The LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has reported the discovery of a class of particles known as pentaquarks. The collaboration has submitted a paper reporting these findings to the journal Physical Review Letters.
“The pentaquark is not just any new particle,” said LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson. “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 over fifty years of experimental searches. Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we’re all made, is constituted.”
Our understanding of the structure of matter was revolutionized in 1964 when American physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, proposed that a category of particles known as baryons, which includes protons and neutrons, are comprised of three fractionally charged objects called quarks, and that another category, mesons, are formed of quark-antiquark pairs. Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for this work in 1969. This quark model also allows the existence of other quark composite states, such as pentaquarks composed of four quarks and an antiquark. Until now, however, no conclusive evidence for pentaquarks had been seen.
Arxiv - Observation of J/ψ p resonances consistent with pentaquark states in Λ0 b → J/ψK−p decays
Observations of exotic structures in the J/ψ p channel, that we refer to as pentaquarkcharmonium states, in Λ 0 b → J/ψ K−p decays are presented. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 3 fb−1 acquired with the LHCb detector from 7 and 8 TeV pp collisions. An amplitude analysis is performed on the three-body final-state that reproduces the two-body mass and angular distributions. To obtain a satisfactory fit of the structures seen in the J/ψ p mass spectrum, it is necessary to include two Breit-Wigner amplitudes that each describe a resonant state. The significance of each of these resonances is more than 9 standard deviations. One has a mass of 4380 ± 8 ± 29 MeV and a width of 205 ± 18 ± 86 MeV, while the second is narrower, with a mass of 4449.8 ± 1.7 ± 2.5 MeV and a width of 39 ± 5 ± 19 MeV. The preferred J P assignments are of opposite parity, with one state having spin 3/2 and the other 5/2.
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