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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...

New York, March 3 : A team of US researchers has detected a new form of elementary particle called the "four-flavoured" tetraquark that can affect scientists' understanding of "quark matter" -- the hot, dense material that existed moments after the Big Bang and may still exist in the super-dense interior of neutron stars. For most of the history of quarks, it's seemed that all particles were made of either a quark and an antiquark or three quarks, "This new particle is unique -- a strange, charged beauty. It's the birth of a new paradigm. Particles made of four quarks --...