The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has confirmed to have found a very rare type of particle, baptized as Z (4430). It is a subatomic particle but it does not match either of the two existing categories of hadrons. It is an exotic hadron .
According to the evidence presented by CERN, this particle has a mass of approximately four times that of the proton, so it does not fit into the traditional scheme of particles (neither baryons nor mesons), since this "exotic hadron" has at least four quarks, two quarks, and two antiquarks .
To reach this confirmation, the LHCb researchers analyzed more than 25,000 decays of B mesons , whose data indicated that Z (4430) is a quantum state, an authentic particle and, with a level of statistical significance close to 14 sigma (the evidence that it is a true observation and not the result of some error in the measurement).
“There were some conjectures about the existence of these types of 'exotic' states, although the finding does not break with the theory of QCD (quantum chromodynamics), reveals aspects of the theory that we now know are not purely speculative, and greatly boosts theoretical research in this direction ”, affirms Bernardo Adeva, researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) and participant in the LHCb experiment.
