{"id":752,"date":"2003-07-08T03:53:59","date_gmt":"2003-07-08T03:53:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=752"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:34:35","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:34:35","slug":"five-quarks-for-muster-mark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=752","title":{"rendered":"five quarks for muster mark"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/span>Here’s some great news for particle-physics enthusiasts: A new type of subatomic particle has been discovered! And for you non-particle-physics enthusiasts, here’s a primer: Quarks are the elementary particles that make up the subatomic particles that make up atoms that make up everything in the universe. The word quark supposedly derives from a line in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.” And it does take three quarks to make up a neutron or a proton, the building blocks of atomic nuclei. (Two-quark combinations called mesons also exist.) But theory never ruled out the existence of particles consisting of more than three quarks; it’s just that they were never found – until now. A five-quark particle, or “pentaquark,” has been discovered by physicists working at the SPring-8 physics lab in Japan, and confirmed by researchers at the Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in the United States. According to a paper in the July 4 issue of Physical Review Letters,<\/em> the physicists found the particle (which decays almost immediately) by analyzing the debris of particle-smashing experiments. Ken Hicks, a member of both the US and Japanese teams, attributes the new discovery to more powerful experimental techniques — including more efficient detectors — that allowed the collisions to be better observed. <\/span><\/p>\n

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the <\/em>Boston Globe’s Health\/Science section on 7\/08\/2003.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s some great news for particle-physics enthusiasts: A new type of subatomic particle has been discovered! And for you non-particle-physics enthusiasts, here’s a primer: Quarks are the elementary particles that make up the subatomic particles that make up atoms that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=752"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1175,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions\/1175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}