{"id":86744,"date":"2019-01-17T13:42:47","date_gmt":"2019-01-17T21:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/lhcb-observes-two-new-baryon-particles"},"modified":"2019-01-17T13:42:47","modified_gmt":"2019-01-17T21:42:47","slug":"lhcb-observes-two-new-baryon-particles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/lhcb-observes-two-new-baryon-particles","title":{"rendered":"LHCb observes two new baryon particles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/lhcb-observes-two-new-baryon-particles.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Today the collaboration for the <a href=\"https:\/\/home.cern\/about\/experiments\/lhcb\">LHCb experiment<\/a> at CERN\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/home.cern\/topics\/large-hadron-collider\">Large Hadron Collider<\/a> announced the discovery of two new particles in the baryon family. The particles, known as the Xi_b\u2019<sup>-<\/sup> and Xi_b*<sup>-<\/sup>, were predicted to exist by the quark model but had never been seen before. A related particle, the Xi_b*, was found by the CMS experiment at CERN in 2012. The LHCb collaboration submitted a paper reporting the finding to <em>Physical Review Letters<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Like the well-known protons that the LHC accelerates, the new particles are baryons made from three quarks bound together by the strong force. The types of quarks are different, though: the new X_ib particles both contain one beauty (b), one strange (s), and one down (d) quark. Thanks to the heavyweight b quarks, they are more than six times as massive as the proton. But the particles are more than just the sum of their parts: their mass also depends on how they are configured. Each of the quarks has an attribute called \u201cspin\u201d. In the Xi_b\u2019<sup>-<\/sup> state, the spins of the two lighter quarks point in the opposite direction to the b quark, whereas in the Xi_b*<sup>-<\/sup> state they are aligned.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNature was kind and gave us two particles for the price of one,\u201d said Matthew Charles of the CNRS\u2019s LPNHE laboratory at Paris VI University. \u201cThe Xi_b\u2019<sup>-<\/sup> is very close in mass to the sum of its decay products: if it had been just a little lighter, we wouldn\u2019t have seen it at all using the decay signature that we were looking for.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/home.cern\/news\/news\/experiments\/lhcb-observes-two-new-baryon-particles\">https:\/\/home.cern\/news\/news\/experiments\/lhcb-observes-two-new-baryon-particles<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today the collaboration for the LHCb experiment at CERN\u2019s Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of two new particles in the baryon family. The particles, known as the Xi_b\u2019- and Xi_b*-, were predicted to exist by the quark model but had never been seen before. A related particle, the Xi_b*, was found by the CMS [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":502,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86744","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\/502"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}