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RichardGarfinkle
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Very intriguiging. The chromodynamics imply the possibility of very high energy particles made up of many more combinations. Of course, more than four would be horrendously high energy.
Still there's SFnal possibilities here.
Still there's SFnal possibilities here.
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[1304.3036] Observation of the Charged Hadron Zc(3900) at sqrt(s)=4170 MeV
It's a 4-quark hadron: up, antidown, charm, anticharm
(positively charged; negatively charged version has antiparticles of all of these)
All other known hadrons are either:
Mesons: ordinary quark, antiquark
Baryon: 3 ordinary quarks / 3 antiquarks
The Zc(3900) decays into two mesons:
J/psi: charm, anticharm
charged pion: up, antidown
The Zc(3900), like many other particles produced by accelerators, is too evanescent to last long enough to make a track in a detector. So its production is inferred from its decay products.
There's some controversy over the particle's structure. Is it a two-meson molecule? Or are the four quarks all mixed together? If the particle is observed to decay in some additional fashions, we may have some clues to that.
It's a 4-quark hadron: up, antidown, charm, anticharm
(positively charged; negatively charged version has antiparticles of all of these)
All other known hadrons are either:
Mesons: ordinary quark, antiquark
Baryon: 3 ordinary quarks / 3 antiquarks
The Zc(3900) decays into two mesons:
J/psi: charm, anticharm
charged pion: up, antidown
The Zc(3900), like many other particles produced by accelerators, is too evanescent to last long enough to make a track in a detector. So its production is inferred from its decay products.
There's some controversy over the particle's structure. Is it a two-meson molecule? Or are the four quarks all mixed together? If the particle is observed to decay in some additional fashions, we may have some clues to that.