New Particle Discovered

I clicked over to the Language Log in my blogroll when I saw the announcement of a new particle.

Woot. (I think.)

An entirely new type of particle has been discovered by scientists using the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), near Geneva, Switzerland.

The discovery of the new particle, called “neutral Xi_b^star baryon,” was made by the CMS experiment, one of six separate particle physics experiments running at the LHC. It was announced Friday by Symmetry Magazine.

Here's the announcement from Symmetry ("CMS collaboration discovers its first new particle", Symmetry Breaking 4/27/2012):

Members of the CMS collaboration announced the experiment’s first discovery of a new particle today. In a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters, the CMS collaboration described the first observation of an excited, neutral Xi_b baryon, a particle made up of three quarks, including one beauty quark.