Artist's impression of Tcc+, a new particle made up two charm quarks: an up and a down.Scientists from the largest atom smasher in the world have found the longest-living exotic-matter particle yet discovered. It has twice as much charm than anything else.Although physicists are yet to investigate the mysterious nature of this new particle, called a double-charm Tetraquark, it is a really strange mix that contains an unusual combination of two matter and two antimatter particles. The doubly charming particle is so bizarre that we don’t know how it sticks together.Quarks are the basic building blocks of matter. They come in six types or "flavors", each having their own mass and charge. Although many tetraquarks have been discovered in recent years by physicists, this latest addition, a mixture between two charm quarks, and two antimatter quiarks, is the first "doubly charming" one. It contains two charm quarks, but no charm antiquarks.Related: Beyond Higgs - 5 mysterious particles that lurk in the universeThe arrangement of quarks inside the new Tetraquark is unknown. They may all be glued together equally. Or they could be two quark/antiquark pairs that are mixed loosely into a "molecule". Matteo Palutan (a particle physicist at National Laboratories of Frascati, Italy, and deputy spokesperson for Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment (LHCb), told Live Science.This discovery was made through the analysis of particle decays that occurred in Large Hadron Collider. (Image credit: Shutterstock)Quarks are unable to exist by themselves so they combine into particle "recipes", called hadrons. Baryons are mixtures of three quarks, such as the neutron and the proton. Mesons are made up of mesons and mesons.There is no rule that quarks must only exist in pairs or threes. Chris Parkes is a University of Manchester physicist and spokesperson for the LHCb experiment. He stated that theories have predicted the existence of quarks in hadrons with more than two or three quarks. However, only recently have physicists noticed these combinations briefly waking into existence. In 2003, the Belle experiment in Japan discovered the first tetraquark. Since then, scientists have discovered many of the four-quark hadrons. In 2015, two more were discovered, which they called "pentaquarks". These contained five.These quark-quark combinations are called exotic particles. They have unique properties that can help physicists understand or rewrite the laws of matter.Parkes stated that there are many predictions about exotic states and their properties. He was referring to the numerous extensions proposed to the Standard Model, which is a theory that describes all the fundamental particles and their interactions but does not include details about exotic particles or how they might be glued together. We will continue to discover exotic hadrons and tune these models, as well as test their predictions so we can better understand how quarks combine to create hadrons.A man rides his bicycle along the section of CERN's particle accelerator. (Image credit to VALENTIN FLAURAUD/AFP via Getty ImagesExotic particles can be fascinating objects to study but their short lives make it difficult to research. Researchers said that the double-charm Tetraquark's relatively long life span (known scientifically as Tcc+), causes it to appear in Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, for a little longer than one-quintillionths of a second before it decomposes into lighter particles.The double-charm Tetraquark is able to live for longer than other exotic particles. Its long lifespan and the small particles it decays into make it an ideal candidate for physicists who want to probe previously unknown effects or test theoretical models.The LHC's physicists discovered the new tetraquark by "bump hunting," which has led to the discovery of 62 new hadrons, including the Higgs boson. Bump hunting is simply a way to look at data from thousands of millions of interactions recorded by the LHC's detectors. Once all background noise and signals from known interactions are ruled out, any sudden spike in system readings could be a sign that something is more. Parkes stated that bump hunts can take up to three years.Tetraquarks usually decay via the strong force, one of the four fundamental powers of nature. However, they don't necessarily have to do so. Although Tcc+ is able to decay through the strong force, scientists believe it may point the way for a yet-to be discovered tetraquark. This tetraquark cannot be broken down in this manner. Tbbb, a cousin to Tcc+ but not yet discovered, is supposed to decay through the weak force. This would give it a life expectancy orders of magnitude longer that Tcc+ and any other quarks, Palutan explained to Live Science.The Tbbb is more difficult to spot than any other tetraquark, so physicists will need to use a stronger detector. Parkes thinks it unlikely that the data used to locate the Tcc+ was derived from data from previous LHC online runs. Instead, researchers plan to search for the particle in data from a new run that will use an upgraded detector. This will be done next year.Palutan stated that the new detector will allow them to accumulate signal events at five-fold the rate they were used to in the past years. We are confident that we can catch the Tbb if it is present. It's a matter of patience.Original publication on Live Science
