A team at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva in Switzerland have discovered a new state of matter, which has been called a 'pentaquark'. This startling discovery was made by analysing data collected from the Collider before it was turned on again for the upgrades added earlier this year, allowing it to run at a much higher energy level than ever before. But for everyone out there who isn't a particle physicist, what exactly is a pentaquark? And what does its discovery mean for the state of science worldwide?

What is a pentaquark and how was it discovered?

The existence of the pentaquark was discovered after scientists took a closer look at the disintegration of an unstable ball of three quarks called a 'Lambda baryon', the name for a family of three subatomic hadron particles. Quarks are minuscule particles that group together to form larger particles, like protons and neutrons; they come in a variety of different types: up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm. A pentaquark consists of a combination of five different quarks: two up quarks, one down quark, a charm quark and an anti-charm quark. However, due to the complex and bizarre nature of particle physics, it's not quite as simple as adding five quarks together. As each quark is added to the next one to form the pentaquark, it changes into a completely different matter altogether, and in doing so destroys the quark adjacent to it, which has also changed into a completely different matter. Despite this seeming irregularity, however, the pentaquark does adhere to the Standard Model of physics, the set of rules used to explain the nature and functioning of the small particles that make up the universe around us. So, while it is a startling discovery, it doesn't rewrite physics as we know it, so what does it tell us?

What does this discovery mean for physics, and for science more generally?

The discovery of the pentaquark solves a puzzle that has been haunting particle physicists for over 50 years – the idea of the pentaquark was first hypothesised in a predication by Murray Gell-Mann in the 1960s. Guy Wilkinson, a spokesperson for the Large Hadron Collider research group, has said that pentaquarks could be useful in the study of neutron stars, particularly in their formation and collapse. This is an area where there is particular dearth of knowledge, specifically related to what neutron stars look like, and what happens to them throughout their lifespan. Now that the Hadron Collider is running at a higher level than ever before, the scientists predict that they will be able to study the pentaquarks in more detail, which they hope will lead to more discoveries about them. From this, they hope to understand more about how the pentaquark will impact the study of particle physics, and inform our understanding of the world around us.

You can read the full report, which details the discovery of the pentaquark and its natures, at the following link: http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03414.