Skip to main content
  • Home
  • About
  • Faculty Experts
  • For The Media
  • ’Cuse Conversations Podcast
  • Topics
    • Alumni
    • Events
    • Faculty
    • Students
    • All Topics
  • Contact
  • Submit
STEM
  • All News
  • Arts & Culture
  • Business & Economy
  • Campus & Community
  • Health & Society
  • Media, Law & Policy
  • STEM
  • Veterans
  • University Statements
  • Syracuse University Impact
  • |
  • The Peel
  • Athletics
Sections
  • All News
  • Arts & Culture
  • Business & Economy
  • Campus & Community
  • Health & Society
  • Media, Law & Policy
  • STEM
  • Veterans
  • University Statements
  • Syracuse University Impact
  • |
  • The Peel
  • Athletics
  • Home
  • About
  • Faculty Experts
  • For The Media
  • ’Cuse Conversations Podcast
  • Topics
    • Alumni
    • Events
    • Faculty
    • Students
    • All Topics
  • Contact
  • Submit
STEM

LHCb’s Pentaquark Discovery Named Top 10 Breakthrough of 2015

Tuesday, December 15, 2015, By Rob Enslin
Share
AwardsResearch and Creative

A discovery by scientists in the College of Arts and Sciences has been named one of the Top 10 Breakthroughs of the year by Physics World magazine.

The Top 10 is chosen by a panel of Physics World editors and reporters. Qualified research must be of fundamental importance, represent a significant advancement in knowledge, demonstrate a strong link between theory and practice and be of interest to all physicists.

Tomasz Skwarnicki

Tomasz Skwarnicki

Physics professors Tomasz Skwarnicki and Sheldon Stone, along with Ph.D. student Nathan Jurik G’16 and former research associate Liming Zhang (now a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing), made international headlines in July when they discovered two rare pentaquark states.

The accolade is the latest in a series for the team, putting to rest a 51-year-old mystery, in which American physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently proposed that all baryonic matter is composed of three quarks, or four quarks and an antiquark known as a pentaquark. While many three-quark baryons have been found, the pentaquark sighting is a first.

“This discovery explains not only how protons and neutrons are bound together, but also how matter is constituted,” says Alan Middleton, professor and chair of physics. “Pentaquarks force us to rethink how atomic nuclei behave under the most extreme conditions, from the super-dense Early Universe to neutron stars. It’s a milestone for particle physics in general.”

The discovery occurred at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the biggest, most powerful particle accelerator in the world. Each year, thousands of scientists and engineers flock to CERN, in hopes of better understanding the makeup of the universe.

Among them are some 800 scientists—including a team of 20 Syracuse researchers, headed up by Stone—who are involved with the LHCb experiment. (The “b” stands for “beauty,” which is a type of quark found in protons and neutrons. While absent in today’s universe, b quarks were prevalent after the Big Bang, nearly 14 billion years ago, and have been generated extensively by LHCb.) The LHCb team uses the accelerator to fling particles together to see what happens.

Sheldon Stone

Sheldon Stone

“Energy is sometimes converted into heavy particles that are not normally found in nature,” says Skwarnicki, a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). “By examining the debris from these high-impact collisions, we’re able to learn more about the building blocks of matter and the forces controlling them.”

Also an APS Fellow, Stone is a Distinguished Professor who says the pentaquark discovery puts a fine point on quantum chromodynamics, which helps explain how quarks behave inside protons and other particles.

“We’re recreating the first millionth of a second of the Universe,” Stone says. “After the Large Hadron Collider creates proton-proton collisions, the LHCb detector uses a powerful magnet to cause the paths of charged particles to curve, with positive and negative particles moving in opposite directions. It’s through this curvature that we calculate the momentum of the particles. Their identities are then established with other devices, which deduce their mass by making velocity measurements.”

Jurik and Zhang are indicative of the University’s commitment to research training. In fact, both of them instigated the pentaquark project and wrote the code for the analysis. Zhang then presented the group’s findings at CERN. “I am proud to have come up with a model that has been proven mathematically and is essential to the project,” he adds.

Scientists believe that pentaquarks have two kinds of internal structures: (left) one with all the particles tightly bound in a spherical system and (right) one in which a meson, shown in blue, is weakly bound to a proton, in orange. (Illustration by the American Physical Society/Carin Cain)

Scientists believe that pentaquarks have two kinds of internal structures: one with all the particles tightly bound in a spherical system, left, and one in which a meson, shown in blue, is weakly bound to a proton, in orange, right. (Illustration by the American Physical Society/Carin Cain)

The pentaquark discovery probably would not have happened without an LHCb paper that Skwarnicki published in April 2014, confirming the existence of a tetraquark known as Z(4430), containing two quarks and two antiquarks. The paper was the LHCb’s most quoted one of the year, and established a prototype for an analysis method later applied to pentaquarks.

Around the same time, Stone and Zhang published an LHCb paper in which they suggested that another particle, called f0(980), was not a tetraquark, as originally thought, but was a meson, with two quarks.

“All convincing tetraquark and pentaquark candidates have a heavily charmed quark-antiquark pair inside them,” Skwarnicki says, adding that charm quarks are among the most massive of all quarks.

“A lot of different quarks are created by the LHC, before they fall apart or decay into other forms,” says Stone, who spends an average of three months a year at CERN, working on LHCb. “Our goal is to catch these b quarks, which are usually part of some baryon [with three quarks] or meson [three quarks and an antiquark], and to analyze their decays.”

  • Author

Rob Enslin

  • Recent
  • Doctoral Candidate Wins Grant for Research on Infrastructure, Violence and Resistance in Pakistan
    Friday, August 1, 2025, By News Staff
  • Co-President of Disability Law Society Eyes Career in National Security Law in Washington
    Thursday, July 31, 2025, By Jordan Bruenger
  • Lender Center New York Event Gathers Wealth Gap Experts
    Wednesday, July 30, 2025, By Diane Stirling
  • After Tragedy, Newhouse Grad Rediscovers Her Voice Through Podcasting
    Wednesday, July 30, 2025, By Chris Velardi
  • Back-to-School Shopping: More Expensive and Less Variety of Back-to-School Items
    Tuesday, July 29, 2025, By Daryl Lovell

More In STEM

New Study Reveals Ozone’s Hidden Toll on America’s Trees

A new nationwide study reveals that ozone pollution—an invisible threat in the air—may be quietly reducing the survival chances of many tree species across the United States. The research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres is the first…

Inspiring the Next Generation of STEM Enthusiasts

A friendly competition is brewing in the corner of a basement classroom in Link Hall during the annual STEM Trekkers summer program, where students are participating in a time-honored ritual: seeing who can build a paper airplane that travels the…

5 Surprisingly Simple Ways to Use Generative Artificial Intelligence at Work

Not too long ago, generative artificial intelligence (AI) might’ve sounded like something out of a sci-fi movie. Now it’s here, and it’s ready to help you write emails, schedule meetings and even create presentations. In a recent Information Technology Services…

NSF I-Corps Semiconductor and Microelectronics Free Virtual Course Being Offered

University researchers with groundbreaking ideas in semiconductors, microelectronics or advanced materials are invited to apply for an entrepreneurship-focused hybrid course offered through the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program. The free virtual course runs from Sept. 15 through…

Jianshun ‘Jensen’ Zhang Named Interim Department Chair of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

The College of Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) is excited to announce that Professor Jianshun “Jensen” Zhang has been appointed interim department chair of mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE), as of July 1, 2025. Zhang serves as executive director of…

Subscribe to SU Today

If you need help with your subscription, contact sunews@syr.edu.

Connect With Us

  • X
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Youtube
  • LinkedIn
Social Media Directory

For the Media

Find an Expert Follow @SyracuseUNews
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Youtube
  • LinkedIn
  • @SyracuseU
  • @SyracuseUNews
  • Social Media Directory
  • Accessibility
  • Privacy
  • Campus Status
  • Syracuse.edu
© 2025 Syracuse University News. All Rights Reserved.