The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration today announced results that confirm the existence of exotic hadrons – a type of matter that cannot be classified within the traditional quark model.
Following on from the excitement of the IOP conference, the LHCb experiment at CERN has today released results which appear to conclusively reveal a four-quark state of matter in the Universe.
This resonance had been seen back in 2008 by the BELLE Collaboration, and LHCb has unambiguously confirmed that the resonance is a particle with four quarks inside. This confirmation is very important as it has been found by two independent groups and datasets.
Our current understanding of hadrons, that is to say bound quark states confined by the nature of the strong nuclear force, is that they are composed of a quark-antiquark pair (meson) or are composed of three quarks (or three antiquarks) (baryons). This state of matter has been shown to have four quarks which will either hint at a bound state of two mesons, or some hitherto undefined state of two quarks and two antiquarks bound together by the strong nuclear force.
The interesting result here is that the quark structure has been probed by LHCb to show the particle consists of a charm, an anti-charm, a down and an anti-up quark.
For more information: - http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2014/04/lhcb-confirms-existence-exotic-hadrons - http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/