The physics of the Massachusetts Technological Institute (MIT) found evidence of the existence of X particles in a quark gluon plasma, which is produced on a large hadron collider at CERN. This is reported in the article published in the magazine Physical Review Letters.
It is known that after a large explosion, the universe was a plasma consisting of quarks and gluons – elementary particles, which formed various unstable particles before cooling and forming Androna (including protons and neutrons). It is believed that exotic X particles of an unknown structure occurred before cooling from quarks and gluons. X particles can also occur within particle accelerators capable of generating a quark gluon plasma.
Researchers took advantage of machine learning methods to allocate candidate events among 13 billion clashes of heavy ions, each of which produced tens of thousands of charged particles. The results of the analysis indicated about a hundred X (3872) particles (3872) – species of X particles, which received its designation due to the calculated mass. According to the data obtained, this particle is a compact tetrakvark (consists of four quarks) or a completely new type of molecules consisting of not classical atoms, and from two mesons, which, in turn, are formed by two quarks.
For the first time, the evidence of the existence of X (3872) was obtained in 2003 in the experiment at the Japanese collider Belle, however, the particles disintegrated too quickly so that scientists could study their structure in detail. However, in a new study, scientists managed to detect an unusual distribution of flying particles indicating the existence of a disintegrating X particle.