Charm quarks do energetic shuffle

The LHCb collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider recently reported the discovery of a doubly charmed baryon with a large binding energy between the two charm quarks inside it. Marek Karliner and Jonathan Rosner report that this strong binding energy allows for a rearrangement of the quarks that releases energy in a quark-level analogue of deuterium–tritium nuclear fusion. They point out that the even larger binding energy between two bottom quarks can also undergo such an exothermic rearrangement, with a considerably larger energy release.