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TOTEM and DØ collaborations announce odderon discovery Part of the TOTEM installation in the LHC tunnel 220 m downstream from the CMS experiment (Image: CERN)
The TOTEM collaboration at the LHC, together with the DØ collaboration at the Tevatron collider at Fermilab, have announced the discovery of the odderon – an elusive state of three fundamental particles called gluons that was predicted almost 50 years ago. The result was presented on Friday 5 March during a meeting at CERN, and follows the joint submission in December 2020 of a CERN/Fermilab preprint by TOTEM and DØ reporting the observation. “This result probes the deepest features of the theory of quantum chromodynamics, notably that gluons interact between themselves and that an odd number of gluons are able to be “colourless”, thus shielding the strong interaction,” says TOTEM spokesperson Simone Giani of CERN. “A notable feature of this work is that the results ar