Physicists Just Detected a Very Odd Particle That Isn't a Particle at All

By Paul Sutter 6 hours ago Science & Astronomy



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It sounds like the start of a very bad physics riddle: I'm a particle that really isn't; I vanish before I can even be detected, yet can be seen. I break your understanding of physics but don't overhaul your knowledge. Who am I?

It's an odderon, a particle that's even more odd than its name suggests, and it may have recently been detected at the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful atom smasher, where particles are zipped at near light speed around a 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) ring near Geneva in Switzerland.

It's just complicated
First off, the odderon is not really a particle. What we think of as particles are usually very stable: electrons, protons, quarks, neutrinos and so on. You can hold a bunch of them in your hand and carry them around with you. Heck, your hand is literally made of them. And your hand isn't vanishing into thin air anytime soon, so we can probably safely assume that its fundamental particles are in for the long term. [7 Strange Facts About Quarks]

There are other particles that don't last long but still get to be called particles. Despite their short lifetimes, they remain particles. They're free, independent and able to live on their own, separate from any interactions — those are the hallmarks of a real particle.

More:
https://www.space.com/odderons-quasiparticles-detected.html