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Not all physicists are convinced that this diquark hypothesis reflects how lambdas really form, however.

Instead of a virtual photon hitting one quark and freeing it to go find two new quarks to bond with, as theorists have long assumed, the virtual photon sometimes seemed to interact with a quark pair, known as a diquark.

Likely composed of the mundane up and down quarks that are so plentiful in the nucleus, this diquark would then go in search of a third quark, ultimately bonding with a strange quark.

For example, he says, patterns of momentum transfer between particles that the researchers attribute to the diquark’s dynamics could instead be the result of a single quark picking up two quarks separately.