{"id":171482,"date":"2023-09-06T22:26:02","date_gmt":"2023-09-07T03:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/how-tightly-bound-are-hypertritons"},"modified":"2023-09-06T22:26:02","modified_gmt":"2023-09-07T03:26:02","slug":"how-tightly-bound-are-hypertritons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/how-tightly-bound-are-hypertritons","title":{"rendered":"How Tightly Bound Are Hypertritons?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-tightly-bound-are-hypertritons.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is best known for the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, which was made by smashing together high-energy protons (see <a target=\"xrefwindow\" href=\"https:\/\/physics.aps.org\/the-history-of-observations-of-the-higgs-boson\" id=\"d5e102\">Collection: The History of Observations of the Higgs Boson<\/a>). But protons are not the only particles accelerated by the collider, and some studies call for colliding much heavier objects. Now a team working on the LHC\u2019s ALICE experiment has collided lead nuclei to study an exotic particle called a hypertriton [<a href=\"https:\/\/physics.aps.org\/articles\/v16\/s129#c1\" class=\"\">1<\/a>]. The result could help researchers reduce errors in models of the structure of neutron stars.<\/p>\n<p>A hypertriton is a tritium nucleus in which one neutron has been replaced with a lambda hyperon, a heavier particle with a quark configuration of up-down-strange rather than up-down-down. Researchers have long known the energy it takes to bind tritium\u2019s proton and two neutrons. But it was unclear how that energy changed with the neutron\u2013lambda hyperon switch.<\/p>\n<p>The ALICE Collaboration turned to lead\u2013lead collisions to answer this question because these collisions produce hypertritons in much greater numbers than proton\u2013proton ones do. A hypertriton quickly decays into a helium-3 nucleus and a pion, with the decay time and the energy of the decay products depending on the binding energy between the lambda hyperon and the hypertriton core.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is best known for the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, which was made by smashing together high-energy protons (see Collection: The History of Observations of the Higgs Boson). But protons are not the only particles accelerated by the collider, and some studies call for colliding much heavier objects. Now [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}