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| New particle identified at LHC | New particle identified at LHC |
| (40 minutes later) | |
| The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Franco-Swiss border has made its first clear observation of a new particle since opening in 2009. | The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Franco-Swiss border has made its first clear observation of a new particle since opening in 2009. |
| Known as Chi-b 3P, it is a boson - the label given to particles that carry the forces of Nature. | Known as Chi-b 3P, it is a boson - the label given to particles that carry the forces of Nature. |
| The discovery is reported on the Arxiv pre-print server. | |
| The LHC is exploring some of the fundamental questions in Big Physics by colliding proton particles together in a huge underground facility. | |
| Detail in the sub-atomic wreckage from these impacts is expected to yield new information about the way matter is constructed. | |
| The Chi-b 3P is a more excited state of Chi particles already seen in previous collision experiments, explained Prof Roger Jones, who works on the Atlas detector at the LHC. | |
| "The new particle is made up of a 'beauty quark' and a 'beauty anti-quark', which are then bound together," he told BBC News. | |
| "People have thought this more excited state should exist for years but nobody has managed to see it until now. | |
| "It's also interesting for what it tells us about the forces that hold the quark and the anti-quark together - the strong nuclear force. And that's the same force that holds, for instance, the atomic nucleus together with its protons and the neutrons." | |
| The LHC is designed to fill in gaps in the Standard Model - the current framework devised to explain the interactions of sub-atomic particles - and also to look for the new physics beyond. | |
| In particular, it is using the collisions to try to pin down the famous Higgs particle - another boson that physicists hypothesize can explain why matter has mass. | |
| Discoveries such as Chi-b 3P are an important part of this quest because they add to the wider background knowledge, says Prof Jones. | |
| "The better we understand the strong force, the more we understand a large part of the data that we see, which is quite often the background to the more exciting things we are looking for, like the Higgs. | |
| "So, it's helping put together that basic understanding that we have and need to do the new physics." |