In other science news: The Large Hadron Collider finds new particle

[Jodell88]

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have announced the discovery of a new particle called the pentaquark.

It was first predicted to exist in the 1960s but, much like the Higgs boson particle before it, the pentaquark eluded science for decades until its detection at the LHC.

The discovery, which amounts to a new form of matter, was made by the Hadron Collider's LHCb experiment.

The findings have been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.

In 1964, two physicists - Murray Gell Mann and George Zweig - independently proposed the existence of the subatomic particles known as quarks.

They theorised that key properties of the particles known as baryons and mesons were best explained if they were in turn made up of other constituent particles. Zweig coined the term "aces" for the three new hypothesised building blocks, but it was Gell-Mann's name "quark" that stuck.

This model also allowed for other quark states, such as the pentaquark. This purely theoretical particle was composed of four quarks and an antiquark (the anti-matter equivalent of an ordinary quark).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33517492

 

[Mxylplyx]

I can imagine that much like the vastness of the universe is near infinite, the vastness of the micro-verse is infinite as well. I bet you could dig into the pentaquark and find that it is made up of n particles, and so on and so forth.

On another note, these physicists that can simply propose the existence of a new particle without the technology to verify it make me feel like a mental midget.

 

[dank69]

I can imagine that much like the vastness of the universe is near infinite, the vastness of the micro-verse is infinite as well. I bet you could dig into the pentaquark and find that it is made up of n particles, and so on and so forth.

On another note, these physicists that can simply propose the existence of a new particle without the technology to verify it make me feel like a mental midget.

n = 5 😉

 

[DrPizza]

Sweet! Now when I'm teaching the Standard Model and say, "... 3 quarks, ... quark and an anti-quark..." I won't need to whisper the hint of another type of particle.

On a related note, I'm looking forward to next week when I get to spend the week at the NSCL, and learn more about FRIB that goes online in about 7 years, as well as do some experimenting and hopefully learning some new stuff. Though, the particles are a step up from quarks, I'm really hoping that at the end of the week, I'll no longer leave it at "and the weak force, something or other responsible for nuclear decay don't ask me how, that's all you need to know: nuclear decay. Oh yeah, and it's stronger than gravity and is better understood than gravity, though not by me." (Yes, I know more, but am presently uncomfortable going farther in class, and not required to go into any more depth.)

 

[zinfamous]

these pentaquarks and antiquarks are inferior particles compared to the octozin and and the antizin.

 

[Charmonium]

I can't tell from the article but pentaquarks seem to be similar to tetraquarks. Mesons consist of 2 (out of 12 quarks and antiquarks) while baryons consist of 3. Protons and neutrons are baryons.

I'm guessing that pentaquarks are 5-quark particles just as tetraquarks are 4-quark particles.

 

[manimal]

me thinks Steve Vai will break trough the dimensional borders of space time playing pentaquark scales on this guitar.

 

[sao123]

so this new particle, does it fit or anti fit with the (nearly dead) theory of supersymmetry, since they cannot find the existence of the related superheavy particles?

 

[Charmonium]

Here's a very good article on the discovery.

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/art...-discover-five-quark-particle?email_issue=798

Symmetry magazine is a publication of Fermilab/SLAC

 

[disappoint]

so this new particle, does it fit or anti fit with the (nearly dead) theory of supersymmetry, since they cannot find the existence of the related superheavy particles?

The short answer is that it does not fit in with supersymmetry. There is no anti-pentaquark. No SPentaquark has been discovered. I erroneously called it an anti-pentaquark instead of an SPentaquark, thanks to Dr. Pizza for pointing that out.

Does anyone else think naming this particle a Pentaquark is a big mistake or is it just me? Naming it Pentaquark makes it seem like a new quark has been discovered, but that is not the case. It is an entirely new particle made up of 5 already known quarks.

They need to name it after the Syracuse student who discovered it and stop this lazy naming convention. This particle is not a quark, it is a new particle made up of 5 quarks.

 

[MongGrel]

The state of things these days, I hope they do suck the planet into a black hole 😛

 

[DrPizza]

The short answer is that it does not fit in with supersymmetry. There is no anti-pentaquark.

Does anyone else think naming this particle a Pentaquark is a big mistake or is it just me? Naming it Pentaquark makes it seem like a new quark has been discovered, but that is not the case. It is an entirely new particle made up of 5 already known quarks.

They need to name it after the Syracuse student who discovered it and stop this lazy naming convention. This particle is not a quark, it is a new particle made up of 5 quarks.

No, it's just you. Else there are people out there who say, "I don't live in the tri-state area. There isn't a new state here." Or, "pentachlorophenol is a stupid name. The pentachloro denoting that there are 5 chlorine atoms is a lazy naming convention." Also, supersymmetry and anti-matter are separate topics. E.g., an anti-electron (positron) is not the supersymmetric partner to the electron. (I believe it's called the selectron.) No supersymmetric partners have ever been found; plenty of antimatter has been found, and has been created in labs.

 

[Charmonium]

The state of things these days, I hope they do suck the planet into a black hole 😛

People were worried about something similar with RHIC (relativistic heavy ion collider) on Long Island. They were worried about the creation of strange matter which in theory can produce highly stable strangelets that can convert other quarks to strange matter.

The argument against this is that the entire solar system has been bombarded with cosmic rays many orders of magnitude higher than what would be produced at RHIC. The thing I always wondered about was luminosity. There, they were accelerating bunches of gold and lead nuclei that collided to produce a quark gluon plasma, similar to what existed right after the big bang. But I guess they ended up being right about that since we're all still here.





For now - bwahahaha😎

 

[disappoint]

No, it's just you. Else there are people out there who say, "I don't live in the tri-state area. There isn't a new state here." Or, "pentachlorophenol is a stupid name. The pentachloro denoting that there are 5 chlorine atoms is a lazy naming convention." Also, supersymmetry and anti-matter are separate topics. E.g., an anti-electron (positron) is not the supersymmetric partner to the electron. (I believe it's called the selectron.) No supersymmetric partners have ever been found; plenty of antimatter has been found, and has been created in labs.

Well the naming convention is just a matter of opinion. Pentachloro is very different from quarks though. We have several quarks, the up quark, down quark, charm quark, strange quark, top quark and bottom quark and of course their anti particle pairs. Pentaquark sounds like another quark rather than a new particle made up of those quarks. That is why I disagree with the name. Why not name it after it's discoverer? Though now that I think about it, it's discovery is a collaborative effort of many scientists working at the LHC so perhaps another name would be better than the name of the student who was given the task to sift through the data.

You're right about supersymmetry and antimatter being separate topics. What I meant was that there is no supersymmetric partner particle for the newly discovered pentaquark. The selectron has never been observed either. Nor will it ever be. At least not one with the same mass as the electron. If it doesn't have the same mass then it will not be symmetrical to the electron.

 

[MongGrel]

People were worried about something similar with RHIC (relativistic heavy ion collider) on Long Island. They were worried about the creation of strange matter which in theory can produce highly stable strangelets that can convert other quarks to strange matter.

The argument against this is that the entire solar system has been bombarded with cosmic rays many orders of magnitude higher than what would be produced at RHIC. The thing I always wondered about was luminosity. There, they were accelerating bunches of gold and lead nuclei that collided to produce a quark gluon plasma, similar to what existed right after the big bang. But I guess they ended up being right about that since we're all still here.





For now - bwahahaha😎

Yeah, I was teasing a bit to begin with 🙂

 

[Charmonium]

Here's a recent article from Quanta Magazine that puts things in perspective

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2015/07/what-the-heck-is-a-pentaquark/

It’s less certain whether the new particles are really pentaquarks. There are good reasons for skepticism: For one thing, the makeup of the new pentaquarks—two ups, a down, and a charm quark/antiquark pair—seems improbable. It should be easier to make a pentaquark consisting of only up and down quarks, which are lighter than charm quarks, and such a particle has never been discovered. Discovering a charm pentaquark first feels like going fishing and pulling up two sharks and no trout. A second possibility is that the new discovery is actually a sort of “molecule”: a particle called a J/ψ attached to a proton, roughly similar to how a deuteron is a proton and neutron bound together. Both have the same quark content, but only “five things in a bag” qualifies as a “real” pentaquark.