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posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 14 2015, @09:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the keep-your-particles-off-the-monopole dept.

From a Phys.org story:

Today, the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider has reported the discovery of a class of particles known as pentaquarks. The collaboration has submitted a paper reporting these findings to the journal Physical Review Letters.

"The pentaquark is not just any new particle," said LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson. "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."

Our understanding of the structure of matter was revolutionized in 1964 when American physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, proposed that a category of particles known as baryons, which includes protons and neutrons, are comprised of three fractionally charged objects called quarks, and that another category, mesons, are formed of quark-antiquark pairs. Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for this work in 1969. This quark model also allows the existence of other quark composite states, such as pentaquarks composed of four quarks and an antiquark. Until now, however, no conclusive evidence for pentaquarks had been seen.

LHCb researchers looked for pentaquark states by examining the decay of a baryon known as Λb (Lambda b) into three other particles, a J/ѱ (J-psi), a proton and a charged kaon. Studying the spectrum of masses of the J/ѱ and the proton revealed that intermediate states were sometimes involved in their production. These have been named Pc(4450)+ and Pc(4380)+, the former being clearly visible as a peak in the data, with the latter being required to describe the data fully.

"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", says LHCb physicist Tomasz Skwarnicki of Syracuse University.

 
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  • (Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @05:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @05:04PM (#209461)

    you are probably right and i most probably didn't pay much attention in physics class.
    i just want to point out that modern physics might put too much emphasize on time and space invariance.
    what i mean with "time and space invariance" is that experiments don't need to made in a special place (x degree left of the moon and y degree up from neptun) or at a special time (on Walpurgis-night) or in a special order.

    thus the experiments are "repeatable", space and time invariant.

    so my argument might be moat: that indeed there might be very energetic particles hitting earth and
    they don't create blackholes that destroy the solar system, however i will argue that earth and the whole
    system with "high-energy particle" sources has evolved "brainless" over belleons of years.
    thus pretty much everything is connected, one domino unto the next.
    i would thus say that the "high-energy" particle whos trajectory cannot be predicted is completely natural.

    maybe a bad example would be a coral reef: there are many poisons that can kill found in a coral reef.
    it evolved naturally and most of the time the coral reef survives.
    if however we calculate the total amount of the poisons, then manufacture it artificially and dump it into the reef .. well *shrug*.

    one could argue that the universe also naturally evolved CERN physicists and thus it is fundamentally to the universe that these
    artificial particles will be created by beings with "consciousness" even though it is completely useless, just like a flower can be very pretty but useless.

    anyways, last note, i feel it is a vain research attempt, because normally in scientific research you can use the output as a new input and thus use a small crane to build a bigger crane which again you can use to make an even bigger crane, but the "output" of CERN is ... data and you cannot build a bigger crane with just data.

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