Posted on 08/03/2021 8:37:51 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Meet the double-charm tetraquark, the longest-lived exotic matter particle yet discovered.
Exotic particles like this can be created within accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, but they pop into and out of existence extremely quickly. This new particle is considered to have a long lifespan before it decays, but “long” in this case is still so short it can hardly be measured in human terms. Its lifespan is probably a little longer than one-quintillionth of a second...
Like many other quark states, this double-charm tetraquark was found at LHCb using a method called bump hunting. Basically, the researchers fire up the particle accelerator and let particles collide, keeping their eyes peeled for an unexpected amount of energy or mass in the system. When they get results out of sync with the system’s basic noise after they’ve filtered out all irrelevant signals, the researchers have a clue they’ve stumbled across something new; it was bump hunting that revealed the Higgs boson in 2012. The 62 hadrons so far discovered at the Large Hadron Collider have basically been cajoled out of obscurity by the accelerator’s extreme physics and the vast team that labors over all the machinery and data.
The double-charm tetraquark (written scientifically as Tcc+) decays so slowly because it’s just slightly heavier than the particles it decays into. Its rare configuration puts it in a class of candidates for stable exotic hadronic states. Previous results from the LHCb allowed theoretical physicists to predict in 2017 that a similar tetraquark, called Tbb, could be entirely stable, meaning it would not decay at all through the force of strong interaction.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
I had a tetraquark.
It died..........................
That is so cool! Maybe I can use one to help keep my pool clean.
Does the require a /S?
IOW about as long as a politicians promise.
You probably fed it after midnight or more than once a day.
‘E’s not dead! Your Tetraquark is just pinin’ for the Fijords!
God says: “You’re getting warm, no colder, colder, OK, warmer....”
It’s a double charm tetraquark. Is it magically delicious?
Need funding for a bigger collider?
Worried about the dwindling possibility of ever getting the money (25-to-100 billion dollars)?
Want to distract from all the failed scientific theories and experiments throughout particle physics?
Keep on bumping!
2. (Mathematics) (in the US and Canada) the number represented as one followed by 18 zeros (1018).
That's a minor disagreement of 12 orders of magnitude between the Brits and Americans.
Is the "quintillionth of a second" in this article and American quintillionth or a British quintillionth? It's a bit of vital information I need to fully comprehend this discovery.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.