Scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have discovered, with “overwhelming” certainty, the existence of a new class of subatomic particles, exotic hadrons. In related news, CERN has begun the painstaking process of turning the LHC back on after being switched off for upgrades over the last 12 months. When it returns, in early 2015, the LHC will have almost twice as much collision power, which will hopefully allow it to further investigate the Higgs boson, and probe the theory of supersymmetry.
First, those exotic hadrons. In all honesty, I don’t really understand them myself, but I’ll try my best to explain them — and the significance of this discovery. Basically, at four points around the LHC’s 17-mile (27km) circumference, there are four major detectors. You’ve probably heard of ATLAS and CMS, which discovered the Higgs boson, but there’s also ALICE (which studies quark-gluon plasma), and LHCb (which studies the weird relationship between matter and antimatter). These detectors are all absolutely massive, weighing over 5,000 tonnes a piece.
The exotic hadrons were found by LHCb (pictured top). The b stands for the beauty quarks (b quarks) that the LHCb is designed to detect. Hadrons, such as protons and neutrons, are made up of quarks. The Large Hadron Collider, as its name implies, collides protons together at very high energies, smashing them back into quarks. Historically there are only two types of hadron — baryons, which consist of three quarks, and mesons, which consist of two quarks. Now, LHCb is reporting that it’s discovered a third kind of hadron… the exotic hadron!
via Large Hadron Collider discovers a new type of matter: Exotic hadrons | ExtremeTech.