Three new ‘exotic’ sub-atomic particles discovered at CERN

Three new ‘exotic’ sub-atomic particles discovered at CERN

Subject: Science

• The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment — which is investigating the slight differences between matter and antimatter by studying a type of particle called the “beauty quark”, or “b quark” — has observed three never-before-seen particles. It seeks to unlock the building blocks of the universe in Big Bang recreation.
• The three “exotic” additions — a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks” — to the growing list of new hadrons found at the LHC will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles,
• CERN — Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire — is the original name of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, which runs the particle accelerator complex that houses the LHC, the world’s largest and most complex collider.
• Quarks are elementary particles that come in six “flavours”: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei.
• But they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, called tetraquarks and pentaquarks. But they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, called tetraquarks and pentaquarks.
• According to the CERN release, most exotic hadrons discovered in the past two decades are tetraquarks or pentaquarks containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark — with the remaining two or three quarks being an up, down or strange quark or their antiquarks.
• CERN is based in Geneva on the French-Swiss border. It has 22 member states. found the elusive Higgs boson in 2012.
• Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
• It is a kind of atom smasher machine.
• It is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.
• It is essentially two 16-mile-round rings that overlap in four places.
• It consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way.
• Higgs boson particle
• In 2012, the Nobel-winning discovery of the Higgs boson(also known as ‘God particle’) validated the Standard Model of physics, which also predicts that about 60% of the time a Higgs boson will decay to a pair of bottom quarks.
• In 1960s Peter Higgs was the first person to suggest that this particle might exist.
• The Higgs particle is a boson. Bosons are thought to be particles which are responsible for all physical forces. Other known bosons are the photon, the W and Z bosons, and the gluon.