Large Hadron Collider scientists discover new kind of particle

Scientists working at the world’s biggest atom-smasher say they have discovered a new kind of particle called “pentaquarks”.

The existence of pentaquarks was first proposed in the 1960s by American physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Georg Zweig.

Mr Gell-Mann, who coined the term “quark”, received the Nobel Prize in 1969.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or Cern, said the discovery was made by a team working on one of the four experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) beneath the Swiss-French border.

Guy Wilkinson, a spokesman for the LHC team, said studying pentaquarks may help scientists gain a better understanding of “how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we’re all made, is constituted”.

The findings were submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.