The Large Hadron Collider’s subatomic discoveries didn’t stop with the Higgs boson: This week, scientists at Europe’s CERN research center announced that the collider’s LHCb experiment has detected a doubly charmed particle that’s like a proton, but four times as weighty.
The particle is known as the Ξcc⁺, or “Xi-cc-plus.” It flashes in and out of existence in less than the blink of an eye, but just knowing that it exists — and knowing how massive it is — could give physicists a more solid sense of how matter is put together.
The discovery of the Xi-cc-plus baryon marks a milestone for the LHCb team. “This is the first new particle identified after the upgrades to the LHCb detector that were completed in 2023,” Vincenzo Vagnoni, the…