According to a recently published press release, scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have discovered a class of subatomic particle called the pentaquark. This newly spotted subatomic particle has an antiquark and four quarks bound together.
The existence of pentaquark, like that of the Higgs Boson particle, has been theorized for several years. However, the experiments of the early 2000s that claims to have identified the exotic form of matter soon got invalidated. A large share of scientists working on pentaquark at that time gave up their studies on the subject for good. This new finding of CERN scientists is surely good news for them; CERN physicists are now convinced that pentaquark does exist.
As mentioned above the pentaquark consists of five quarks bound together. For those who don’t know: a quark is an elementary particle that can exist in six different forms referred to as flavors. Each variation of quark has a different name. They are: strange, charm, top, bottom, up and down.
Quarks bind together in various combinations in order to form different kinds of composite particles. The most commonly known particles formed of quarks are protons and neutrons, both of which contain three quarks.
LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson said that the pentaquark is much more than just a new particle. According to him, this particle represents a procedure of aggregating quarks in a pattern which has never been seen in the last five decades.
Here, it must be mentioned that the LHCb is one of the seven particle detectors the Large Hadron Collider has. The pentaquark has been discovered by scientists operating at the LHCb.
Wilkinson added that studying the properties of the pentaquark might help us to comprehend how the neutrons and protons from which all of us are made have been constituted.
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Scientists made the discovery by observing decay of a kind of subatomic particle called Lambda B baryon. The data used by scientists conducting this study was gathered between the years 2009 and 2012. However, the experts were wary of results produced by the previously conducted invalidated experiments.
Some scientists said that there can be a more comprehensive interpretation of the collected data that doesn’t involve pentaquarks. The physicists at CERN, however, are confident that the huge data set made available to them by the Large Hadron Collider and the amazing precision of CERN’s particle detector, have finally allowed them to locate the pentaquark.
