Today, researchers with the LHCb experiment at CERN announced the confirmation of a weird object that first appeared in detectors in 2008. This object is made up of four quarks, where other particles are made of two or three quarks (or zero, in the case of electrons, neutrinos, and the like). But what sort of beast is this? As is often the case, more work is needed before we can say for ccertain.

With that much data, physicists were able to determine the composition of the Z(4430)^–: it consists of a charm quark, a charm anti-quark, a down quark, and an up antiquark. The “4430” part of the name indicates its mass: 4,430 million electron-volts, which a little more than four times the mass of a proton (938 million electron volts). The combination of quarks gives the Z(4430)^– a negative electric charge, hence the “-” in the label. The particle is highly unstable, so none of them are expected to be seen in nature. [Read more…]