I was earlier into work than usual this morning after talking about a new pentaquark discovered by LHCb and reported just now in the Moriond QCD meeting.

Even so, when I got in, Ryan was already there, well into his Noνa data taking shift.

After confusion and controversy on various experiments (including mine) over several years, LHCb reported the first solid observation of two pentaquark states in 2015. This result adds a third, and also reveals that one of the others may in fact be two, with slightly different masses.

Here’s the CERN press release with links to more information, and here’s a link to the Today programme episode. The interview is at 6:50am.

Update: 9/4/2019, paper now on the arXiv.