Intriguing signs from CERN hint at a never-before-seen form of matter – one that could be the tiniest particle cluster ever detected.
Top quarks, typically too short-lived to pair up, may have briefly bonded into a mysterious object known as toponium. This unexpected observation challenges assumptions about particle behavior at the LHC and could reshape how physicists explore the quantum frontier.
Researchers with the CMS collaboration at CERN have detected an unexpected feature in data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that could point to a new kind of particle – possibly the smallest composite particle ever observed.
The finding, presented last week at the Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy, suggests that top quarks – the most massive and shortest-lived of the known elementary particles – may briefly form a bound state with their antimatter partners. This short-lived pairing, known as toponium, has long been considered too difficult to observe at the LHC. While the data hint at its possible existence, other explanations remain on the table, and confirmation will require further analysis from the LHC’s other major experiment, ATLAS.
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