alt Hacker NewsAre there are other flavours of proton still to be discovered? Can you (theoretically) build a proton with any two quarks selected from {up, charm, top} and one selected from {down, strange, bottom}?
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Yes, also mixes like up+top+strange. There is a list in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_baryons but note the note:
> Particles with † next to their names have been predicted by the Standard Model but not yet observed.
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There are some technical details, because QM rules makes everything more complicated and you can potentially have a mix of quarks. I (mis)remember something weird in barions, but I can't find what it was.
But there is something weird in mesons. For example the pi_0 is 50% up+antiup and 50% down+andidown . More details inhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mesons
Good questions…
Another one: Is this newly discovered particle stable, or does it only exist for a short time before transforming in some way? I didn’t see any mention of that in the article.
Is it theoretically possible to have atoms with 4x the proton mass, starting with hydrogen at atomic weight 4? Pu-239 could theoretically have an atomic weight of 521 instead of 239… Wild!