Since the spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the gigantic particle accelerator outside Geneva, have suffered a bit of a drought when it comes to finding new particles. In a welcome relief, the LHCb collaboration, who run one of four large experiments at the LHC, have announced one of the most genuinely exciting observations to come out of the 27km super-collider so far – an exotic particle that cannot be explained by current theories.
In the early 1930s physicists had a clean picture of the subatomic particles that make up our world. Every known atom has a tiny nucleus at its heart surrounded by a cloud of electrons, and each nucleus was made out of varying numbers of protons and neutrons. However, as the decades wore on a number of new, and somewhat unwelcome, particles were discovered, at first in detectors studying particles from outer space and later in particle-collider experiments.
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