Physicists have discovered the particle mysterious from the beginning of time that formed in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest high-energy particle accelerator. This X particle is said to have come from the first seconds of the formation of the universe.
In the first millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with elementary particles such as quarks and gluons, which formed countless combinations before cooling and settling into more stable configurations to make neutrons and protons ordinary matter.
Before cooling, a fraction of these quarks and gluons collide randomly to form short-lived X particles. Named the X particle, because its structure is mysterious and unknown.
Quoted from 9News, now physicists have found evidence of the mysterious particle. The team used machine learning techniques to filter out more than 13 billion heavy ion collisions, each of which resulted in tens of thousands of charged particles.
In the midst of this very dense sea of high-energy particles, the researchers were able to find about 100 X particles. The results, published this week in Physical Review Letters, mark the first time the researchers have detected X particles in the quark-gluon plasma, the environment they predicted. will illuminate the structure of unknown particles.
“This is just the beginning of the story,” said study lead author Associate Professor Yen-Jie Lee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“We have shown that we can find a signal. “In the next few years we want to use the quark-gluon plasma to investigate the internal structure of the X particle, which could change our view of what kind of material the universe produces.”
The study’s co-authors are members of the CMS Collaboration, the international team of scientists that operates and collects data from the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the LHC’s particle detectors.
Particles in plasma
Researchers say the basic building blocks of this material are neutrons and protons, each of which is made of three tightly bonded quarks.
“For years we thought that for some reason, nature had chosen to produce particles made of only two or three quarks,” Professor Lee said.
Recently, physicists have begun to see signs of exotic “tetraquarks,” which are particles made of a rare combination of four quarks.
Scientists suspect that the recently observed X particle, dubbed X (3872), is a compact tetraquark or an entirely new type of molecule made of not an atom but two loosely bound mesons, or a subatomic particle made of two quarks. .
In the next year or two, the researchers plan to collect more data, which will help explain the structure of particle X. If the particle is a tightly bound tetraquark, it should decay more slowly than if it were a loosely bound molecule.
Now, the team has shown X-particles can be detected in the quark-gluon plasma. They plan to investigate this particle with the quark-gluon plasma in more detail, to determine the structure of the X particle.
“Right now our data is consistent with both because we don’t have enough statistics yet. In the next few years we will be taking more data so we can separate these two scenarios,” said Professor Lee.
“That will broaden our view of the types of particles that were produced in abundance in the early formation of the early universe.”
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