Topic summary
Hadrons
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Hadron.
Hadrons are categorized into two broad families: baryons, made of an odd number of quarks (usually three), and mesons, made of an even number of quarks (usually two: one quark and one antiquark). Protons and neutrons (which make the majority of the mass of an atom) are examples of baryons; pions are an example of a meson. A tetraquark state (an exotic meson), named the Z(4430), was discovered in 2007 by the Belle Collaboration and confirmed as a resonance in 2014 by the LHCb collaboration. Two pentaquark states (exotic baryons), named P
c(4380) and P
c(4450), were discovered in 2015 by the LHCb collaboration. There are several other "Exotic" hadron candidates and other colour-singlet quark combinations that may also exist.