Scientists discover particle first predicted in the 1960s

More than 40 years after scientists first predicted its existence, a particle called the pentaquark was discovered at CERN's Large Hadron Collider LHCb lab in Switzerland.

"The pentaquark is not just any new particle," said LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson. "It represents a way to aggregate quarks, namely the fundamental constituents of ordinary protons and neutrons, in a pattern that has never been observed before in over 50 years of experimental searches. Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we're all made, is constituted."

It took several decades for scientists to finally detect the particle. In 1964, physicists Murray Gell Mann and George Zweig independently put forward the existence of subatomic particles known as quarks, theorizing that key properties of the particles known as baryons and mesons were made up of other constituent particles. This model allowed for other quark states, and although several research teams in the mid-2000s believed they had detected pentaquarks, they were superseded by new results that showed the previous ones were fluctuations and not real signals, Patrick Koppenburg, physics coordinator for LHCb at CERN, told BBC News.

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Physicists finally looked at the way a sub-atomic particle called Lambda b transformed into three other particles in LHCb, and found that intermediate states were sometimes involved in the production of the particles. "We have examined all possibilities for these signals, and conclude that they can only be explained by pentaquark states," LHCb physicist Tomasz Skwarnicki said.