40 Years of Searching for a Physical Event That Occurs Once in Every 10 Billion
LHCb team announces evidence of a rare particle transformation at CERN's collider.
Translated by Qiyas from الأنباء — Original source
Scientists at CERN’s particle collider have detected evidence of an extremely rare event in which a particle known as a “B meson” decays into two smaller particles called muons, which resemble the electrons found in ordinary atoms but are heavier and have very short lifetimes.
According to theoretical calculations, this decay occurs only about once in every 10 billion such decays.
The LHCb experiment team announced the result on November 3, following a search that spanned more than 40 years.
An upgrade to the experiment helped collect data five times faster, along with artificial intelligence techniques that distinguished the signals of this decay amid a vast number of other collisions.
The result is promising but does not yet constitute a confirmed discovery; the current evidence requires more data to verify that the signal is genuine and not a statistical fluctuation.
The significance of this research lies in the possibility that unknown particles could influence the frequency of this rare decay, even if they cannot be produced directly in the collider, which, as its name suggests, collides particles to search for new particles at high energies.
Therefore, scientists compare their observations with the predictions of their current theory to better understand particles and their forces.
