Pentaquarks: scientists find new "exotic" configurations of quarks

Image source, Cern

New ways in which quarks group together have been found by scientists.

The new structures are only a hundred thousandth of a billionth of a second in size.

There are three quarks that make up the particles in an atom.

Four and five quarks are found in "exotic" matter.

Scientists at the Large Hadron collider have found two newquarks. There are 21 discovered there. Researchers are excited about the qualities of the three new discoveries.

The new pentaquark decays into particles that aren't produced by the others, suggesting they may be the first pair of exotic structures.

The latest finds mean that there are enough particles to start grouping them together like the chemical elements in the periodic table. That is the beginning of the process of creating a theory and set of rules for exotic mass.

Physicists will discuss the issue at a special seminar on Tuesday at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which houses the Large Hadron collider.

The strong force that holds the insides of atoms together is created by the interaction of quarks.

Prof Chris Parkes of Manchester University says that it's difficult to calculate the strong force. We hope that by learning about them, we can come up with better theories for understanding them.

The world was made up of indivisible particles according to a Greek philosopher.

By the end of the 19th century, it was shown that atoms were made up of smaller particles.

In the 1960s, it became clear that the interaction of quarks was tied to one of the fundamental forces of nature.

The force holds the insides of atoms together and is important in the interactions of other sub-atomic particles

Researchers believe that they will discover many more exotic particles, some of which may have six quarks bound together.

A hundred billionth of a second is how long some of these may last. Because these particles travel at the speed of light, they would leave trails a few millimetres long, which would be a great footprint for physicist sleuths to follow.