9 years ago
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The LHC Has Discovered a New Sub-Atomic Particle Called a Pentaquark
After restarting to run at higher power than ever, the Large Hadron Collider has made its first proper discovery. Today, a team of scientists announced that they’ve found a new class of sub-atomic particles known as pentaquarks.
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I feel like physics has entered an Inception phase. Not that I'm complaining.
This is more higher than deeper, though, since the matter we know already consists of three quarks (baryons) or one quark and one anti quark (mesons). A pentaquark is basically 4 quarks and one antiquark, a combination of a baryon and a meson in one.
I know some of these words...
From the LHCb spokesperson, Guy Wilkinson:
Thanks, that quote is making it a little clearer. I'll try to simplify even more:
When a particle consists of quarks (not all particles do; e.g. an electron is not made of quarks), "the numbers" need to "add up".
"The numbers" are the so-called "color charge". No relation to real colors, it's just a name :). The color of a quark can be red, green or blue. In total, baryons (big fat particles, e.g. protons and neutrons) have to be white.
Example: Proton: Blue up-quark, Red up-quark, Green down-quark. R+G+B = white.
As you can see, there can't be a baryon with 4 quarks -- it would be RRGB or RGGB or RGBB or RRRG...; definitely not the same amount of red, green and blue.
But 5 quarks are possible again, because there are anti-quarks, which also have an anti-color; you have 3 quarks that are R+G+B, and then e.g. another Red one, and an Anti-Red. The Anti-Red cancels out 1 Red, so color-wise you again have RGB=white.
And now the LHC has shown that those theoretical 5-quark-particles ("pentaquarks") actually exist. That's quite impressive.
So... can you simplify the charm quark and anti-charm quark? Because that sounds adorable.
It does :) While other particles have greek(-ish) names, it looks like scientists decided to have some fun with quarks:
They come in 6 flavors: up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. And they have a color charge: red, green or blue.
A pentaquark! What what?? This is madness. There are small things as small as our universe is big.
You could have particles made from gluons, called glueballs...
Hahaha I love it!