Exotic particles can be incredibly ephemeral, sticking around for tiny fractions of a second before decaying. The recent discovery of a new type of particle called a tetraquark may turn out to be equally short-lived, according to a new study casting doubt on the finding, although the issue is not yet settled.
The new tetraquark—an arrangement of four quarks, the fundamental particles that build up the protons and neutrons inside atoms—was first announced in late February by physicists at the DZero experiment at the Tevatron collider at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois. The finding represented a surprising configuration of quarks of four different flavors that was not predicted and could help elucidate the maddeningly complex rules that govern quarks. But now scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the world’s largest particle accelerator, buried beneath Switzerland and France—say they have tried and failed to find confirming evidence for the particle in their own data. “We don’t see any of these tetraquarks at all,” says Sheldon Stone, a Syracuse University physicist who led the analysis for the LHCb experiment. “We contradict their result.”
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