The world’s largest particle accelerator, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN, just made an interesting announcement. A new class of particles called pentaquarks, whose existence was alleged but never verified, has been discovered.
The pentaquarks consists of ‘quarks, the fundamental elements of protons and neutrons, assembled according to a configuration that has not been seen ever in over 50 years of experimental research. According to Guy Wilkinson, a LHC spokesman, the study of pentaquarks would allow us to better understand the structure of ordinary matter and how it is made.
Starting with June 3, after two years of maintenance and repairs, the LHC has began a new phase of experiments, using double the energy that was engaged in the first phase of the project. In the first experiments that took place in 2012, the scientists managed to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, an element that was considered the core of the fundamental structure of matter.
The next step in the analysis will be to study how the quarks are bound within pentaquarks.
