The strong interaction is one of the fundamental forces of nature, which binds quarks into hadrons such as the proton and the neutron, the building blocks of atoms. According to the quark model, ...

When the quark model was formulated in the 1960s by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, they predicted that mesons (two-quark hadrons) and baryons (three-quark hadrons) would not be the only hadrons in ...

Pentaquarks do not fit into the traditional quark model of hadrons, but understanding these exotic new particles is offering fresh insights into the subtleties of the strong interaction Five quarks In ...

Now, the LHCb experiment at the LHC has observed three never-before-seen particles: a new type of pentaquark, and two new tetraquarks. Quarks are elementary particles that combine to make hadrons, the ...

Hadrons count among their number the familiar protons and neutrons that make up our atoms, but they are much more than that. In the early 1900s, physicists were trying to find the source of a ...

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is also a big hadron discoverer. The atom smasher near Geneva, Switzerland, is most famous for demonstrating the existence of the Higgs boson in 2012, a discovery that ...

Physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced on 5 July that they had observed three exotic new types of particles that had never been seen before—shining a light into ...

Light and heavy New calculations reveal quark distributions in flavour-asymmetric mesons. (Courtesy: iStock Traffic-Analyzer) The distribution of quarks inside flavour-asymmetric mesons has been ...

A supercomputer simulation of the "primordial soup" has revealed that its inner structure is surprisingly complex. When our universe burst into existence approximately 13.8 billion years ago, it ...

An unforeseen feature in proton-proton collisions previously observed by the CMS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has now been confirmed by its sister experiment ATLAS. Subscribe to ...

Harry Cliff is a member of the LHCb Collaboration, though he was not directly involved in the work described in this article. Everything you see around you is made up of elementary particles called ...

Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces from Imperial College London.View full profile Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum ...