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LHCb Confirms Existence of Exotic Hadrons

An anonymous reader sends this news from CERN: "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. Hadrons are subatomic particles that can take part in the strong interaction – the force that binds protons inside the nuclei of atoms. Physicists have theorized since the 1960s, and ample experimental evidence since has confirmed, that hadrons are made up of quarks and antiquarks that determine their properties. A subset of hadrons, called mesons, is formed from quark-antiquark pairs, while the rest – baryons – are made up of three quarks. ... The Belle Collaboration reported the first evidence for the Z(4430) in 2008. They found a tantalizing peak in the mass distribution of particles that result from the decays of B mesons. Belle later confirmed the existence of the Z(4430) with a significance of 5.2 sigma on the scale that particle physicists use to describe the certainty of a result. LHCb reports a more detailed measurement of the Z(4430) that confirms that it is unambiguously a particle, and a long-sought exotic hadron at that. They analyzed more than 25,000 decays of B mesons selected from data from 180 trillion (180x10^12) proton-proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider."

25 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. From the beginning... by barlevg · · Score: 3, Insightful
  2. Re:Who else misread the title as 'exotic hardons' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    My Large Hardon Collided with your mom's pussy last night.

    She said it wasn't all that large.

  3. Re:So what is it made of? by MobyDisk · · Score: 4, Informative

    According to http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch...
    "It is therefore a four quark state or a two-quark plus two-antiquark state."

  4. 4 quarks particle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    From the original publication ( http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/ ):
    The minimal quark content of the Z(4430) state is: charm + anti-charm + down + anti-up.
    It is therefore a four quark state or a two-quark plus two-antiquark state.

  5. Implications for the Standard Model by JoshuaZ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Can someone who knows more about this subject explain what if any the implications this result has for the Standard Model?

    1. Re:Implications for the Standard Model by DirePickle · · Score: 4, Informative

      Unfortunately, none really. There's nothing in the standard model that says we can't have tetraquarks or mesonic molecules (this seems to be one or the other), it's just that we haven't seen any before.

    2. Re:Implications for the Standard Model by BitZtream · · Score: 2

      It means we're one step closer to confirming theoretical constructs such as wormholes as we're rapidly approaching the stage where exotic matter is no longer theoretical, and things such as negative mass start to look achievable.

      Not that this observation makes all of that actually true, but we're still moving in the right direction to maybe eventually one day confirm and observe things such as stable wormholes.

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  6. I read it as Erotic Hadrons. by tekrat · · Score: 2

    I'm not sure which is funnier.

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  7. Is Slashdot all 12 year old boys now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    18 comments in, and 17 of them are just stupid stuff about hard-ons. Either Slashdot has been taken over by 12 year old boys, or they're all just still boys trapped in the bodies of men.

    1. Re:Is Slashdot all 12 year old boys now? by wjcofkc · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Clearly you weren't here in those dark days before moderation. Natalie Portman, hot grits, goatse links, etc, etc, etc... Don't like what you see in the comments? Get an account, stop whining as an AC, earn some mod points, and help eradicate the less flattering posts. I do.

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    2. Re:Is Slashdot all 12 year old boys now? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      Of course, in every high-energy experiment, there's a lot of juvenile, short-lived resonances, but only few respectable, long-lived stable particles like us.

      --
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  8. Re:strange by iggymanz · · Score: 4, Informative

    it is believe to be made of quarks, but instead of the usual two or three it has four, c c_ d u_

    that means it has charge of negative one

  9. Re:strange by gman003 · · Score: 5, Informative

    It *is* made up of quarks - a charm quark, an anti-charm quark, down quark, and anti-up quark. The interesting thing is that this is a pairing never before seen - all previous hadrons were either two quarks (quark + antiquark of same color) or three quarks (three quarks or antiquarks, all of different colors). Two quarks and two antiquarks has been postulated but never observed, until now.

  10. Editorial/stats geekiness by MAXOMENOS · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Belle later confirmed the existence of the Z(4430) with a significance of 5.2 sigma on the scale that particle physicists use to describe the certainty of a result.

    I believe that "scale" is called the normal distribution; that is to say, the odds of getting that result as a fluke are the same as finding a point 5.2 standard deviations away from the mean of the normal curve. If so, everything in that sentence after "5.2 sigma" can be left out.

  11. Re:strange by Eunuchswear · · Score: 2

    It is made of quarks, it's "just" that it doesn't seem to be a meson (quark +antiquark) or a baryon (3 quarks)

    They're speculating that it's charm + anticharm + up + antidown, i.e 4 quarks (or 2 quark/antiquark pairs).

    Probably bollocks.

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  12. Four quarks! by MAXOMENOS · · Score: 3, Informative

    Master Mark will have a field day!

    1. Re:Four quarks! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      MUSTER Mark.

  13. Re:So what is it made of? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Tetraquarks" are a two-quark plus two-antiquark state.
    The other possibility that was mentioned (a four quark state) is too exotic to be reasonable (it would break color neutrality).

  14. Re:So is this evidence for or against Lisi's theor by iggymanz · · Score: 2

    Lisi's theory predicts fields and the kind of particles known as bosons, it's a field theory that hasn't even been refined enough to include quantization. It doesn't predict mass of particles either.

  15. Re:So what is it made of? by hamburger+lady · · Score: 5, Funny

    Fuck it, we're doing five quarks.

    Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of particles in this universe. The meson was the hadron to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-quark nucleon. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the proton. That's three quarks and a positive charge. For positivity. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened—the bastards went to four quarks. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three quarks and a charge. Charge or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five quarks.

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  16. Re:strange by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    To get Psi' you need c-cbar; to get a pi you need an up and a down. The final state they observe is a mu-,mu+ K pi. The production of the muons in pairs means that they came out of the same reaction -- that is you can put them together to get a Psi' with good reliability. So you that leaves you with Psi' k and pi, you could have an initial state that decays to a psi' and a (k+pi) in a baggy (aka the K* resonances), or a psi' and a k and a pi that don't interact with each other (but three prong decays are well down from pair wise decay chains), or a k + (psi' pi) in a baggy. Since momentum and energy are conserved having K*'s in the produced stuff can reflect into the other pairings (this is the crux of the venerable Dalitz plot analysis). The reflections are insufficient to explain away a k +(psi' pi) decay chain --it's not an echo from other known physics. The psi' is a pure ccbar state and the quark content of the pion is well known -- either all four quarks are present in the (psi' pi) baggy or something really weird is going on. Whip out the Occam's razor and you claim a tetraquark. (It's not clear however that the ancient a0(980) and f0(980) are not tetraquarks or molecules ... it's just a very very hard place to work -- here the muon decays help a lot at cleaning up the states -- there's not a great analog of the psi' below 1GeV that is a clean resonance to beat against.

  17. Re:So what is it made of? by Megane · · Score: 2

    Sure, we could go to four quarks next, like the next universe over. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a thicker gluon field and call it the Quark3SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a fundamental force of the universe, that's why!

    Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands

    Such a missed opportunity for the word "hadron".

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  18. Re:So what is it made of? by gerald.edward.butler · · Score: 2

    Hmmm....this sounds familiar: http://www.theonion.com/articl...

  19. Re:Exotic Hard Ons by Overzeetop · · Score: 2

    Golf clap.

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  20. Re:strange by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    For a more useful perspective and pretty graph of the experimental data, see:
    http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2014/04/09/major-harvest-of-four-leaf-clover