The Large Hadron Collider now runs on higher power than ever and it seems that its productivity is increasing as well. The giant machine has made its first newsworthy discovery. A team of scientists has recently discovered a new subatomic particle, called Pentaquark.
Pentaquark can be defined as a new form of matter. This is no less than a revolutionary breakthrough when it comes to the universal laws of physics. The entire research and findings will be published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
The entire “Pentaquark Quest” has begun back in 1960s, when researchers could only guess its existence. The very detection of the particle had eluded researchers for more than half a century.
The quark in pentaquark comes from the building blocks that make up hadrons. Protons and neutrons are hadrons as well and are maybe the best known examples to define the concept. This recent success underlines the discovery of five quarks bound together in a hadron and comes to confirm what scientists have been speculating on a long time ago.
Quarks are charged sub-atomic particles which come together to form large particles, such as protons and neutrons. They have the capacity to shape into other entities too and the pentaquark is the living example in that matter.
The pentaquark is an extremely interesting particle, made up of five smaller entities, namely four quarks and an anti-quark. After decades of research, hypothesis, trial and error, scientists have found evidence for the existence of this completely new form of matter.
One thing leads to another and most breakthrough discoveries are made in surprisingly inappropriate conditions. Preparation is sometimes unnecessary as surprises can take us off our initial track and lead us to more generous horizons. The team of scientists has revealed the presence of the pentaquark by watching for the decay of a baryon called Lambda b. Lambda b split into three other particles and as it did, the researchers managed to observe a certain transition state in which two previously unobserved particles could be identified.
Opinions on the new discovery are bound to controversy. Some say that the Large Hadron Collider is some kind of man made global warming that forcefully makes new entities appear. Without the special, synthetic conditions which allow for matter to mould, modify and change its structure, these new forms of matter could never exist. On the other hand, the LHC is designed to create most exotic environments that exist in nature’s most extreme moments, at the very beginning of the universe. Conditions that can only be found in the cores of stars, buried deep within the structures of atoms and so on. These are environments outside the human experience. LHC can generate these special and real environments( a different level of reality, alternative to the common and empirical human perception ) and allow us to observe and understand the sorts of processes, states of matter, events or discoveries that may occur.
Yes, LHC is a synthetic machine which creates special conditions that could motivate the appearance of some kinds of events. If the events see the light of day and can be defined, explained, conceptualized and efficiently used, everything is as real as it can get. The challenge lays behind the manners in which we choose to make use of everything we know.
Image Source: theguardian.com
