LHCb experiment reports observation of exotic pentaquark particles
press.web.cern.ch
press.web.cern.ch
- 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).
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.
“Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that never has been.” – Theodore von Kármán
Gell Mann and Zweig among others proposed the imaginary concept of quarks (or partons, Feynman's Dolly) to do something about all those particles that kept popping up in accelerators. There was a time, when a particle was a run-of-the-mill cookie-cutter thesis.