GENEVA — Scientists at the world’s largest smasher said Wednesday they have discovered two subatomic particles never seen before that could widen our understanding of the universe.
An experiment using the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s Large Hadron Collider found the new particles, which were predicted to exist and are both baryons made from three quarks bound together by a strong force.
Officials at the lab known by its French acronym, CERN, announced the discovery in a statement Wednesday.
“Nature was kind and gave us two particles for the price of one,” said one of the CERN collaborators, Matthew Charles, of the CNRS’s LPNHE laboratory at Paris VI University.
The new particles are more than six times as massive as the protons that scientists have been crashing into one another in a 17-mile tunnel on the Swiss-French border.
The heavier weight of the two particles is partly the result of their “spins” in opposite directions, which is “an exciting result,” said Steven Blusk of Syracuse University in New York.
