• It’s a new kind of quark, or a subatomic particle, that is a basic building block of matter.
• Something like the Xicc++ was known to exist in theory since decades but was finally ‘observed’ by physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider facility in Geneva and made public last week.
• Nearly all the matter that we see around us is made of baryons, which are common particles composed of three quarks, the best-known being protons and neutrons.
• But there are six types of quarks — top, bottom, up, down, charm and strange.
• Theoretically many different potential combinations could form other kinds of baryons. Unlike a proton, which is made up of only up and down quarks, the new entity has two charm quarks.
• This is the first time that researchers have seen two charm quarks in a baryon and therefore, throws new light on the relationship between the most fundamental forces of nature.
• The mass of the newly identified particle is about 3621 MeV, which is almost four times heavier than the proton.

Source:TH