Just millionths of a second after the Big Bang, everything in the known physical universe was in motion. The cosmos was already filled with a trillion-degree plasma made of quarks & gluons, which are elementary particles that only existed for relatively short periods of time before cooling & changing. into more stable particles.
From these come the neutrons & protons that make up our modern day conventional matter. But, before they cool, a tiny fraction of those gluons & quarks randomly-collide, forming “X” particles that don’t last long.
And despite the rarity of these missing & unknown particle structures with which scientists working with CERN have found evidence of X particles in Quark Gluon plasma generated by Large Hadron Collider (LHC), according to a recent study published in the journal Physical Review Study.
And this “is just the beginning of the story,” said YenJie Lee, lead author of the study and 1958 Associate Professor of Physics Professional Development at MIT, in a press release. Crucially, this could be the first chance for scientists to study X-particles in detail & building a better picture of the Big Bang.
Structure of particle from Big Bang
X-particles are rare because we don’t see a big bang every day. But physicists think they suspected they would be formed by a process called quark coalescence in particle accelerators, when high-energy collisions result in plasma flashes that could emulate chaotic, raw conditions of un-conscionably young universe. And now MIT physicists at institution’s Nuclear Sciences Laboratory and elsewhere have uncovered evidence that X-particles can be produced in LHC at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
The discovery was achieved using machine learning techniques that allowed physicists to analyze more than 13 billion heavy-ion collisions All of this then created tens of thousands of charged particles.
And while testing this ultra-dense, high-energy cocktail, MIT researchers discovered about 100 X-particles, specifically the X-type (3872), They are named according to estimated mass of the particle. This is the first time scientists have successfully detected X-particles in this quark-gluon plasma in a way that scientists believe could reveal their mysterious structure.
X particle could be one of entirely new kind
“We have shown that we can find a signal,” lead author Lee said in the press release. “In the next few years we want to use the quark-gluon plasma to study the internal structure of the X particle, which could change our opinion.” What kind of material should the universe produce. The study’s co-authors are part of the CMS Collaboration, which has an international team of scientists working to collect data from one of the LHC’s particle detectors, called the Compact Muon Solenoid.
We have known for a long time that neutrons & protons are the building blocks of atoms & matter. But these, in turn, are made up of three quarks packed tightly together.” “For years we thought that for some reason nature had chosen to produced particles made up of just 2 or 3 quarks,” Lee said in the statement.
Ever since X(3872) was discovered in 2003 during Belle experiment (in Japan), scientists have speculated that X(3872) is either a compact tetraquark or an entirely new type of molecule composed from mesons rather than atoms, former which is composed of 2 quarks. “Currently, our data is consistent with both,” Lee explained. At the moment, several years of studies are needed to distinguish between either scenarios & “broaden our view of the types of particles that were abundantly produced in the early Universe.”
