Scientists at CERN have discovered a fleeting bond between top quarks inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Scientists at CERN have observed an unexpected phenomenon within the world’s largest particle accelerator that suggests that the heaviest and shortest-lived particles in the universe may not be as solitary as once believed.The unforeseen feature in the behavior of top quarks indicates that these elementary particles form a fleeting union previously observed by the CMS experiment at CERN ’s Large Hadron Collider .
, and revealed at the European Physical Society’s High-Energy Physics conference in Marseille, France, on Monday, July 7.The discovery implies that top quarks, also known as truth quarks, which are the most massive of all elementary particles, can momentarily pair up with their antimatter counterparts to produce a quasi-bound-state called toponium.
has confirmed that the same effect exists in its data, thus ruling out simpler explanations and aligning closely with CMS’s findings.As it turns out, top quark–antiquark pairs can linger just long enough to briefly bind into a toponium state, an interaction mediated by gluons, the messengers of the strong nuclear force.Forming a rare unionScientists at CMS measured the production rate of the top quark–antiquark excess to be 8.8 picobarns, with an uncertainty of 1.
confirmed the finding using its full Run-2 dataset collected from 2015 to 2018, reporting a nearly identical cross section of 9.0±1.3 picobarns and rejecting non-toponium models with a significance of 7.7 sigma. However, pinpointing the cause of the unexpected phenomenon remains challenging.One possibility is a new particle, with a mass close to twice that of the top quark, formed in gluon collisions and decaying into a top quark–antiquark pair.
spokesperson Stéphane Willocq said in a press release.If toponium is real, it would mark a major milestone in particle physics, joining charmonium and bottomonium as the latest in a series of short-lived quark-antiquark states. With Run 3 of the LHC underway, scientists are gearing up for more insights into the strong force.
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