New particle discovered at the LHC

In the beginning, the hunt for new particles was exciting: it had ingenuity, creativity, technology and perseverance on display. New constituents of matter would be found, experimented with, and added to a slowly growing list that would cement our understanding of the universe. Now, however, high-energy detectors churn out exotic phenomena like adding clothes to a laundry list. Though the Higgs boson still commands sizeable attention because of its elusive nature and its underpinnings in the Standard Model, other less-important particles are studied as offshoots of more-important interactions. Only as theoretical physics evolves to understand the importance of these exotic particles will their significance be truly understood. Till then, all we can do is pay as much attention to what has happened as we can and understand why these beings could be important.

The latest amongst these beings is the "beauty baryon". Baryons are particles that are composed of three quarks, and any baryon that has one bottom quark becomes a bottom- or beauty-baryon. While their existence has been theorized, this is the first time they've been spotted - at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The CMS is one of the six detectors that dot the underground ring of the LHC, and is built to study particles with relatively higher masses (of the order of some billions of electron-volts). The "beauty baryon" or, to put it correctly, χ_b* (pronounced "chi-bee-star"), has been spotted at a 5-sigma confidence level. This means that the accuracy of the measurement is 99.99 per cent.