Particle physics Research team discovers a new particle in Geneva
A research team has discovered a new particle at Cern in Geneva. The discovery should help to better understand the strong force that holds matter together.
17.03.2026, 12:20
SDA
The discovery was presented at the Moriond conference, as announced by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics Cern on Tuesday. It is the 80th particle to be discovered using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator.
The newly observed particle, named "Xicc+", is like a proton that has undergone a dramatic "quark upgrade", wrote the research group of the Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb) experiment in a statement on the discovery. It belongs to the class of baryons.
Like a proton, it consists of three quarks. Quarks are so-called elementary particles - the smallest building blocks of everything that exists. They are the building blocks of matter that cannot be broken down any further. They form the basis for all other particles and therefore for all matter in the universe.
Unlike a proton, two of the quarks that make up the newly discovered particle are particularly heavy "charm quarks". The particle therefore weighs around four times as much as an ordinary proton.
Physicists had been searching for the particle for a long time. In 2017, the LHCb experiment reported the discovery of a very similar particle in which only one of the quarks is different. It was assumed that the new particle that has now been discovered must also exist.
With this discovery, physicists can now compare their theories with the actual discovery.
The particle itself was not measured directly in the particle accelerator, as Cern explained. It only exists for a very short time, less than a trillionth of a second, before it decays. The particle accelerator's detectors see the decay products of such particles. From this, physicists can reconstruct which particle was present.
