Experts, however, have always said that particles could be made of up to five quarks – namely the pentaquark – but it had eluded them until now.
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Guy Wilkinson, a physicist from the Oxford University and a spokesman at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, otherwise known as CERN said that they made many checks to make sure there is no other explanation possible for the discovery. These are not new particles but simply aggregation of quarks, the fundamental constituents of ordinary protons and neutrons, similar to baryons wherein protons and neutrons are made up of three quarks.
They theorised that baryons – which include protons and neytrons – and mesons, which are key properties of the particles, were best explained though other constituent particles.
Gell-Mann, who won the Nobel Physics Prize in 1969, further proposed another category of particles, mesons, formed of “quark-antiquark” pairs. But, surprisingly, they noted that in the production of these decay products, intermediate states were also at play, and these intermediate states indicated the presence of pentaquark particles. Theoretical physicists reveal that pentaquarks can contain four quarks and one anti matter of these particles.
“From the point of view of our experiment, we think it has fulfilled all criteria of discovery”.
The team has submitted their findings to the Physical Review Letters journal for those wishing to dig deeper. The collider was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that had long been theorized but never confirmed until 2013. Quarks are made up of small ingredients of sub-atomic particles like protons and neutrons.
Next step is to determine how the five quarks within the pentaquark are bound together, and what else pentaquarks can reveal regarding the structure of matter and the subatomic physics that direct the universe.
But what makes a pentaquark “not just any new particle?”
“We have seen the first data beginning to flow”. An experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia, repeated the Spring-8 measurement with more data and suggested the 2002 discovery was a mistake. ‘It may also have cosmic consequences for… understanding what happens to stars at the end of their life.’ He said it was still a mystery why it had taken 50 years to find pentaquarks.
Currently, LHC researchers seek new insights into Universe’s dark matter and other layers of matter hidden under what we can see or perceive with astronomical instruments.
Mr. Wilkinson said that the team found two pentaquarks.
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LHCb physicist Tim Gershon of the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom explains why he is confident of the result: “The LHCb analysis is significantly different from those of previous experiments that found hints of [pentaquarks] that were later disproved”.
