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PARTICLE PHYSICS

A tetraquark trophy

Nature Physics (2022)Cite this article

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The hunt for new particles helps to complete our understanding of hadronic matter. The LHCb Collaboration now reports the surprising observation of a doubly charmed tetraquark.

What is the matter in our Universe made of? The Greek philosopher Democritus believed that everything is made of what he called atoms. Today, we know that atoms consist of subatomic particles, such as electrons and nucleons, which in turn contain quarks. Bound together by the strong force, quarks form composite particles, so-called hadrons. These are usually classified as mesons consisting of a quark and an antiquark pair and baryons made of three quarks. Now writing in Nature Physics, the LHCb Collaboration has reported1 the discovery of a new particle, called Tcc+. It contains two charm quarks and two light antiquarks (an up antiquark and a down antiquark) and thus is a tetraquark. It’s the first of its kind, and it has a surprisingly long lifetime.

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Fig. 1: Quark soup of the tetraquark particle family.

References

  1. Aaij, R. et al. (LHCb Collaboration) Nat. Phys. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01614-y (2022).

  2. Ablikim, M. et al. (BESIII Collaboration) Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 252001 (2013).

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  5. Aaij, R. et al. (LHCb Collaboration) Nat. Commun. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-30206-w (2022).

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  1. Shandong University, Jinan, China

    Zhiqing Liu

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  1. Zhiqing Liu
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Correspondence to Zhiqing Liu.

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Liu, Z. A tetraquark trophy. Nat. Phys. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01620-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01620-0

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