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Pentaquarks

Posted by timothy on from the cheesy-bits dept.

jafuser writes "Physicists are quite confident that they have discovered a new baryonic state called a 'pentaquark' which is a particle composed of *five* quarks (4 quarks and one anti-quark to be precise). Up until now, quarks were only observed to come together in groups of two (mesons) or three (baryons). If you still haven't gotten comfortable with knowing your leptons from your hadrons, I suggest clicking through an excellent site at Particle Adventure."

5 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Five Quarks? by Atario · · Score: 4, Funny

    I suppose that's what happens when the last epsiode of Star Trek: The Next Generation collides with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

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    "A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
  2. Ohh, I love it... by joto · · Score: 4, Funny

    They have an explanation for the general public, the general scientist, and the physicist. Obviously, they care about accurate science reporting.

  3. They're all just a bunch of reverse engineers! by Bob+Bitchen · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's interesting to note that this form of reverse engineering is revered and those practicing are held in high esteem (usually) but that more meso-scale reverse engineering is considered lowly and usually is illegal. Ponder that....

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  4. Color? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wonder what the color makeup of the pentaquark is. As I undestand it, for mesons it's red/anti-red, blue/anti-blue, or green/anti-green. For baryons it's red/blue/green or anti-red/anti-blue/anti-green. What do you do for five?

    1. Re:Color? by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 5, Informative

      Think of this as a merged baryon and meson.

      No. They specifically said that the merged version would have different properties.

      "Merged" != "Bound".

      A bound pair would not be a distinct particle (it would be two co-orbiting, which would have different particles). A pentaquark can be thought of has a merger of the two particles, containing the constituents of both but having its own energy structure.

      List of the constituents is the same. Hence, my example.