This article doesn’t paint the detection as particularly significant. Does anyone know of any way this constraints potential theories of subatomic forces?
“It’s a very interesting measurement, but it’s unclear what we learn from it,” says Juan Rojo at Vrije University Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “There is no rule in quantum chromodynamics which prevents this hadron from existing, but now we’ve measured it exists, we are left not particularly illuminated.”
There are a bunch of higher-mass relatives to the proton and neutron, many of which have already been detected and measured. Another one isn’t a particularly big deal.
In principle, the measurements of this particle’s mass and lifespan provide two more data points to constrain a hypothetical complete theory of the strong nuclear force (or more precisely, the color force of which the strong nuclear force is but one manifestation), but lack of data points has never been the problem in developing such a theory.
Thanks