{"id":558297,"date":"2026-04-01T13:48:37","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T13:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/558297\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T13:48:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T13:48:37","slug":"this-new-particle-is-rewriting-what-we-know-about-how-matter-forms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/558297\/","title":{"rendered":"This New Particle Is Rewriting What We Know About How Matter Forms"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Estimated3 min read<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what you\u2019ll learn when you read this story:<\/p>\n

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is in the business of discovering new subatomic particles\u2014and business is good. The team at CERN recently announced the discovery of a new particle, named \u039ecc\u207a or Xi-cc-plus, that\u2019s four times heavier than a proton.This new particle could help paint a more accurate picture of how matter forms.<\/p>\n

The scientific world has long known that atoms form the basic building blocks of matter, but CERN<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

Related Story<\/p>\n

No collider is better for the job than the Large Hadron Collider<\/a>, which famously discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. In 2023<\/a>, one of the collider\u2019s detectors\u2014the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) detector, designed to study the beauty (a.k.a. bottom) quark\u2014received 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<\/a>. The results, which held a statistical significance of seven sigma (well above the discovery threshold of five sigma<\/a>) were revealed earlier this week at the Rencontres de Moriond Electroweak conference<\/a> in France. <\/p>\n

Quarks<\/a> come in six \u201cflavors\u201d: 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<\/a>. Some hadrons, like protons\u2014which contain two up quarks and one down quark\u2014are extremely stable. Most, however, exist for only tiny fractions of a second before decaying into other subatomic particles.<\/p>\n

By smashing protons together, researchers can briefly create the short-lived particles they want to study\u2014and at the LHCb detector, those collisions revealed a new baryon composed of two charm quarks and one down quark. They named it \u039ecc\u207a, or Xi-cc-plus, and observed it for 45 femtoseconds\u2014a femtosecond being one millionth of a billionth of a second.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis 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<\/a> with two heavy quarks has been observed,\u201d Vincenzo Vagnoni, a spokesperson for LHCb, said in a press statement. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Related Story<\/p>\n

Researchers confirmed that this new particle weighs four times as much as a proton<\/a> and is somewhat similar to another particle, discovered in 2017<\/a>, 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\u2019s six times shorter, meaning that it was even more difficult to detect. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe detector is a form of \u2018camera<\/a>\u2019 that images the particles produced at the LHC and takes photographs 40 million times per second,\u201d Stefano De Capua, a researcher from the University of Manchester who led the production of the silicon detector module, said in a press statement<\/a>. \u201cIt utilizes a custom designed silicon chip that also has a variant for use in medical imaging applications.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Xi-cc-plus doesn\u2019t rival the importance of LHC\u2019s more famous discoveries\u2014especially the Higgs boson<\/a>\u2014it\u2019s an undeniably significant piece of the subatomic puzzle that\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"3 min read Here\u2019s what you\u2019ll learn when you read this story: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558298,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[3,199,79],"class_list":["post-558297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-physics","tag-news","tag-physics","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}