Physicists find new particle with a double dose of charm
Scientists have found an extra charming new subatomic particle that they hope will help further explain a key force that binds matter together. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced Thursday the fleeting discovery of a long theorized but never-before-seen type of baryon. The high-speed collisions at the world's biggest atom smasher created for a fraction of a second a baryon particle called Xi cc, said Oxford physicist Guy Wilkinson, who is part of the experiment. The particle has two heavy quarks - both of a type that are called "charm"- and a light one. In the natural world, baryons have at most one heavy quark. Read more
LHC double heavy particle to shine light on strong force
Scientists have detected a new particle at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern. The discovery will help researchers learn more about the so-called "strong force" which holds the centres of atoms together. The existence of the new particle was theoretically predicted but this is the first time it has been identified. The details of the Xi-cc++ particle were presented at a high-energy physics conference in Venice. Read more
The LHCb experiment is charmed to announce observation of a new particle
Today at the EPS Conference on High Energy Physics in Venice, the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider has reported the observation of Xicc++ a new particle containing two charm quarks and one up quark. The existence of this particle from the baryon family was expected by current theories, but physicists have been looking for such baryons with two heavy quarks for many years. The mass of the newly identified particle is about 3621 MeV, which is almost four times heavier than the most familiar baryon, the proton, a property that arises from its doubly charmed quark content. It is the first time that such a particle has been unambiguously detected. Read more