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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is in the business of discovering new subatomic particles—and business is good. The team at CERN recently announced the discovery of a new particle, named Ξcc⁺ or Xi-cc-plus, that’s four times heavier than a proton.This new particle could help paint a more accurate picture of how matter forms.
The scientific world has long known that atoms form the basic building blocks of matter, but CERN is interested in peering beyond the atom into the mesonic and baryonic soup that gives rise to matter by binding quarks together. To do this, researchers at the organization use massive colliders to fling particles at each other at near-light speed and employ super-sensitive detectors to make sense of the messy aftermath.
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No collider is better for the job than the Large Hadron Collider, which famously discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. In 2023, one of the collider’s detectors—the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) detector, designed to study the beauty (a.k.a. bottom) quark—received a major upgrade. And now, just three years later, researchers working with the LHCb have discovered a new kind of particle, according to a CERN news release. The results, which held a statistical significance of seven sigma (well above the discovery threshold of five sigma) were revealed earlier this week at the Rencontres de Moriond Electroweak conference in France.
Quarks come in six “flavors”: up, down, strange, charm, top (also called truth), and bottom (also called beauty). They usually combine in pairs or trios to form particles such as mesons and baryons, which are collectively known as hadrons. Some hadrons, like protons—which contain two up quarks and one down quark—are extremely stable. Most, however, exist for only tiny fractions of a second before decaying into other subatomic particles.
By smashing protons together, researchers can briefly create the short-lived particles they want to study—and at the LHCb detector, those collisions revealed a new baryon composed of two charm quarks and one down quark. They named it Ξcc⁺, or Xi-cc-plus, and observed it for 45 femtoseconds—a femtosecond being one millionth of a billionth of a second.
“This is the first new particle identified after the upgrades to the LHCb detector that were completed in 2023, and only the second time a baryon with two heavy quarks has been observed,” Vincenzo Vagnoni, a spokesperson for LHCb, said in a press statement. “The result will help theorists test models of quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong force that binds quarks into not only conventional baryons and mesons but also more exotic hadrons such as tetraquarks and pentaquarks.”
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Researchers confirmed that this new particle weighs four times as much as a proton and is somewhat similar to another particle, discovered in 2017, that contained two charm quarks and one up quark and is known as Xi-cc-plus-plus. Despite this similarity, Xi-cc-plus has a lifespan that’s six times shorter, meaning that it was even more difficult to detect.
“The detector is a form of ‘camera’ that images the particles produced at the LHC and takes photographs 40 million times per second,” Stefano De Capua, a researcher from the University of Manchester who led the production of the silicon detector module, said in a press statement. “It utilizes a custom designed silicon chip that also has a variant for use in medical imaging applications.”
While Xi-cc-plus doesn’t rival the importance of LHC’s more famous discoveries—especially the Higgs boson—it’s an undeniably significant piece of the subatomic puzzle that’s very slowly coming into focus.
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Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.