Large Hadron Collider Spots Extremely Rare Particle Decay in Two Experiments

The Large Hadron Collider has started up again and now, physicists have announced that two experiments have combined their results to reveal a very rare and previously unseen subatomic process. The new findings reveal a bit more about particle physics.

In this case, the researchers witnessed a new and rare decays of the Bs particle, which is a heavy composite particle consisting of a bottom antiquark and a strange quark, into two muons. Theorists had predicted that this decay would only occur about four times out of a billion.

"It's amazing that this theoretical prediction is so accurate and even more amazing than we can actually observe it at all," said Sheldon Stone, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This is a great triumph for the LHC and both experiments."

The LHCb and CMS both study the properties or particles to search for cracks in the Standard Model, which is our best description so far of the behavior of all directly observable matter in the universe. The Standard Model, though, is known to be incomplete since it doesn't address the presence of dark matter or the abundance of matter over antimatter in our universe.

"Many theories that propose to extend the Standard Model also predict an increase in this Bs decay rate," said Joel Butler of the CMS experiment in a news release. "This new result allows us to discount or severely limit the parameters of most of these theories. Any viable theory must predict a change small enough to be accommodated by the remaining uncertainty."

Bs mesons oscillate between their matter and antimatter counterparts. This means that studying the properties of B mesons will give scientists a better understanding of the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe.

The findings are important for better understanding matter and antimatter in our universe. Soon, the LHC will begin a new run at a higher energy and intensity, which means that the precision with which the decay is measured will improve and further limit the viable Standard Model extensions.

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

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