{"id":217414,"date":"2025-07-08T22:11:28","date_gmt":"2025-07-09T03:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/elusive-romance-of-top-quark-pairs-observed-at-the-lhc"},"modified":"2025-07-08T22:11:28","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T03:11:28","slug":"elusive-romance-of-top-quark-pairs-observed-at-the-lhc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/elusive-romance-of-top-quark-pairs-observed-at-the-lhc","title":{"rendered":"Elusive romance of top-quark pairs observed at the LHC"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/elusive-romance-of-top-quark-pairs-observed-at-the-lhc2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>An unforeseen feature in proton-proton collisions previously observed by the CMS experiment at CERN\u2019s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has now been confirmed by its sister experiment ATLAS. The result, reported yesterday at the European Physical Society\u2019s High-Energy Physics conference in Marseille, suggests that top quarks \u2013 the heaviest and shortest-lived of all the elementary particles \u2013 can momentarily pair up with their <a href=\"https:\/\/www.home.cern\/science\/physics\/antimatter\">antimatter<\/a> counterparts to produce a \u201cquasi-bound-state\u201d called toponium. Further input based on complex<em> <\/em>theoretical calculations of the strong nuclear force \u2014 called quantum chromodynamics (QCD) \u2014 will enable physicists to understand the true nature of this elusive dance.<\/p>\n<p>High-energy collisions between protons at the LHC routinely produce top quark\u2013antiquark pairs. Measuring the probability, or cross section, of this process is both an important test of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.home.cern\/science\/physics\/standard-model\">Standard Model<\/a> of particle physics and a powerful way to search for the existence of new particles that are not described by the theory.<\/p>\n<p>Last year, CMS researchers were analysing a large sample of top quark\u2013antiquark production data collected from 2016 to 2018 to search for new types of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.home.cern\/science\/physics\/higgs-boson\">Higgs bosons<\/a> when they <a href=\"https:\/\/home.cern\/news\/news\/physics\/cms-finds-unexpected-excess-top-quarks\">observed<\/a> something unusual. The team saw a surplus of top quark\u2013antiquark pairs, which is often considered as a smoking gun for the presence of new particles. Intriguingly, the excess appeared at the very minimum energy required to produce such a pair of top quarks. This led the team to consider an alternative hypothesis of something that had long been considered too difficult to detect at the LHC: a short-lived union of a top quark and a top antiquark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An unforeseen feature in proton-proton collisions previously observed by the CMS experiment at CERN\u2019s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has now been confirmed by its sister experiment ATLAS. The result, reported yesterday at the European Physical Society\u2019s High-Energy Physics conference in Marseille, suggests that top quarks \u2013 the heaviest and shortest-lived of all the elementary particles [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217414","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\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}