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| A diagram of one possible layout of the five quarks that compose the newly discovered pentaquark |
The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have discovered yet another new particle! This one is called a pentaquark and has been postulated and searched for over the last 50 years. The discovery of this new form of matter further enables our understanding of how the universe is put together, and could eventually lead to our complete understanding of the workings of reality. This is quite exciting!
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| An alternate layout of a pentaquark showing it composed of a meson particle (one quark and one antiquark) and a baryon (three quarks). |
LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson commented: "The pentaquark is not just any new particle… It represents a way to aggregate quarks, namely the fundamental constituents of ordinary protons and neutrons, in a pattern that has never been observed before in over fifty years of experimental searches. Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we're all made, is constituted."
The original findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03414
