(Newswire.net — July 15, 2015) — Called the pentaquark, the particle was first predicted to exist in the 1960s. After 50 years of searching, the particle emerges in a new experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, IFL Science reported.
According to scientists, the pentaquark is not just another particle, as it is believed; it represents an entirely new type of matter that exists for one billion trillion trillionths of a second before it decays.
“The pentaquark is not just any new particle,” LHC spokesperson Guy Wilkinson said in a statement. “Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we’re all made, is constituted.”
The smallest particle known to man is a quark. Combined differently, quarks produce larger particles. Groups of three quarks with protons are known as baryons, and a group of four quarks is named tetraquark. After their most recent tweaks in a collider, scientists discovered the pentaquark, the group of five quarks.
Actually, the Pentaquarks are found to be made of four quarks and an antiquark, which is the antimatter version of a regular quark with the same mass but an opposite charge.
According to scientists, these new findings can open up new realms of physics.
“It is an important result in that it shows that there is a new state of matter,” Professor Sheldon Stone from Syracuse University, told IFLScience.
Though previous findings of the pentaquark proved to be false, scientists behind the discovery carefully approached their results, until they were absolutely sure they could prove the existence of a new type of matter.
“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,” LHC physicist Tomasz Skwarnicki, said in a statement.
There are six types of quarks, known as “flavors,” which denote their mass, charge, the magnetic field and other properties. The flavors are Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top and Bottom. According to the scientists who made the discovery, the pentaquark is made of two up quarks, a down quark, a charm quark and one anticharm quark.