Frabjous Times

The crowd I ran with in my previous place of employment seems to have hit something big. The page Observation of Exotic Baryon describes evidence for a "pentaquark" state in experiments at the Jefferson Lab in Newport News, VA. [via Science Blog] This would be the first evidence of a strongly interacting particle which is not composed of either three quarks or of one quark and one antiquark, in a sense, a new state of matter. The lead researchers in this work, people I know fairly well, collected the data using the CLAS detector I spent some years helping to design and build in my previous life as a physicist. Seriously cool stuff.