Since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, scientists in the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been hard at work characterizing its properties and hunting down the diverse ways in which this ephemeral particle can decay. From the copious but experimentally challenging decay to b-quarks, to the exquisitely rare but low-background decay into four…
Tag: quarks
Researchers set new bounds on the mass of leptoquarks
At the most fundamental level, matter is made up of two types of particles: leptons, such as the electron, and quarks, which combine to form protons, neutrons and other composite particles. Under the Standard Model of particle physics, both leptons and quarks fall into three generations of increasing mass. Otherwise, the two kinds of particles are distinct. But some theories that…
Physicists say they’ve found a ‘tetraquark’
On July 1, scientists announced the discovery of a new exotic particle – a so-called “tetraquark” – a finding that marks a major breakthrough in a search of almost 20 years, carried out in particle physics labs all over the world. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/cern-physicists-discovery-new-particle-tetraquark…