Behold the pentaquark: BBC report

[Ivan Seeking]

"The new particle is the so-called pentaquark - five quarks in formation. Until now, physicists had only seen quarks packed into two- or three-quark combinations"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3034754.stm

 

[Brad_Ad23]

I posted the same thing in the regular Physics forum. Hopefully here more people will respond to the news!

 

[FZ+]

Cool...

I wonder if this is the signs of some deeper structure in the ways the quarks bind together... Fibonacci sequence? Prime numbers?

 

[meteor]

And to what category pertain the pentaquark? Is a boson or a fermion?
Could the pentaquark have an antiparticle(the antipentaquark)?

 

[Brad_Ad23]

They consider it a boson. And yes, there could be an anti version of it.

 

[Tail]

So, what quarks does it consist of?

 

[Brad_Ad23]

Two down, Two up, and 1 antistrange (in this case).

 

[HunterSThompson]

Originally posted by Brad_Ad23
Two down, Two up, and 1 antistrange (in this case).

My nuclear knowledge consists of what i got from 2 semesters of Chem.
Studied quarks a little bit and found this discovery interesting. But what is this antistrange orientaion you speak of?

 

[Brad_Ad23]

Quarks come in six flavors. Top, Down, Bottom, Up, Charm, and Strange. Flavors are not tastes, just some random term physicists used to label the properties. In addition, each quark has one of three colors (not real colors, again just a label sake) associated with the gluons they emitt/absorp. Red, Green, Blue.

 

[vedder]

Well, it keeps getting deeper and deeper... hopefully the LHC will sort some of this out.

 

[Brad_Ad23]

what keeps getting deeper and deeper?

 

[vedder]

Our conception of fundamentality.

 

[Brad_Ad23]

This doesn't go any more fundamental than quarks, which we already knew existed. Indeed, the standard model does in fact allow for various quark combinations. So in essence, it is just the experimental realization of an aspect of the standard model.

Now, if the experiment had demonstrated that quarks are made up of little things inside them, THEN our conception of fundamentality would become deeper.

 

[vedder]

Yes, you're absolutely right. Deeper was definitely the wrong adjective.

 

[Brad_Ad23]

No problem! While this doesn't make it deeper, it is still interesting!

 

[vedder]

It sure is interesting. Thanks for the link by the way. I had not read anything about this. It's pretty exciting actually. Ok Ok, I'm kinda nerdy but, it is.