theory and as i said, the ability to predict stable and unstable states, possible interactions and decay routes etc.

So on surface, looks stupid, in reality it defines many things.

Now this theory predicts that quarks on their own cannot exist or are forbidden because they would have residual colour charge. So the possible bound states are in sets of 2, 3, 4, 5 etc...

evidence for, but not a descovery of 4 and 5 quark bound states have been hinted at for a long time. They are quite difficult to measure because they are energetically suppressed meaning that, at that point in the centre of mass energy for the interaction, the production of a 4 or 5 quark bound state is very rare and typically you will have a tonne of back grounds from offshell interactions.

The particle observed however was observed with a high sigma of statistical uncertainty and thus is something physical that is occurring, and the decay products suggest it to be a 4 quark bound state.

The measurement is actually a counting experiment where you look for resonances. What this means is that you set the centre of mass energy of the beam and count the numbers of particles being produced. You then scan through the centre of mass energy and look for bursts of particle production. The reason why this works is that if you have a particle that say requires 1GeV to produce, you expect lots of them to be produced at 1GeV and relatively less at say 0.9 and 1.1 GeV. So it really is a resonance like effect. Once you find a peak that doesn't correspond to what you expect, you look at just those interactions and attempt to decypher what is going on in those events.

a reply to: ErosA433

Thanks for elaborating beyond what's in the link. Apparently, you aren't surprised the 4 quark state was discovered, and also won't be surprised if a 5 quark state is also discovered.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Id personally not be surprised. I think the way that it seems to be, that 3 quark bound states have the lowest energy state.

2 quarks bound states decay away to photons and leptons. Mesons appear to be the throughout of the strong force during interactions. Like knocking out a quark from a nucleus and 'condensing' an antiquark from the interaction energy and gluon, such that the meson can come out of the hadron, and leave it intact. Again this is mainly speculation but it is fact that no mesons have been observed to be stable.

So I think the production of greater than 3 quark bound states i think is more about branching ratios are quite low, such that typically you produce an excited state and then it decays via a few different paths. One of these paths can be a 4 or 5 quark bound state. But the probability of this happening is extremely low.

It is the same for direct production. Typically the interaction will produce far more 3 quark bound pairs, because energetically this is favoured, bindings of 4 and 5 quarks seem to be much weaker and unstable, so producing them is just a much rarer occurrence. I think theoretically there is no reason for these bound states not to exist. Its just weather these bound states are really bound states or mainly transitional states