LHCb collaboration

Five new particles have been discovered 'hiding in plain sight' at the Large Hadron Collider.

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The discovery comes from the collider's LHCb detector, or LHC beauty, which searches for objects such as antimatter.

The five new particles are examples of baryons, which means they are made up of three fundamental particles called quarks, and all of them were discovered at once.

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"The exceptionality of this discovery is that observing five new states all at once is a rather unique event," said CERN's Stefania Pandolfi.

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Quarks are said to have six ‘flavours’: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. Combinations of quarks within these flavours give rise to the ‘larger’ particles. A common example of a baryon is a proton, which is made of two 'up' quarks and a 'down' quark.

"These particles have been hiding in plain sight for years," said Professor Tara Shears, a member of the LHCb team from the University of Liverpool. "But it's taken the exquisite sensitivity of LHCb's particle detectors to bring them to our attention."

The new particles are excited states of a particle called Omega-zero, which contains two 'strange' and one 'charm' quark. This means they have a higher energy than the lowest possible state, or ground state.

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The five particle states are the five narrow peaks standing out from the distribution of data LHCb collaboration

A paper has been published detailing each of the particles on the preprint server arXiv.

As the largest and most powerful machine on the planet, the 27km underground LHC ring in Geneva is capable of answering questions we have never been able to ask before.

By smashing subatomic particles together at speeds approaching the speed of light, the Large Hadron Collider can confirm the existence of widely-predicted particles, discover new ones, and could potentially even create microscopic black holes that lead to other dimensions.


What are subatomic particles? Atoms are usually made of protons, neutrons and electrons. These are made of the smallest particles we know to exist, called fundamental particles. Fundamental particles are subdivided into two groups, the first being fermions, the particles that make up matter. The second are bosons, the force particles that hold the others together. Within the group of fermions are fundamental particles known as quarks. When quarks combine in threes, they form compound particles known as baryons. Protons are probably the best-known baryons. Often, quarks interact with corresponding antiparticles, such as antiquarks, which have the same mass but opposite charges and when this happens, they form mesons. Mesons often turn up in the decay of heavy man-made particles, such as those in accelerators. Mesons, baryons, and other kinds of particles that take part in interactions like these are called hadrons.

"This discovery was made possible thanks to the specialised capabilities of the LHCb detector in the precise recognition of different types of particles and also thanks to the large dataset accumulated during the first and second runs of the Large Hadron Collider," a CERN statement said.

"These two ingredients allowed the five excited states to be identified with an overwhelming level of statistical significance – meaning that the discovery cannot be just a statistical fluke of data."