LHCb discovers a new type of tetraquark at CERN The LHCb collaboration has observed an exotic particle made up of four charm quarks for the first time. The LHCb collaboration has observed a type of four-quark particle never seen before. The discovery, presented at a recent seminar at CERN and described in a paper posted today on the arXiv preprint server, is likely to be the first of a previously undiscovered class of particles. https://home.cern/news/news/physics/lhcb-discovers-new-type-tetraquark-cern The more particles that are discovered means that more exotic sources of energy are out there, just waiting to be discovered.
The CERN article is more interesting. https://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/Welcome.html#Tcccc Any particle that is not forbidden will eventually be detected given enough time - so I expect there will be bottom, top, strange, up, and down versions of this tetraquark. This one appears to have a combined mass almost exactly equal to the sum of two types of D0 mesons (which is also a possible decay path) so perhaps it's not a true tetraquark? D0 mesons consist of a charm and anti-up quark pair rather than the charm anti-charm quark pair in a J/Psi meson -- it's of interest to aficionados of such things, apparently. I'm not envisaging any potential as an energy source seeing as such particles are unstable and require a much larger expenditure of energy to produce than their intrinsic mass-energy.
Large Hadron was just a consolation prize for the death of the superconducting supercollider. Now, this design reminds me of particle beam weapons, just underground. I’d like to see a port to allow the beam to shoot up for atmospheric research, chip sat or starwisp propulsion, etc. I wonder if upward super bolts might be a vector for virus fountaining...