Physicists uncover evidence of one of nature’s rarest particle decays

After a search lasting more than four decades, a UK-led team of physicists have found evidence for the rarest decay of a subatomic ‘beauty’ particle ever seen. 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.

The team, working at the upgraded LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, were studying beauty quarks, exotic cousins of the up and down quarks that make up all atomic matter in the universe.

When these beauty particles are created, they live for just one and a half trillionths of a second before they decay. The way they decay can tell us about physics that happens at very short-distance scales: trillionths of billionths of a metre.

“What we found in these latest results is an incredibly rare decay of one of these beauty particles, where it turns into two even smaller particles called muons,” said Dr Harry Cliff from the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the analysis team. “This process only happens for one in every ten billion beauty particles, so it’s incredibly difficult to find.”

This is the first time that evidence for this rare type of decay, known as ‘Bd to mu mu’, has been achieved by a single experiment. The results, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, will be presented today (3 November) at CERN.

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