We may be one small giant step toward solving the most essential universal questions, including what happened immediately after the Big Bang, where dark matter hides, and why normal matter exists. The increasing sensitivity of particle colliders like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is allowing researchers to delve unprecedentedly into the very fabric of our reality. Called the “zeptoverse,” it may harbor undiscovered particles or forces that exist on zeptometer scales, billions of times thinner than a human hair, and quantum actions that shape the cosmos over unimaginably small periods of time. After more than 40 years of effort, scientists have effectively placed a knocker on the door of the zeptoverse, offering experimental evidence for an extremely elusive and unstable type of particle decay. At a seminar on November 3, and in a preprint paper on arXiv that has not yet been peer-reviewed, the LHCb Collaboration announced evidence of this phenomenon. It is believed to occur only once in ten billion events involving the death of a certain “beautiful” particle—odds substantially less likely than winning the lottery. This potential discovery, and a much more precise measurement of a previously observed sister decay, provide “a powerful new test of the Standard Model and a window into potential new physics,” explains Niladri Sahoo, a particle physicist at the University of Birmingham and coordinator of the LHCb Very Rare Decays working group. frameborder=”0″ enable=”accelerometer; autoplay; writing on clipboard; encrypted media; gyroscope; picture in picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” enablefullscreen> The experiment was carried out at the Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb), a particle search project situated along the sprawling underground LHC. It can now focus on the physics of such rare particles, sought after since the 1980s, thanks to a recent upgrade that significantly increased its particle collision detection rate, as well as leveraging machine learning techniques to increase the signal-to-noise ratio that has drowned out such attempts at observations The LHCb experiment detects decays using instruments such as its eagle-eye VELO subdetector, which is conveniently located less than a finger’s width from the particle beam to better observe the zoo of exotic particles produced by collisions near the speed of light A map of the LHC and its components, including the LHCb (CERN) a Bd meson in a muon and an antimuon The meson in question is composed of two particles. strange quarks, called beauty quarks and down antiquarks. Quarks come in six types, and two of them, called up and down quarks, combine into triads to form neutrons and protons. The other quarks are more esoteric but essential to exploring the biggest universal mysteries of the Big Bang, perhaps when the cosmos was only a hundredth of a billionth of a second, but are naturally absent today. beauty quark to create the meson and start the whole thing? First, they collided protons at near the speed of light, producing an ephemeral spray of particles that included many beauty quarks and down antiquarks, which don’t like to be alone, so they combine almost instantaneously through the strong nuclear force, which also binds the quarks inside the protons and neutrons. These mesons are incredibly fleeting and decay into a trillionth and. half a second. But only one in ten billion of these “beautiful” decays produces the desired result: a muon and an antimuon emerge from the energy of the quantum realm to preserve the energy-mass law. These muons themselves only “live” for about two millionths of a second before decaying into particles such as electrons and positrons. 2025, combined with previous data collected between 2011 and 2018, yields a comfortable 3.2 sigma significance level. Reaching the ‘gold standard’ 5 sigma significance value will require further research to confirm this decline. Future upgrades in the 2030s will increase the number of LHC collisions and increase the data collection rate again, by an order of magnitude. [Standard Model] This highlights that the results of this work align with the Standard Model, which explains much of our Universe but does not illuminate dark matter, or the slight asymmetry in normal matter and antimatter that prevented the entire cosmos from annihilating in a cloud of energy after the Big Bang. He also tantalizes us with the suggestion that discovering new physics may not depend on the LHC directly generating a new particle, but based on indirect evidence, it may have been observed at other decay rates. This has been the case in the previous discoveries of the charm quark and the top quark, the latter of which is the heaviest of the quarks, almost as massive as an entire gold atom. “Seeing clear evidence of this very rare decay for the first time was exciting,” concludes Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge and leader of the analysis team. “We are knocking on the door of the zeptoverse.” now. I can’t wait to see what we find as we dig deeper.” A preprint of the research paper is available on arXiv. This article was fact-checked by Rebecca Dyer and edited by Rebecca Dyer. While we’re proud of our process, we’re only human. If you spot an error, please let us know.
