Hi, it's Laura Lickman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Heads up, subatomic lovers, a new particle just dropped.

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland announced that they have discovered something like an extra heavy proton.

Here to tell us what that means is Hassan Jawa Harry, a member of the

LHCB experiment. Welcome, Hassan. Thank you. Thanks for the invitation. I'm happy to talk about

the LHCB resolved. Yeah, so describe this new little particle for us. It's been described as

like a proton. What is it exactly?

So that's actually a very good description which you put there as a heavy proton. So what's

been discovered by LHCB is the first observation of a composite particle, which contains two charm quarks and a down quark.

So it's a proton-like particle because ordinary proton contains actually two up quarks

and one down quarks.

So in this particle, the two up quarks have been replaced by the charm quark, and the charmed quark being so heavy, makes this particle about four times heavier than the ordinary proton.

Put the finding in context. I mean, is this like discovering a new species of frog or an astronomer finding a new exoplanet or, you know, even more fundamental than that.

So I think, yes, what you just described is really more of a finding an extra planet.

We haven't discovered a new fundamental particles, but these particles are made up of

fundamental particles. The fundamental particles here are the quarks. We are all made up of quarks, but the kind of quarks which participate in the structure of the ordinary matter are the lightest ones,

which we call them up and down quark.

Those are relatively light, and they form, for example, the proton is made up of two up quark and one down quark,

and a neutron is made up of two down quark and one up quark.

Everything else which we see around us, in the stars, in the galaxies, and so on,

are made up of the same quarks.

In this case, we've seen a particle which is made up of a heavy quark.

...