Eli5: It was posted in the science page that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have yielded the simultaneous appearance of three force-carrying elementary particles that had never been seen together before.

Question

Can anyone help me understand what this means and how important this discovery is?

In: Physics

Answer 1

They smashed 2 protons together and that produced an electron, a muon, and a photon. None of these particles are new, it’s just that a proton-proton collision has never been seen to produce that specific combination of 3 particles before, which was predicted to be possible according to quantum chromodynamics. It’s really not possible to eli5 this any more than that. You’re much better off asking a physics sub like r/AskPhysics