Pentaquarks

Elton Smith
Jefferson Lab

ABSTRACT: For more than thirty years we have known that quarks are the building blocks of nuclear matter. However, quarks have never been observed in isolation but only in combinations with other quarks. Until recently, all experimental evidence has shown that, of the many ways that quarks can be grouped to form normal matter, only two combinations have been observed in nature. Mesons are build out of quark and anti-quark pairs and baryons have a 3-quark configuration. Recent experiments have reported evidence for a new state composed of at least 4 quarks and 1 anti-quark. We will review the experimental evidence for this new state of matter, concentrating on data taken with the CLAS detector at Jlab which confirms the observation of a narrow state which is about 60% heavier than the proton.