Scientists Discovered a Shockingly Tiny New Particle. They’ve Never Seen Anything Like It.

> The hypothetical 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.

> This discovery was something of an accident, as it emerged out of the search for new types of Higgs bosons. Instead of bosons, what came up was a signal from a type of fermion—a particle whose spin has only odd half-integer values such as 1/2 or 3/2. The particular fermion they found is a top quark.

> Top quarks, in particular, are already the heaviest known elementary particles—the basic particles that makes up matter—clocking in at 184 times the mass of a proton. Some quarks produced from smashed protons are massive enough to decay into top quark-antiquark pairs, or tt-bar. If this happens, protons will disintegrate into streams of particles.

> But wait—shouldn’t a matter and antimatter particle annihilate each other? **Usually, but not in this scenario.** Instead, the top quarks decay into a bottom quark and a W boson, which is one of two bosons responsible for the weak force. **That doesn’t happen in any other bound matter-antimatter pair that we know of,** and it happens in the time it takes for light to travel just one femtometer, which is one tenth of one quadrillionth of a meter.

I need to sit down. My dinner plans have radically changed.

They’ve never seen anything like it??? Probably because it’s so small.

“Physics” is Nature’s ineffable name

for [milliards](https://g.co/kgs/prhd9df) and millards and millards

of particles playing their infinite game

of billiards and billiards and billiards.

– – Piet Hein, [*Grooks*](https://g.co/kgs/YgbLZp1)