After running at record-breaking speeds, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has made its first major discovery. Today, a team of scientists announced that they've found a new class of subatomic particles known as pentaquarks.
As reported by Georgia State University, quarks are a series of charged subatomic particles that combine to form larger particles called hadrons - the most stable of which are protons and neutrons. First proposed in 1964 by American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, their existence redefined the way the public thought about particle physicists.
Back then, the pentaquark was a theoretical particle composed of four quarks and an antiquark, but now CERN researchers claim that their existence is irrefutable.
The team identified the existence of the pentaquark by studying the way a subatomic particle called Lambda b decayed - or transformed - into three other particles inside LHCb (J-psi, a proton and a charged kaon). The analysis revealed that two previously unobserved particles could be identified during the transition state, according to Gizmodo.
"The pentaquark is not just any new particle," LHC spokesperson Guy Wilkinson said. "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 more than 50 years of experimental searches.
Scientists who operate the collider believe that the existence of this new particle could shed new light on how the matter that makes up everything, including humans, is structured, according to Express.
Researchers will now investigate the structure of the pentaquark to understand exactly how they're bound together.
The collaboration has submitted a paper reporting these findings which can be found here.
