Scientists have recreated the birth of the universe and discovered the mysterious "X particles"

The physicists of the European Center for Nuclear Research conducted Evidence for X(3872) in Pb-Pb Collisions and Studies of its Prompt Production at √ s N N = 5.02 TeV at the Large Hadron Collider experiment to recreate the quark-gluon plasma. This is a special state of matter in which the Universe was in the first moments after the Big Bang.

In the states we are accustomed to, matter consists of molecules, and they are of atoms. Atoms, in turn, include a nucleus of positive protons and neutral neutrons, as well as negatively charged electrons.

At extremely high temperatures, the nucleus decays into protons and neutrons. They, in turn, consist of quarks connected by gluons - elementary particles that have no mass and are vector gauge bosons.

At ultrahigh particle energies (which, in fact, determine temperatures at the level of trillions of degrees), quarks and gluons separate. A quark-gluon plasma is formed Heavy ions and quark-gluon plasmawhere quarks and gluons move independently of each other.

At the Large Hadron Collider, physicists have accelerated protons and neutrons from 13 billion lead atoms to maximum speeds. The particles crashed into each other, and a quark-gluon plasma was formed, which lasted for several billionths of a second.

After analyzing the experimental data using a neural network, scientists discovered about a hundred unusual mesons X (3872). These are unstable particles, which consist of an equal number of quarks and antiquarks, exist for up to several hundred-millionths of a second, and are usually detected only in the form of fragments. But such a number of mysterious "particles X" could not be obtained before.

The set of quantum characteristics X (3872) turned out to be unusual for mesons in general. They do not fit into the quark model proposed by Gell-Mann and Zweig in 1964, which describes the structure and formation of matter.

The study of X particles should complement the quark model. In general, this is not the first case when the theory did not coincide with the results of experiments, and this each time gives rise to new reasons for scientific research.

It is important that scientists now know how to get a sufficiently large number of X mesons in quark-gluon plasma and analyze data about them using intelligent algorithms. This will help to more accurately describe the first moments of the existence of the Universe after the Big Bang and to better understand the processes that led it to its current state.