Beauty Quark Decay Hints at Hidden Physics: A 1-in-10B Find
Using the upgraded Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at CERN near Geneva, researchers detected signs of a beauty particle, one that contains a beauty quark, decaying into two particles called muons. After more than four decades of searching, it is the first time a single experiment has produced evidence of the decay. If confirmed, it would be the rarest particle decay ever observed, CERN said.
The decay, known as “Bd to mu mu,” is vanishingly uncommon. “This process only happens for one in every ten billion beauty particles, so it’s incredibly difficult to find,” said Dr. Harry Cliff of the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the analysis.
Beauty quarks are exotic relatives of the up and down quarks that make up ordinary atomic matter. Particles containing them survive for only about 1.5 trillionths of a second before decaying, a window that lets scientists examine physical processes at extremely small distances.
The Large Hadron Collider can probe distances of roughly 100 zeptometers; a zeptometer is a trillionth of a billionth of a meter. Cambridge said the findings could open a new frontier.
“The results could open the door to a strange new world known as the zeptoverse, where particles that could help explain mysteries like dark matter and how matter came into existence during the Big Bang may be hiding,” Cambridge said.
The collider has so far failed to deliver definitive evidence of many of the new particles predicted by theories that extend the Standard Model of particle physics, prompting researchers to ask whether new physics lies at even smaller scales. The LHCb experiment was built specifically to study beauty-quark particles, which are produced in large numbers when high-energy particles collide inside the machine.
About 20 physicists from the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands took part in the research. The findings have not yet been peer-reviewed and were due to be presented at CERN on Tuesday.
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