![quark flavours quark flavours](https://cdn1.byjus.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/physics/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/3-1.png)
This latest discovery comes on the heels of the first observation of a pentaquark-a five-quark particle-announced last year by the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. “They could all be scrunched together in one tight ball, or they might be one pair of tightly bound quarks that revolves at some distance from the other pair.”įour-quark states are rare, and although there’s nothing in nature that forbids the formation of a tetraquark, scientists don’t understand them nearly as well as they do two- and three-quark states. “The next question will be to understand how the four quarks are put together,” says DZero co-spokesperson Paul Grannis. While all other observed tetraquarks contain at least two of the same flavor, X(5568) has four different flavors: up, down, strange and bottom. “Only after we performed multiple cross-checks did we start to believe that the signal we saw could not be explained by backgrounds or known processes, but was evidence of a new particle.”Īnd the X(5568) is not just any new tetraquark. “At first, we didn’t believe it was a new particle,” says DZero co-spokesperson Dmitri Denisov. Although the Tevatron was retired in 2011, the experiments continue to analyze billions of previously recorded events from its collisions.Īs is the case with many discoveries, the tetraquark observation came as a surprise when DZero scientists first saw hints in July 2015 of the new particle, called X(5568), named for its mass-5568 megaelectronvolts. Since then physicists have glimpsed a handful of different tetraquark candidates, including now the recent discovery by DZero-the first observed to contain four different quark flavors.ĭZero is one of two experiments at Fermilab’s Tevatron collider. In 2003 scientists on the Belle experiment in Japan reported the first evidence of quarks hanging out as a foursome, forming a tetraquark. Over the last 60 years, scientists have observed hundreds of combinations of quark duos and trios. Each of these also has an antimatter counterpart. There are six types, or “flavors,” of quark to choose from: up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top.
![quark flavours quark flavours](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e4/Hadron_colors.svg/170px-Hadron_colors.svg.png)
Quarks are point-like particles that typically come in packages of two or three, the most familiar of which are the proton and neutron (each is made of three quarks). Department of Energy’s Fermilab have discovered a new particle-the latest member to be added to the exotic species of particle known as tetraquarks. Scientists on the DZero collaboration at the U.S.