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 .It has reportedly been confirmed by its sister experiment, ATLAS, 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.To better understand the nature of this elusive interaction, physicists will now turn to complex theoretical calculations of the strong nuclear force, called quantum chromodynamics . Quantum bond defies particle expectationsAlthough top quarks are routinely produced in high-energy proton collisions at the LHC, they’re notoriously unstable and decay in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, earning a reputation as solitary particles. That brevity has long made it seem impossible for them to interact in the way lighter quarks do, forming particles like protons or mesons. However, last year, while analyzing a large dataset of top quark–antiquark production from 2016 to 2018 in search of new types of Higgs bosons, CMS researchers spotted an unexpected surplus of top quark–antiquark pairs, which are often seen as a smoking gun for the presence of undiscovered particles.Artist’s impression of the short-lived union of a top quark and a top antiquark formed by the exchange of gluons. Credit: D. Dominguez/CERNThat excess occurred precisely at the minimum energy required to produce such a pair of top quarks, a threshold where the formation of a quasi-bound state becomes more likely. This led the team to consider an alternative hypothesis, a fleeting union of a top quark and antiquark, which was long thought too elusive to detect at the LHC. ATLAS 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 1.3 picobarns, which surpassed the five-sigma threshold required to claim a discovery in particle physics.“The observation of a non-relativistic QCD effect that was thought to be too difficult to detect is a great triumph for the LHC experiment programme,” Gautier Hamel de Monchenault, CMS spokesperson, said, adding that the team looks forward to working closely with theorists better to understand this intriguing aspect of the Standard Model.ATLAS 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. Confirming this will require precise quark and gluon behavior modeling through cutting-edge QCD calculations.This subtle effect was long thought impossible to measure at the LHC, as near-threshold events are rare and hard to detect. “However, thanks to the wealth of proton-proton data recorded during Run 2 of the LHC and advances in analysis techniques, this long-held assumption is now being overturned,” ATLAS 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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