Outside particle physics laboratories, pentaquarks also could be produced naturally by supernovae as part of the process of forming a neutron star. The scientific study of pentaquarks might offer insights into how these stars form, as well as allowing more thorough study of particle interactions and the strong force.
Quarks are tiny particles that bind together to form different types of larger particles you might be more familiar with. Three quarks make a proton, for example. And, when five quarks combine, that’s called a pentaquark. This might not seem all that exciting, but for physicists it is.
“The pentaquark is not just any particle,” Guy Wilkinson, physicist, said in a statement in the Smithsonian. “Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we’re all made, is constituted.”
Quarks come in six “flavors”: up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm. Anti-quarks also come the same six flavors. A pentaquark seems to consist of two up quarks, one down quark, a charm quark and an anti-charm quark. The LHCb collaboration has observed a new pentaquark particle and has confirmed the pentaquark structure previously reported
In the conventional quark model, composite particles can be either mesons formed of quark–antiquark pairs or baryons formed of three quarks. Particles not classified within this scheme are known as exotic hadrons. When Murray Gell-Mann proposed the quark model in his fundamental 1964 paper, he mentioned the possibility of exotic hadrons such as pentaquarks, but it took 50 years to demonstrate their existence experimentally. In July 2015, the LHCb collaboration reported the Pc(4450)+ and Pc(4380)+ pentaquark structures. The new particle is a lighter companion to these pentaquark structures and its existence sheds new light into the nature of the entire family.
The main illustration is of the possible layout of the quarks in a pentaquark particle such as those discovered at LHCb. The five quarks might be tightly bonded or assembled differently, see image above. (Image: CERN)
Report sourced from CERN pres release; https://home.cern/news/news/physics/lhcb-experiment-discovers-new-pentaquark