Large Hadron Collider Scientists Hail Discovery Of Pentaquark Particle

The Large Hadron Collider (Flickr/Cern)

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have found a previously unearthed particle known as the ‘pentaquark’.

The discovery by researchers at the facility near Geneva, Switzerland, solves a 50-year-old puzzle and demonstrates a new state of matter.

Like the Higgs boson particle – also discovered by scientists at Cern – the pentaquark was believed to exist, but no conclusive evidence was available, until now.

Since the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann’s Nobel-prize winning work in the 1960s, scientists have accepted that protons and neutrons are made up of three kinds of quarks.

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.

Which is why the discovery, which was made by the centre’s LHCb experiment, is being heralded a major scientific breakthrough.

“There is quite a history with pentaquarks, which is also why we were very careful in putting this paper forward,” Patrick Koppenburg, physics co-ordinator for LHCb at Cern, told BBC News.

“It’s just the word ‘pentaquark’ which seems to be cursed somehow because there have been many discoveries that were then superseded by new results that showed that previous ones were actually fluctuations and not real signals.”

LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson added: “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 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.”

In other words: for something so tiny, it’s pretty massive.