Two new supermassive particles have popped up at the world’s largest atom smasher. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located near Geneva, Switzerland, uses massive magnets to accelerate two beams of protons to nearly the speed of light and smash them together. The collisions break the protons apart with so much energy that it creates a “shower” of new particles for scientists to study.On July 4, 2012, scientists at the LHC announced they had found an elementary particle called the Higgs boson, which could help scientists understand how matter has mass. On November 20, 2014, one of the experiments at the LHC, called LHCb, identified two never-before-seen baryon particles.
The new particles are known as Xi_b'- and Xi_b*-, and are each made up of three quarks. Quarks are believed to be truly fundamental particles, meaning they are not made up of smaller particles. Protons are also made up of three quarks.Xi_b'- and Xi_b*- consist of one down quark, one strange quark and one bottom quark (also known as a beauty quark which is incredibly heavy for its size). Other particles consisting of this same quark combination were seen at the LHC in 2012, and by experiments at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 2007.
So what makes Xi_b'- and Xi_b*- unique? The quarks contained in them have different "spins," — an important property of particles that includes a number and a direction. Differences in the quark spins can make two particles unique, even if they contain the same combination of quark types.
This discovery opens new doors in the construction of our universe. The LHC has been under repairs since the tests on November 20th but the collider is scheduled to restart by the spring of 2015. Scientists are currently preparing the LHC to once again start colliding particles but at higher energies and with more intense beams than ever before.
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