{"id":237808,"date":"2026-05-27T03:23:37","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T08:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/atlas-observes-new-bc-meson-excited-state"},"modified":"2026-05-27T03:23:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T08:23:37","slug":"atlas-observes-new-bc-meson-excited-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/atlas-observes-new-bc-meson-excited-state","title":{"rendered":"ATLAS observes new Bc meson excited state"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/atlas-observes-new-bc-meson-excited-state2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Protons and neutrons\u2014the building blocks of matter\u2014belong to a huge class of particles called hadrons. Hadrons are composite particles made of quarks that are bound together by the strong force. They are classified into two groups: baryons, which consist of three quarks (like protons and neutrons), and mesons, which are formed by a quark\u2013antiquark pair.<\/p>\n<p>Despite decades of study, many aspects of the strong force remain poorly understood, particularly the way it binds quarks together inside hadrons. Mesons made of heavy quarks\u2014such as charm or bottom quarks\u2014can provide an important laboratory for testing theoretical descriptions of these effects. Of particular interest to physicists are B<sub>c<\/sub><sup>+<\/sup> mesons, as they contain two types of heavy quarks: a charm quark and a bottom antiquark (b\u0305c).<\/p>\n<p>In a new result presented at the <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2024-03-lhcb-decay-mode-charmed-beauty.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">Large Hadron Collider Physics 2026<\/a> conference, physicists from the ATLAS Collaboration report the first observation of a particle with properties consistent with the B<sub>c<\/sub>*<sup>+<\/sup> meson, the lowest excited B<sub>c<\/sub><sup>+<\/sup> meson. The paper is <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2605.16228\" target=\"_blank\">available<\/a> on the <i>arXiv<\/i> preprint server.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Protons and neutrons\u2014the building blocks of matter\u2014belong to a huge class of particles called hadrons. Hadrons are composite particles made of quarks that are bound together by the strong force. They are classified into two groups: baryons, which consist of three quarks (like protons and neutrons), and mesons, which are formed by a quark\u2013antiquark pair. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237808\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}