Physicists at Cern have discovered a plethora of new exotic particles being created in the collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider over the past few years. So many have been found in fact, that our collaboration (LHCb), which has discovered 59 out of 66 recent particles, has come up with a new naming scheme to help us impose some order on the growing particle zoo
Particle physicists have a rather chequered history when it comes to naming things. As more and more particles were discovered over the course of the 20th century, the nomenclature became increasingly befuddling. For instance, in the group of leptons we have electrons, muons and then taus, but not tauons.
