July 6 (UPI) -- Scientists have announced the discovery of a new particle. Researchers with CERN announced the new particle at the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics, held this week in Venice.
Physicists discovered the new particle during LHCb tests at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The new particle was spotted among the chaos of collisions between b-hadrons, heavy particles featuring a bottom quark.
The new particle contains two heavy quarks. The particle boasts two charm quarks -- the heavy quarks -- and one up quark. The particle belongs to the baryon family.
"In contrast to other baryons, in which the three quarks perform an elaborate dance around each other, a doubly heavy baryon is expected to act like a planetary system, where the two heavy quarks play the role of heavy stars orbiting one around the other, with the lighter quark orbiting around this binary system," Guy Wilkinson, former spokesperson for the LHCb experiments, said in a news release.
"Finding a doubly heavy-quark baryon is of great interest as it will provide a unique tool to further probe quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes the strong interaction, one of the four fundamental forces," said Giovanni Passaleva, the new spokesperson for the LHCb tests. "Such particles will thus help us improve the predictive power of our theories."
Researchers have submitted a new paper detailing their discovery to the journal Physical Review Letters.
Researchers hope additional experiments will reveal the new particle's full range of behavior: its lifespan and its production and decay mechanisms.
