LHCb’s hunt for new particles
The LHCb experiments unique designs turns the detector into a spectrometer perfectly suited to not only study all types of quark bound states, but to discover new ones.
While the discovery of the Higgs boson is the most famous new and the only fundamental particle found at the LHC, 72 new bound states have been found as well (August 2023).
64 for of these new hadrons have been discovered by the LHCb experiment. While these include some new mesons and baryons, it also includes 23 new exotic hadrons. These are distinguished in pentaquarks consisting out of two quarks and two anti-quarks and tetraquarks, which combine five quarks in total.
Many of these newly observed hadrons, contain at least one beauty or charm quark, explaining LHCb’s advantage in their discovery.
Beside the first observation of these states, the dataset collected with the LHCb experiment is used to study the properties of these states precisely and try to find the answer to their nature.