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LHC Discoveries

While most websites are reporting on the latest celebrities news, I was pleased to see that a few news agencies were reporting on the newest LHC discovery. The LHC has just discovered the pentaquark particle, a particle whose existence was theorized 50 years ago.













"A quark (/ˈkwɔrk/ or /ˈkwɑrk/) is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never directly observed or found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, such as baryons (of which protons and neutrons are examples), and mesons. For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of the hadrons themselves."

"A pentaquark is a subatomic particle consisting of four quarks and one antiquark bound together. As quarks have a baryon number of +1⁄3, and antiquarks of −1⁄3, it would have a total baryon number of 1, thus being classified as an exotic baryon. By contrast, regular baryons (or 'triquarks') consist of three quarks. The name pentaquark was coined by Harry J. Lipkin. Although predicted for decades, pentaquark states have proved surprisingly difficult to discover, and some physicists went so far as to propose that an unknown law of nature forbids their production."

"The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and most powerful particle collider, the largest and most complex experimental facility ever built, and the largest single machine in the world. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference, as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland."

"The LHC's aim is to allow physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics, high-energy physics and in particular, to prove or disprove the existence of the theorized Higgs boson and the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetric theories, and other unsolved questions of physics, advancing human understanding of physical laws. It contains seven detectors, each designed for certain kinds of research. The proton-proton collision is the primary operation method, but the LHC has also collided protons with lead nuclei for two months in 2013 and used lead–lead collisions for about one month each in 2010, 2011, and 2013 for other investigations."



Today was the pentaquark discovery, but there have been other discoveries thanks to the LHC that have occurred recently. The most notable one was the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle: the particle that gives matter mass (aka the God particle).

1. Higgs Boson
"In 2013, physicists confirmed that they'd found a Higgs boson with a mass of roughly 126 giga-electron volts (GeV) -- the total mass of about 126 protons (mass-energy equivalence lets physicists use electron volts as a unit of mass) [sources: Das]. Far from closing the books, this opened up whole new areas of research into the stability of the universe, why it seems to hold so much more matter than antimatter, and the composition and abundance of dark matter [sources: Siegfried]."

"The Higgs boson or Higgs particle is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. Observation of the particle allows scientists to explore the Higgs field—a fundamental field of crucial importance to particle physics theory, first suspected to exist in the 1960s, that unlike other known fields such as the electromagnetic field, takes a non-zero constant value almost everywhere. For several decades the question of the Higgs Field's existence was the last unverified part of the Standard Model of particle physics and "the central problem in particle physics". The presence of this field, now believed to be confirmed, explains why some fundamental particles have mass when, based on the symmetries controlling their interactions, they should be massless. It also solves several other long-standing puzzles, such as the reason for the weak force's extremely short range."
































It wouldn't be complete without my favorite Higgs Boson joke.





















2. Tetraquarks
"A tetraquark, in particle physics, is an exotic meson composed of four valence quarks. In principle, a tetraquark state may be allowed in quantum chromodynamics, the modern theory of strong interactions. Any established tetraquark state would be an example of an exotic hadron which lies outside the quark model classification.


In 2003 a particle temporarily called X(3872), by the Belle experiment in Japan, was proposed to be a tetraquark candidate, as originally theorized. The name X is a temporary name, indicating that there are still some questions about its properties to be tested. The number following is the mass of the particle in 100 MeV/c2.

In 2004, the DsJ(2632) state seen in Fermilab's SELEX was suggested as a possible tetraquark candidate.

In 2007, Belle announced the observation of the Z(4430) state, a ccdu tetraquark candidate. In 2014, the Large Hadron Collider experiment LHCb confirmed this resonance with a significance of over 13.9σ. There are also indications that the Y(4660), also discovered by Belle in 2007, could be a tetraquark state."

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