Scientists working at the world’s biggest atom smasher say they have discovered a new kind of particle called “pentaquark”. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, says the discovery was made by a team working on one of the four experiments at the Large Hadron Collider beneath the Swiss-French border.
Studying pentaquarks may help scientists to understand better “how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we’re all made, is constituted”.
The findings were submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.
pentaquarks
- The existence of pentaquarks was first initiated in the 1960s by American physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Georg Zweig.
- Prof. Gell-Mann, who coined the term “quark,” received the Nobel Prize in 1969.
- A pentaquark is a hypothetical subatomic particle consisting of four quarks and one antiquark bound together.
