This new particle is so small it makes an atom look enormous.
In their search for more flavors of Higgs bosons, a team of researchers at CERN stumbled across what could be evidence of the smallest matter-antimatter particle ever. The hypoethical particle, known as toponium, would be the result of merging a top quark and antiquark as well as the last missing example of quark-antiquark states known as quarkonium. Toponium particles, at least in theory, do not annihilate each other almost but instantly decay into a bottom quark and a W boson—one of two bosons responsible for the weak nuclear force. As if atoms weren't already mind-blowingly small, never mind subatomic particles, CERN researchers in the CMS Collaboration were sifting through data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and potentially picked up a signal for what could be—if proven—the smallest composite particle ever. This discovery was something of an accident, as it emerged out of the search for new types of Higgs bosons. A boson is a subatomic particle with an angular momentum (spin) that has integer values. Photons are bosons, as are gluons, which act as force carriers in the nucleus. These are released by one particle and travel to another to create forces such as gravity or electromagnetism. Higgs bosons stand out because they are the particles produced when the Higgs field—a field in particle physics theory that is supposed to give other particles mass—is excited by an accelerator like the LHC. But in their search for more Higgs particles, the research team ended up finding something weirder. Related Story The Higgs Could Explain Why…