Large Hadron Collider… Our counterpart for flux capacitor or a lightsaber. The overachieving device famous for finding the Higgs boson… How we love thee.
And now, scientists have discovered an elusive particle, a new particle called Z(4430), and is the best evidence to date of a tetraquark… An entirely new form of matter.
Quarks are the subatomic particles that form all matter and are usually found in pairs or triplets – but scientists had long predicted that a new particle Z(4430) could exist that was a combination of four quarks. And now the LHC has spotted as many as 4,000 of the elusive particles, the researchers reported in ArXiv.
Right now, scientists still aren’t 100% sure this type of tetraquark would obey the laws of physics.
Thomas Cohen at the University of Maryland in College Park told New Scientist: “Our computers aren’t yet big enough to solve the theory from first principles.”
There is still work to be done to determine if Z(4430) really is a tetraquark, and, if so, what that means for us.
But the big first hurdle has been overcome – scientists have proved that Z(4430) really does exist and shown there’s still so much we have to discovery about the world we live in.
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Via: ScienceAlert
