Discover More: First detection of exotic 'X' particles in quark-gluon plasma

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First detection of 

exotic 'X' particles in 

quark-gluon plasma

Date Posted: 25th January 2022



Physicists have found evidence of X particles in the quark-gluon plasma produced in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, based near Geneva, Switzerland.

In the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a trillion-degree plasma of quarks and gluons - elementary particles that briefly glommed together in countless combinations before cooling and settling into more stable configurations to make the neutrons and protons of ordinary matter.

I will be talking about quark-gluon plasma in my blog; however, for now, you can understand that a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was an incredibly dense plasma, so hot that no nuclei nor even nuclear particles could exist. The plasma consisted of quarks, the particles that compose nucleons and some other elementary particles, and gluons, the massless particles that “carry” the force between quarks.
 
(Read my latest article - Introduction to Standard Model for an introduction to these particles!)

In the chaos before cooling, a fraction of these quarks and gluons collided randomly to form short-lived "X" particles, so named for their mysterious, unknown structures. Today, X particles are extremely rare, though physicists have theorized that they may be created in particle accelerators through quark coalescence (the joining or merging of elements to form one mass or whole), where high-energy collisions can generate similar flashes of quark-gluon plasma.

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Read More: Link to Article On Science Daily 

Citation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (2022, January 25). Scientists make first detection of exotic 'X' particles in quark-gluon plasma: The findings could redefine the kinds of particles that were abundant in the early universe.. ScienceDaily. Retrieved January 25, 2022 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220124115044.htm

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