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LHC Discovers Pentaquark Particles
mrspoonsi sends news that researchers running experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have published findings confirming the existence of pentaquark particles, first predicted in the 1960s by Murray Gell Mann and George Zweig. The particles consist of five quarks bound together. Further research will examine exactly how this binding works.
Previous experiments had measured only the so-called mass distribution where a statistical peak may appear against the background "noise" - the possible signature of a novel particle. But the collider enabled researchers to look at the data from additional perspectives, namely the four angles defined by the different directions of travel taken by particles within LHCb. "We are transforming this problem from a one-dimensional to a five dimensional one... we are able to describe everything that happens in the decay," said Dr. Koppenburg, who first saw a signal begin to emerge in 2012. "There is no way that what we see could be due to something else other than the addition of a new particle that was not observed before."
Gillette: Fuck it, we're doing five quarks!!
two up quarks, one down quark
Still haven't discovered the Konami quark then, yet?
Ok, three links, one to an actual pre-pub paper, one to CERN's official press release, and one to a reputable news source? What's wrong with this submitter? Don't you know that Slashdot links are supposed to go to some random bozo's blog, where he rants about the political repercussions of a discovery like this, and how it will affect free software/NSA spying/Sharia law/the Lizard people, all with no useful links to any hard data anywhere, but hundreds of ads? :)
Seriously, I've been expecting this since the recent announcement of a possible tetraquark particle, but I certainly didn't expect it this soon. Very cool.