Particle physics experiments have observed many different types of hadrons, in which quarks are bound together by the strong interaction. Last year, the first ever doubly heavy baryon -- the Xicc++ which contains two charm quarks -- was observed by LHCb. This has inspired renewed theoretical interest in other doubly heavy states, such as those containing two beauty quarks, but the prospects for discovering such particles did not look promising. In a new preprint, researchers at Warwick have now proposed a new method which exploits a distinctive feature of double beauty hadron decays and may allow them to be discovered. The key point is that such decays may produce a particle called a Bc meson (containing a beauty and an anticharm quark) that does not originate directly from the proton-proton collisions at the LHC, and that nothing else can cause this signature. The LHCb experiment is particularly well-suited to searching for this process. Work is now ongoing to understand how large a data sample, and how good the detector performance must be, in order to be able to finally see the double beauties for the first time.

• Caption to figure: Illustration of how the decay of a double beauty hadron (labelled bbx) can produce a Bc meson with momentum vector that does not point back to the primary vertex (PV). This is characterised by a non-zero value of the impact parameter (IP).
• Publication: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.06657