Pentaquarks: A New Kind of Subatomic Particle Discovered by CERN Scientists

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

A visitor takes a phone photograph of a large back lit image of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the Science Museum's 'Collider' exhibition in London, England, on Nov. 12, 2013. Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

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

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, says the discovery was made by a team working on one of the four experiments at the Large Hadron Collider beneath the Swiss-French border.

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