A particle with a similar structure to a proton discovered at CERN
Keystone-SDA
A new particle with a structure similar to that of a proton has been discovered at CERN. Four times heavier than a proton, it is made up of two charm quarks and a down quark, CERN announced on Tuesday.
+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox
This discovery, made as part of the LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider, will help scientists better understand how the strong force links protons, neutrons and other composite particles. Quarks are fundamental constituents of matter and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom.
They usually come together in groups of two to form mesons or three to form baryons. Unlike the proton, baryons are unstable and ephemeral. This makes them difficult to observe.
+ CERN turns spotlight on “exotic” particles structures
“This is the first particle to be identified since the work to improve the LHCb detector was completed in 2023,” said LHCb spokesman Vincenzo Vagnoni. And only the second time that a baryon with two heavy quarks has been observed.
Adapted from French by AI/ts
We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.
Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.
If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at english@swissinfo.ch
