CERN: physicists report the discovery of unique new particle

theconversation.com

27 points·simplertms··7 comments

> The paper by more than 800 authors is yet to be evaluated by other scientists in a process called “peer review”

"'Peer review'? Hey Professor Einstein go easy on the technical terms. We're only human here!"

That was a very strange sentence to read. Is that really how little they assume the reader knows? I almost took it as a comment on the expected quality of the peer review.

I'm pretty sure the average american does not know what peer review means.

It's also worth noting that for a paper from the collaboration to have to got to the preprint stage it will have gone through a very strict internal review process with several layers.

Source: I working in the LHCb collaboration for several years.

The writing is so terrible it is almost tongue-in-cheek to be imagined as recited by Sheldon Cooper. And no author credit.

tl;dr: It's a tetraquark, not a fundamental particle. We've seen tetraquarks before, just not one made out of four charmed particles. And it's not 100% clear that it's actually a tetraquark rather than two mesons.

Better link: https://home.cern/news/news/physics/lhcb-discovers-new-type-...

2019: CERN Pentaquark found (7.3 sigma)

https://home.cern/news/news/physics/lhcb-experiment-discover...

https://theconversation.com/exotic-particles-containing-five...

How many particles can be made of other particles? Stay tuned!

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