CERN physicists are certain that the Large Hadron Collider detected a new type of particle.
After years of speculating its existence, the Large Hadron Collider uncovered the existence of a particle known as a pentaquark.
Quarks are subatomic particles that form together to create composite particles such as protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons contain three quarks each. Quarks are divided into six categories—up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom. Protons and neutrons contain three quarks.Lam
Pentaquarks obviously contain five quarks. Physicist discovered it by analyzing the decay of a subatomic particle known as the Lambda B baryon.
Guy Wilkinson, a spokesperson for the Large Hadron Collider, states, “The pentaquark is not just any new particle. It represents a way to aggregate quarks… in a pattern that has never been observed before in over 50 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.”
While other scientists suggest the data from the Large Hadron Collider can possibly offer a different explanation, CERN physicists, such as Tomasz Skwarnicki, are quite certain this data points to pentaquarks.
“Benefitting from the large data set provided by the LHC, and the excellent precision of our detector, we have examined all possibilities for these signals, and conclude that they can only be explained by pentaquark states.”
Source: The Verge
