It’s a new kind of quark, or a subatomic particle, that is a basic building block of matter. Something like the Xicc++ was known to exist in theory since decades but was finally ‘observed’ by physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider facility in Geneva and made public last week. Nearly all the matter that we see around us is made of baryons, which are common particles composed of three quarks, the best-known being protons and neutrons. But there are six types of quarks — top, bottom, up, down, charm and strange. Theoretically many different potential combinations could form other kinds of baryons. Unlike a proton, which is made up of only up and down quarks, the new entity has two charm quarks.

This is the first time that researchers have seen two charm quarks in a baryon and therefore, throws new light on the relationship between the most fundamental forces of nature. The mass of the newly identified particle is about 3621 MeV, which is almost four times heavier than the proton.