'X particle' from the dawn of time detected inside the Large Hadron Collider

Physicists at the world's largest atom smasher have detected a primordial particle.

For the first time, about 100 of the short-lived particles, so named because of their unknown structures, were spotted among trillions of other particles inside the Large Hadron collider.

The quark-gluon plasma formed in the LHC by smashing together lead ion was the source of the X particles. Scientists hope to build the most accurate picture of the origins of the universe by studying the primordial X particles in more detail. They published their findings in a journal.

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The lead author of the paper, a particle physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement that the story was just beginning. In the next few years, we want to use the quark-gluon plasma to probe the X particle's internal structure, which could change our view of what kind of material the universe should produce.

The X particles were created just a few millionths of a second after the Big bang, when the universe was a soup of quarks and gluons.

The quarks and gluons formed very short-lived X particles just before this rapid cooling. The researchers don't know how elementary particles form the X particle. If the scientists can figure that out, they will have a better idea of the types of particles that were abundant in the universe.

To recreate the conditions of a universe in its infancy, researchers at the LHC fired positively charged lead atoms at each other at high speed, smashing them to produce thousands more particles in a momentary burst of plasma resembling the chaotic primordial soup of the young universe. The easy part was that. The hard part was finding the X particles from 13 billion head-on ion collisions.

The production of X particles should be enhanced because there are so many quarks and gluons.

The researchers had a clue. Although particle physicists don't know the structure of the X particle, they do know that it should have a very distinct decay pattern because it zips off across a very different spread of angles than other particles. The researchers were able to create an algorithm that picked out the telltale signs of dozens of X particles.

It's almost unthinkable that we can tease out these 100 particles from this huge dataset. The data said yes in the end.

The X particle's internal structure can now be determined by the researchers. The X particle is made up of three quarks, but the researchers think it will look different. They know that the new particle has four quarks, but they don't know how they're tied up. An exotic particle called a tetraquark or two quark pairs are bound to each other by four quarks.

Lee said that their data is consistent with both structures because they don't have enough statistics yet. That will help us understand the types of particles that were produced in the early universe.

It was originally published on Live Science.