Zc(3900)

Last updated
Zc(3900)
Composition Exotic meson
StatusOn hold

The Zc(3900) is a hadron, a type of subatomic particle made of quarks, believed to be the first tetraquark that has been observed experimentally. The discovery was made in 2013 by two independent research groups: one using the BES III detector at the Chinese Beijing Electron Positron Collider, the other being part of the Belle experiment group at the Japanese KEK particle physics laboratory. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Contents

The Zc(3900) is a decay product of the previously observed anomalous Y(4260) particle. [6]

The Zc(3900) in turn decays into a charged pion±) and a J/ψ meson. This is consistent with the Zc(3900) containing four or more quarks. [5]

The first evidence of the neutral Zc(3900) was provided by CLEO-c in 2013. [5] It was later observed by BESIII in 2015. It decays into a neutral pion0) and a J/ψ meson. [7]

Researchers were expected to run decay experiments in 2013 to determine the particle's nature with more precision.[ citation needed ]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hadron</span> Composite subatomic particle

In particle physics, a hadron is a composite subatomic particle made of two or more quarks held together by the strong interaction. They are analogous to molecules that are held together by the electric force. Most of the mass of ordinary matter comes from two hadrons: the proton and the neutron, while most of the mass of the protons and neutrons is in turn due to the binding energy of their constituent quarks, due to the strong force.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meson</span> Subatomic particle; made of equal numbers of quarks and antiquarks

In particle physics, a meson is a type of hadronic subatomic particle composed of an equal number of quarks and antiquarks, usually one of each, bound together by the strong interaction. Because mesons are composed of quark subparticles, they have a meaningful physical size, a diameter of roughly one femtometre (10−15 m), which is about 0.6 times the size of a proton or neutron. All mesons are unstable, with the longest-lived lasting for only a few tenths of a nanosecond. Heavier mesons decay to lighter mesons and ultimately to stable electrons, neutrinos and photons.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Omega baryon</span> Subatomic hadron particle

The omega baryons are a family of subatomic hadron particles that are represented by the symbol
Ω
and are either neutral or have a +2, +1 or −1 elementary charge. They are baryons containing no up or down quarks. Omega baryons containing top quarks are not expected to be observed. This is because the Standard Model predicts the mean lifetime of top quarks to be roughly 5×10−25 s, which is about a twentieth of the timescale for strong interactions, and therefore that they do not form hadrons.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charm quark</span> Type of quark

The charm quark, charmed quark, or c quark is an elementary particle found in composite subatomic particles called hadrons such as the J/psi meson and the charmed baryons created in particle accelerator collisions. Several bosons, including the W and Z bosons and the Higgs boson, can decay into charm quarks. All charm quarks carry charm, a quantum number. This second generation is the third-most-massive quark with a mass of 1.27±0.02 GeV/c2 as measured in 2022 and a charge of +2/3e.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pentaquark</span> Human-made subatomic particle

A pentaquark is a human-made subatomic particle, consisting of four quarks and one antiquark bound together; they are not known to occur naturally, or exist outside of experiments specifically carried out to create them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tetraquark</span> Exotic meson composed of four valence quarks

In particle physics, a tetraquark is an exotic meson composed of four valence quarks. A tetraquark state has long been suspected to be allowed by quantum chromodynamics, the modern theory of strong interactions. A tetraquark state is an example of an exotic hadron which lies outside the conventional quark model classification. A number of different types of tetraquark have been observed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J/psi meson</span> Subatomic particle made of a charm quark and antiquark

The
J/ψ
(J/psi) meson is a subatomic particle, a flavor-neutral meson consisting of a charm quark and a charm antiquark. Mesons formed by a bound state of a charm quark and a charm anti-quark are generally known as "charmonium" or psions. The
J/ψ
is the most common form of charmonium, due to its spin of 1 and its low rest mass. The
J/ψ
has a rest mass of 3.0969 GeV/c2, just above that of the
η
c
, and a mean lifetime of 7.2×10−21 s. This lifetime was about a thousand times longer than expected.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quarkonium</span> Meson whose constituents are a quark and its own antiquark of the same flavor

In particle physics, quarkonium is a flavorless meson whose constituents are a heavy quark and its own antiquark, making it both a neutral particle and its own antiparticle. The name "quarkonium" is analogous to positronium, the bound state of electron and anti-electron. The particles are short-lived due to matter-antimatter annihilation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exotic hadron</span> Subatomic particles consisting of quarks and gluons

Exotic hadrons are subatomic particles composed of quarks and gluons, but which – unlike "well-known" hadrons such as protons, neutrons and mesons – consist of more than three valence quarks. By contrast, "ordinary" hadrons contain just two or three quarks. Hadrons with explicit valence gluon content would also be considered exotic. In theory, there is no limit on the number of quarks in a hadron, as long as the hadron's color charge is white, or color-neutral.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Belle experiment</span>

The Belle experiment was a particle physics experiment conducted by the Belle Collaboration, an international collaboration of more than 400 physicists and engineers, at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation (KEK) in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. The experiment ran from 1999 to 2010.

CLEO was a general purpose particle detector at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR), and the name of the collaboration of physicists who operated the detector. The name CLEO is not an acronym; it is short for Cleopatra and was chosen to go with CESR. CESR was a particle accelerator designed to collide electrons and positrons at a center-of-mass energy of approximately 10 GeV. The energy of the accelerator was chosen before the first three bottom quark Upsilon resonances were discovered between 9.4 GeV and 10.4 GeV in 1977. The fourth Υ resonance, the Υ(4S), was slightly above the threshold for, and therefore ideal for the study of, B meson production.

The Xi baryons or cascade particles are a family of subatomic hadron particles which have the symbol Ξ and may have an electric charge of +2 e, +1 e, 0, or −1 e, where e is the elementary charge.

The
B
s
meson
is a meson composed of a bottom antiquark and a strange quark. Its antiparticle is the
B
s
meson
, composed of a bottom quark and a strange antiquark.

The X(3872) is an exotic meson candidate with a mass of 3871.68 MeV/c2 which does not fit into the quark model because of its quantum numbers. It was first discovered in 2003 by the Belle experiment in Japan and later confirmed by several other experimental collaborations. Several theories have been proposed for its nature, such as a mesonic molecule or a diquark-antidiquark pair (tetraquark).

Z(4430) is a mesonic resonance discovered by the Belle experiment. It has a mass of 4430 MeV/c2. The resonant nature of the peak has been confirmed by the LHCb experiment with a significance of at least 13.9 σ. The particle is charged and is thought to have a quark content of
c

c

d

u
, making it a tetraquark candidate. It has the spin-parity quantum numbers JP = 1+.

The bottom eta meson or eta-b meson is a flavourless meson formed from a bottom quark and its antiparticle. It was first observed by the BaBar experiment at SLAC in 2008, and is the lightest particle containing a bottom and anti-bottom quark.

The Y(4140) particle is an electrically neutral exotic hadron candidate that is about 4.4 times heavier than the proton. It was observed at Fermilab and announced on 17 March 2009. This particle is extremely rare and was detected in only 20 of billions of collisions.

The Y(4260) is an anomalous particle with an energy of 4260 MeV which does not appear to fit into the quark model. It was discovered by the BaBar experiment at Stanford University for the Department of Energy in California and later confirmed by several other experimental collaborations. It being a Charmonium state is unlikely because the Y(4260) is heavier than the threshold for production of two D mesons, yet sits, surprisingly in a dip in the production rate for pairs of D's. It is a possibility that it is a hybrid—a predicted but not-yet-seen type of particle, where a gluon is actually a permanent part of the makeup of the particle, instead of just an ephemeral messenger keeping the quarks bound together.

In particle physics, XYZ particles are recently-discovered heavy mesons whose properties do not appear to fit the standard picture of charmonium and bottomonium states. They are therefore types of exotic mesons. The term arises from the names given to some of the first such particles discovered: X(3872), Y(4260) and Zc(3900), although the symbols X and Y have since been deprecated by the Particle Data Group.

SooKyung Choi is a South Korean particle physicist at Gyeongsang National University. She is part of the Belle experiment and was the first to observe the X(3872) meson in 2003. She won the 2017 Ho-Am Prize in Science.

References

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