It has reportedly been confirmed by its sister experiment, ATLAS, and revealed at the European Physical Society’s High-Energy Physics conference in Marseille, France, on Monday, July 7.

The discovery implies that top quarks, also known as truth quarks, which are the most massive of all elementary particles, can momentarily pair up with their antimatter counterparts to produce a quasi-bound-state called toponium.

To better understand the nature of this elusive interaction, physicists will now turn to complex theoretical calculations of the strong nuclear force, called quantum chromodynamics (QCD).

Quantum bond defies particle expectations

Although top quarks are routinely produced in high-energy proton collisions at the LHC, they’re notoriously unstable and decay in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, earning a reputation as solitary particles.

That brevity has long made it seem impossible for them to interact in the way lighter quarks do, forming particles like protons or mesons.