What does the odderon tell us about the universe?

From glueballs and future technology to shining a light on the Standard Model, particle physicists assess the impact of the detection

The odderon as a standalone particle “The main implications are, both mathematically and empirically, that when a particle exists in its virtual state to mediate interactions, it should also exist as a standalone particle. For the case of the gluons under discussion, it is called ‘glueball’.”

Simone Giani, CERN

Glueball detection “There were many attempts to see the odderon as glueball in many processes differed of elastic scattering. However, until now nobody detected such a glueball.” Evgenij Martynov, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

Disproving naïve expectations

“A spectacular possible consequence of the odderon is the fact that the proton-proton total cross section could be bigger than the antiproton-proton total cross section at very high energies, contrary to naïve expectations.” Basarab Nicolescu, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Shining a light on the Standard Model "This doesn't break the Standard Model, but there are very opaque regions of the Standard Model, and this work shines a light on one of those opaque regions." Timothy Raben,

Michigan State University

Odderon tech “When electrons were discovered, no one had a clue as to what they would eventually be important for. We’re in a similar situation right now with QCD; we don’t know what we’ll do with this knowledge in the future, but it could be critical information for building in future technologies.” Jerome Luine, Northrop Grumman Next Basic Research

Confirming what we already knew The experimental discovery of the odderon would not add much new information to our understanding of the universe. It has been known for quite a long time that the odderon firmly exists in QCD. Valery Khoze, University of Durham