Upon close inspection, the tetraquark family members are consistent with tightly bound diquark pairs

The CMS Collaboration has identified three extremely rare same-flavor teraquark states and determined, based on their spin-parity configuration, that they are consistent with a diquark-antidiquark model.

In recent years, a long-standing orthodoxy that all strongly interacting particles (hadrons) are either pairs (mesons) or triplets (baryons) of quarks (q) has been fundamentally overturned. Rapid progress has been made in identifying a plethora of candidates for “exotic hadrons”, including tetraquarks (qq̅qq̅) and pentaquarks (qqqqq̅), now recognized within the scientific community.