No. This is analogous to finding a new molecule in chemistry, or a new isotope in nuclear physics. None of the fundamental constituents are different, they've just been been combined in a new way. (In fairness, this combination is a lot more novel than most new molecules or isotopes.) In principle, the existence of these pentaquarks could have been definitively calculated from first principles if we had sufficient computing power, just as for all molecules, but this is infeasible.
It's more than that; the mass and properties of a pentaquark will tell us a lot about the underlying properties of the strong force. People have been trying to predict the pentaquark masses and lifetimes for many years.
Computations of low-energy strong-force interactions are significantly more difficult than electromagnetism. As far as I know, the proton binding energy has not yet been calculated with confidence, though it should happen in the next decade or two.
If the result holds up, this will count as one of LHC's major discoveries.
Right! To put this in other words, we already had Mesons and Baryons (two- and three-quark bound states), and now we have Pentaquarks (admittedly less creative name). It's very exciting and hopefully we can learn more about QCD by observation of this and other new bound states. As jessriedel mentioned, we currently have no way to compute these states efficiently, and the computing power does not exist (yet?) to evaluate such systems on the lattice. Having this new entry in our "answer key" will hopefully lead to new insights in about the fundamentals of the strong force and/or at least some new tricks to compute bound states.
Not really. Pentaquarks are a prediction of the Standard Model (SM), but nicely they are a true prediction. The standard model was constructed to contain mesons (2 quarks) and hadrons (3 quarks), so the discovery of tetra and pentaquarks is a rather stringent test for predictions of the SM.
It may be, that new effects are more important for pentaquarks than for regular hadrons, since they are less well understood. Someone who works on alternate theories of the strong force can just look up all the precision measurement of the proton. If the new theory does not work there, then he will start another project. So a new particle is a rather interesting test. This is of course also true for the SM, but at the moment it looks like another brilliant confirmation.
They can annihilate -- but annihilation channels are OZI-suppressed because of gluon effects in e.g. charmonium (the J/psi, a famously narrow resonance, which was one of the final states of the decay that produced this signal). The same mechanism is likely in play here as well (it is an artifact of QCD) -- the idea is that hadronization can be energetically favorable to annihilation: since the gluons carry a strong charge (color), they participate in the interaction and can nucleate a light q/q-bar pair rather than requiring an additional (virtual) gluon to couple to the annihilation vertex.
(Also it does happen with non-quark particles as well! Positronium for example, is an electron-positron bound states -- we just see more stable hadron particles like this because QCD has Weird Maths).
Public relations pioneer Edward Bernays refined the creation and use of press releases.
Propaganda was used by the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and others to rally for domestic support and demonize enemies during the World Wars, which led to more sophisticated commercial publicity efforts as public relations talent entered the private sector. Most historians believe public relations became established first in the US by Ivy Lee or Edward Bernays (he felt this manipulation was necessary in society), then spread internationally. Many American companies with PR departments spread the practice to Europe when they created European subsidiaries as a result of the Marshall plan.
Readit News
- http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/Welcome.html#Pent... (LHCb website)
- http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03414 (paper)
Computations of low-energy strong-force interactions are significantly more difficult than electromagnetism. As far as I know, the proton binding energy has not yet been calculated with confidence, though it should happen in the next decade or two.
If the result holds up, this will count as one of LHC's major discoveries.
It may be, that new effects are more important for pentaquarks than for regular hadrons, since they are less well understood. Someone who works on alternate theories of the strong force can just look up all the precision measurement of the proton. If the new theory does not work there, then he will start another project. So a new particle is a rather interesting test. This is of course also true for the SM, but at the moment it looks like another brilliant confirmation.
On the bright side, the author of that paper, Kenneth H. Hicks, has provided three different explanations of pentaquarks here:
http://plato.phy.ohiou.edu/~hicks/thplus.html
They are a bit dated due to the news today, but they're helpful.
It blows my mind
(Also it does happen with non-quark particles as well! Positronium for example, is an electron-positron bound states -- we just see more stable hadron particles like this because QCD has Weird Maths).
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Public relations pioneer Edward Bernays refined the creation and use of press releases.
Propaganda was used by the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and others to rally for domestic support and demonize enemies during the World Wars, which led to more sophisticated commercial publicity efforts as public relations talent entered the private sector. Most historians believe public relations became established first in the US by Ivy Lee or Edward Bernays (he felt this manipulation was necessary in society), then spread internationally. Many American companies with PR departments spread the practice to Europe when they created European subsidiaries as a result of the Marshall plan.