The Large Hadron Collider’s official tally: 59 new hadrons and counting

How many new particles has the LHC discovered? The most widely known discovery is of course that of the Higgs boson. Less well known is the fact that, over the past 10 years, the LHC experiments have also found more than 50 new particles called hadrons. Coincidentally, the number 50 appears in the context of hadrons twice, as 2021 marks the 50th anniversary of hadron colliders: on 27 January 1971, two beams of protons collided for the first time in CERN’s Intersecting Storage Rings accelerator, making it the first accelerator in history to produce collisions between two counter-rotating beams of hadrons.