A pentaquark is a subatomic particle, consisting of four quarks and one antiquark bound together. Evidence for the existence of pentaquarks has been found in decays of the bottom lambda baryon. As quarks have a baryon number of ++1/3, and antiquarks of −+1/3, the pentaquark would have a total baryon number of 1, and thus would be a baryon. Further, because it has five quarks instead of the usual three found in regular baryons (a.k.a. "triquarks"), it is classified as an exotic baryon. The name pentaquark was coined by Claude Gignoux et al. (1987) and Harry J. Lipkin in 1987; however, the possibility of five-quark particles was identified as early as 1964 when Murray Gell-Mann first postulated the existence of quarks. Although predicted for decades, pentaquarks proved surprisingly difficult to discover and some physicists were beginning to suspect that an unknown law of nature prevented their production. The first claim of pentaquark discovery was recorded at LEPS in Japan in 2003, and several experiments in the mid-2000s also reported discoveries of other pentaquark states. However, other researchers were not able to replicate the LEPS results, and the other pentaquark discoveries were not accepted because of poor data and statistical analysis. On 13 July 2015, the LHCb collaboration at CERN reported results consistent with pentaquark states in the decay of bottom Lambda baryons (Λ0b). On 26 March 2019, the LHCb collaboration announced the discovery of a new pentaquark that had not been previously observed. On 5 July 2022, the LHCb collaboration announced the discovery of the PΛψs(4338)0 pentaquark. Outside of particle research laboratories, pentaquarks might be produced naturally in the processes that result in the formation of neutron stars.
Background
A quark is a type of elementary particle that has mass, electric charge, and colour charge, as well as an additional property called flavour, which describes what type of quark it is (up, down, strange, charm, top, or bottom). Due to an effect known as colour confinement, quarks are never seen on their own. Instead, they form composite particles known as hadrons so that their colour charges cancel out. Hadrons made of one quark and one antiquark are known as mesons, while those made of three quarks are known as baryons. These 'regular' hadrons are well documented and characterized; however, there is nothing in theory to prevent quarks from forming 'exotic' hadrons such as tetraquarks with two quarks and two antiquarks, or pentaquarks with four quarks and one antiquark.
Structure
A wide variety of pentaquarks are possible, with different quark combinations producing different particles. To identify which quarks compose a given pentaquark, physicists use the notation qqqqq, where q and q respectively refer to any of the six flavours of quarks and antiquarks. The symbols u, d, s, c, b, and t stand for the up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top quarks respectively, with the symbols of u, d, s, c, b, t corresponding to the respective antiquarks. For instance a pentaquark made of two up quarks, one down quark, one charm quark, and one charm antiquark would be denoted uudcc. The quarks are bound together by the strong force, which acts in such a way as to cancel the colour charges within the particle. In a meson, this means a quark is partnered with an antiquark with an opposite colour charge – blue and antiblue, for example – while in a baryon, the three quarks have between them all three colour charges – red, blue, and green. In a pentaquark, the colours also need to cancel out, and the only feasible combination is to have one quark with one colour (e.g. red), one quark with a second colour (e.g. green), two quarks with the third colour (e.g. blue), and one antiquark to counteract the surplus colour (e.g. antiblue). The binding mechanism for pentaquarks is not yet clear. They may consist of five quarks tightly bound together, but it is also possible that they are more loosely bound and consist of a three-quark baryon and a two-quark meson interacting relatively weakly with each other via pion exchange (the same force that binds atomic nuclei) in a "meson-baryon molecule".
History
Mid-2000s The requirement to include an antiquark means that many classes of pentaquark are hard to identify experimentally – if the flavour of the antiquark matches the flavour of any other quark in the quintuplet, it will cancel out and the particle will resemble its three-quark hadron cousin. For this reason, early pentaquark searches looked for particles where the antiquark did not cancel. In the mid-2000s, several experiments claimed to reveal pentaquark states. In particular, a resonance with a mass of 1540 MeV/c2 (4.6 σ) was reported by LEPS in 2003, the Θ+. This coincided with a pentaquark state with a mass of 1530 MeV/c2 predicted in 1997. The proposed state was composed of two up quarks, two down quarks, and one strange antiquark (uudds). Following this announcement, nine other independent experiments reported seeing narrow peaks from nK+ and pK0, with masses between 1522 MeV/c2 and 1555 MeV/c2, all above 4 σ. While concerns existed about the validity of these states, the Particle Data Group gave the Θ+ a 3-star rating (out of 4) in the 2004 Review of Particle Physics. Two other pentaquark states were reported albeit with low statistical significance—the Φ−− (ddssu), with a mass of 1860 MeV/c2 and the Θ0c (uuddc), with a mass of 3099 MeV/c2. Both were later found to be statistical effects rather than true resonances. Ten experiments then looked for the Θ+, but came out empty-handed. Two in particular (one at BELLE, and the other at CLAS) had nearly the same conditions as other experiments which claimed to have detected the Θ+ (DIANA and SAPHIR respectively). The 2006 Review of Particle Physics concluded:
[T]here has not been a high-statistics confirmation of any of the original experiments that claimed to see the Θ+; there have been two high-statistics repeats from Jefferson Lab that have clearly shown the original positive claims in those two cases to be wrong; there have been a number of other high-statistics experiments, none of which have found any evidence for the Θ+; and all attempts to confirm the two other claimed pentaquark states have led to negative results. The conclusion that pentaquarks in general, and the Θ+, in particular, do not exist, appears compelling. The 2008 Review of Particle Physics went even further:
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