Researchers at CERN have found two new, ‘exotic’ quark forms called pentaquarks and tetraquarks.

At the Swiss Large Hadron Collider, researchers have found two new tetraquarks and one new pentaquark. The total number found there now stands at 21. Although each is distinct, scientists are enthusiastic about the attributes of the three new discoveries. According to the BBC, the two tetraquarks may be the first known pair of exotic structures because the new pentaquark decays into particles that none of the other quarks make and has the same mass as the other two.

After a maintenance and upgrade downtime that was prolonged by COVID-19 delays, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, will restart the 27-kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the device that discovered the Higgs boson particle, this week.Restarting the collider is a complex procedure, and researchers at the CERN centre have champagne on hand if all goes well, ready to join a row of bottles in the control room celebrating landmarks including the discovery of the elusive subatomic particle a decade ago.

‘It’s not flipping a button,’ Rende Steerenberg, in charge of control room operations, told Reuters. ‘This comes with a certain sense of tension, nervousness.’

The finding of obstruction, material shrinkage caused by a nearly 300-degree temperature difference, and problems with the hundreds of magnets that assist hold billions of particles in a tight beam as they circle the collider tunnel below the Swiss-French border are among the potential risks.

The restart of collisions is anticipated to aid physicists in their search for hypothetical ‘dark matter’ that exists outside of the observable cosmos. Thought to be five times as common as regular matter, dark matter does not emit, reflect, or absorb light. So far, searches have turned up nothing.