Three new ‘Exotic’ Sub-Atomic Particles Discovered

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Context:

The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment has observed three never-before-seen particles.

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GS III- Science and Technology

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The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment — which is investigating the slight differences between matter and antimatter by studying a type of particle called the “beauty quark”, or “b quark” — has observed three never-before-seen particles.
The three “exotic” additions — a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks” — to the growing list of new hadrons found at the LHC will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles

Quarks are elementary particles that come in six “flavours”: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom.
They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei.
But they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, called tetraquarks and pentaquarks.
These exotic hadrons were predicted by theorists about six decades ago — around the same time as conventional hadrons — but they have been observed by LHCb and other experiments only in the past 20 years.

According to the CERN release, most exotic hadrons discovered in the past two decades are tetraquarks or pentaquarks containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark — with the remaining two or three quarks being an up, down or strange quark or their antiquarks.

-Source: Indian Express