The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has announced Tuesday the discovery of a new class of particles known as pentaquarks.
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According to LHC spokesman Guy Wilkinson, the pentaquark’s discovery is truly remarkable.
This new study can help better understand the properties of quarks, of how ordinary matter like protons and neutrons originate from. Lipkin coined the term.
Previous claims to the detection of pentaquarks have been refuted. The finding could pave the way to a better understanding of ordinary matter that humans are all made of. They have found two.
Which is why the discovery, which was made by the center’s LHCb experiment, is being heralded a major scientific breakthrough.
Eric Swanson, a theoretical physicist at the University of Pittsburgh said, “Every particle we’re aware of, except for a few oddballs, is made up of quark and anti-quark, or three quarks”.
The history of the pentaquark dates back to 1964, when two physicists, Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, independently came to the conclusion that a group of subatomic particles that acted as building blocks for another form of matter existed. A five particle quark is now known to be a transition state that produces by the decay of a quark containing particle known as Lambda b.
MissMJ on Wikipedia The Standard Model with the six quarks clearly indicated.
The LHCb team is confident that the particles are indeed pentaquarks that comprise two up quarks, one down quark, one charm quark and one anticharm quark.
The first pentaquark they dubbed Pc (4450) + and the second Pc (4380) +. However, these discoveries were later undermined by other experiments, which eventually led it to be pronounced a statistical mirage in 2005.
For now, that’s some of the only information the team has about this new type of particle.
The next step in the analysis will be to study how the quarks are bound together within the pentaquarks. His colleague Patrick Koppenburg, LHCb physics coordinator at CERN, added that there was “no way” that the observations “could be due to something else other than the addition of a new particle that was not observed before”. During the decay, it split into three other particles: a J-spi, a proton and a charged kaon.
It turned out that the middle-man was the elusive pentaquark.
He said it was still a mystery why it had taken 50 years to find pentaquarks.
Still, they can’t see exactly how they are combined at that miniscule level, they said.
“We asked a graduate student to examine what we thought was an uninteresting and minor source of background events, just in case it happened to be a nasty source of experimental noise”, Stone told Symmetry Magazine.
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