Scientists: New subatomic particles found

BERLIN – A new kind of subatomic particle called the pentaquark has been detected for the first time, the European Organization for Nuclear Research said Tuesday.

The lab, known by its French acronym CERN, said the findings were made by a team of scientists working on the LHCb experiment, one of the four at its Large Hadron Collider.

The existence of pentaquarks was first proposed in the 1960s by American physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Georg Zweig. Gell-Mann, who received the Nobel Prize in 1969, coined the term “quark” to describe the building blocks that make up hadrons – subatomic particles such as the proton and the neutron.

Until recently, only hadrons with two or three quarks had been found. In recent years, physicists have seen evidence of hadrons made up of four quarks, called tetraquarks.

Previous claims to the detection of pentaquarks, containing four quarks and an anti-quark, have been refuted. But experts said the new results from CERN, which have been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters, appear credible.

Guy Wilkinson, a spokesman for the LHCb experiment team, said studying pentaquarks may help scientists to better understand “how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we’re all made, is constituted.”