The physics lab that’s home to the world’s largest atom smasher has announced the observation of three new, never-before-seen “exotic particles,” which could provide clues about the force that binds subatomic particles together.
The research collaboration, called the Large Hadron Collider experiment (LHCb), located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, has observed a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever duo of “tetraquarks.”
Quarks are elementary particles, which CERN explains usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. More rarely, however, they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, or “tetraquarks” and “pentaquarks.”
The
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