Randy Lewis was happy to hear the news, but he was nowhere near surprised. He expected Tuesday’s discovery of two new subatomic particles since he predicted their existence five years ago.

“It’s certainly a very nice feeling,” the York University physicist told the Star.

“Finding these two shows our experiments, which are very challenging, are being done correctly.”

Scientists at the world’s largest particle accelerator, the 27-km CERN Large Hadron Collider that straddles the French-Swiss border, announced Tuesday that they had detected a pair of brand new particles, infinitesimal bits of matter smaller than an atom.

Lewis, who teaches physics and astronomy in Toronto, is among a handful of specialists to have forecast the existence of these particles, in his case in a 2009 research paper he co-authored with Richard Woloshyn, from Vancouver’s TRIUMF Laboratory. The scientists wrote out lengthy calculations by hand and ran their equations through a computer program and then pored over their results, Lewis explained.

Their conclusion was that it must be possible for these two new particles to exist, a theory confirmed by CERN scientists this week, based on their particle accelerator experiments from 2011 and 2012.

“It’s nice to have an experimental collaboration (CERN) think it’s important enough to measure these, and it agrees with what we predicted,” he said.

“Physicists were very confident that these particles would exist. It wasn’t a surprise that they were found. We knew they were there.”

Since it went online in 2008, the CERN Large Hadron Collider has been the centre of experimentation for particle physicists from around the world. In 2013, scientists there confirmed that the Higgs Boson particle, theorized to be responsible for the mass of objects, was indeed real.

Tuesday’s discovery added two new particles to the family of baryons, the most familiar of which are protons and neutrons, the materials that make up the nucleus of an atom.

As Lewis explained, each baryon is made up of three smaller pieces, called quarks. The newly discovered particles — called Xi_b'- and Xi_b*- — are similar to protons and neutrons, except that they are made up of different combinations of quarks.

“In practice,” Lewis said, “you and I and everything around us is just made out of protons and neutrons. But there are dozens and dozens and dozens of other (baryons) you could make out of quarks.”

What makes these new particles special is that they incorporate a type of quark — the beauty or bottom quark (“b quark” for short) — that makes them six times larger and significantly heavier than a proton. Asked why these quarks are heavier, Lewis said, “That is a question that nobody can answer. And we would like to.”

CERN, meanwhile, posits that the added weight is explained by the “spin” of the particles, which is based on how their quarks are configured.

Why should we care about this?

Lewis said their discovery is yet another step on the path to confirming the mainstream theory of particle physics.

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“If we want to make brand-new, unexpected discoveries, we need to prove to ourselves and to everyone else that we really understand this quantum physics,” he said.

“Now we have confidence moving ahead to other predictions and maybe even stranger physics.”