You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: New probes of leptoquarks at CERN's Large Hadron Collider

in StemSocial2 years ago (edited)

Wowsers, scary that I read all of that. This post really got me thinking, although I haven't heard about leptoquarks before so I would love to see what your studies bring about.
I'm an Engineering student in my freshman year and I have to say this topic is truly mind-blowing. I do have one question though, you say leptoquarks is the joining of a lepton and a quark. Do they join together naturally?

Sort:  
 2 years ago  

Wowsers, scary that I read all of that.

I am honoured to read that you read it fully! Thanks a lot!

This post really got me thinking, although I haven't heard about leptoquarks before so I would love to see what your studies bring about.

What we try to do is to understand better how the universe functions at its most fundamental level. For now, we have a paradigm called the Standard Model of particle physics that works quite well. However, there are good signs that let us think that the Standard Model is only the tip of the iceberg.

The studies that I conduct (note that this is true for any particle physicist working on similar topics) target what is hidden and that we don't know about. We explore many paths to unravel this. As we don't know what it is and have no hint for anything, we need to consider all possible options. This is what I try to do at my level (exploring some options that I feel cool and interesting).

I don't know whether this answers your question. If you had more the "application" side in mind, maybe you could check comments by @agmoore and @apineda on the very same post. This should give you more insights on this.

I do have one question though, you say leptoquarks is the joining of a lepton and a quark. Do they join together naturally?

Not exactly. A leptoquark is a particle that can interact simultaneously with one quark and one lepton, so that it could decay into this lepton-quark system. However, it is not a bound state of a quark and a lepton. It is really an elementary particle that can "transform" (more or less) into a quark and a lepton. Does this clarify?

Cheers, and thanks again for passing by!

Okay that clarifies a lot. Thanks for explaining that and I will check those comments

 2 years ago  

You are welcome. Please do not hesitate to come back to me if needed. I am always happy to chat and bring clarifications if needed.

Have a nice week!