Physicists working on the LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have announced the discovery of a new elementary particle. This is the 85th such particle to be identified. The newly found object is a doubly charmed baryon: it consists of one strange quark and two charm quarks. Physicists consider this a significant milestone because it completes the family of doubly charmed baryons — particles that were theoretically predicted more than six decades ago. The discovery is based on data collected in 2024 during high-energy proton-proton collisions. The particle is extremely short-lived: it travels only a fraction of a millimeter in the detector before decaying into more stable particles. Researchers traced the trajectories left by these particles to pinpoint their origin and deduce their properties. This finding will help refine theories of quantum chromodynamics, which describes the strong interaction that holds quarks together.
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