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Physicists have confirmed the existence of two rare pentaquark states. Their discovery, which has taken place at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, is said to have major implications for the study of the structure of matter. It also puts to rest a 51-year-old mystery in which American physicist Murray Gell-Mann famously posited the existence of fundamental subatomic constituents called quarks, which form particles such as protons.
In 1964, he said that, in addition to a constituent with three quarks, there could be one with four quarks and an anti-quark, known as a "pentaquark." Until now, the search for pentaquarks has been fruitless.Image credit: Courtesy of CERN
