Image: recreation of a proton / Large Hadron Collider / CMS collision.
Since September 2008, humanity has been able to recreate the conditions of the birth of the universe itself in a place manufactured by itself: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) .
Famous for one of the most promising findings of the 21st century, the verification of the existence of the Higgs boson, the LHC has again made another astonishing discovery related to the subatomic particles that make up our universe and help us understand their nature.
The protagonists of this new detection are two baryons, and also indications of another particle , still unknown, as announced by scientists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) that administers the LHC.
Baryons are fundamental subatomic particles that are made up of three quarks. And quarks, in turn, are even smaller particles that come in different “modes”: up, down, weird, and lovely.
Each type of baryon has a different mix of quarks. Protons, for example, are baryons consisting of two up-mode quarks and one down-mode quarks each.
The mission, dubbed LHCb (b for beauty), found these particles by breaking up the protons and observing the background rate of the particles decay. The experiment looked for alterations above that speed, which could indicate the presence of previously unknown particles.
Similar particles had already been observed in a previous experiment conducted at Fermilab in Illinois, but those particles differed in that they had less mass than their newly discovered ‘brothers’. In contrast, the baryons discovered at CERN are about 6 times more massive than protons , according to the scientists in a CERN statement. The number “6097” refers to its mass in millions of electronic volts, or MeV, (whereas the mass of a proton is approximately 938 MeV).
As for the third potential particle, the researchers only discovered hints that it exists. Called Z sub c- (4100), this particle could be a strange meson, a type of unstable particle that forms briefly during high-energy collisions and consists of two quarks and two antiquarks.
The world’s largest particle accelerator
The experiments carried out at the LHC take place in a tunnel about 27 kilometers in circumference buried under the French-Swiss border, near Geneva. The objective of the LHC is to launch protons and subatomic particles to navigate through this tunnel at a speed slightly slower than that of light, and then make them collide with each other. By doing so, the particles can be broken down into smaller pieces, helping scientists discover the most elementary particles that shape our universe.
