Particle with similar structure to a proton discovered at CERN
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.
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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.
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“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
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