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High-energy physics

Proton smasher spots rare particle decays

Nature volume 522, pages 42–43 (2015)Cite this article

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The extremely rare decays of particles known as neutral B mesons have been observed at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The result may be a glimpse of physics beyond that of the standard model of particle physics. See Letter p.68

For more than three decades, physicists have been looking for the decay of the 'strange B meson' particle into a pair of muons, the heavy cousins of electrons. The process is incredibly rare, and harder to find than the famous Higgs particle, the discovery of which at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, was celebrated worldwide in 2012. The standard model of elementary particle physics1 makes an exact prediction of the number of particle-decay events researchers should observe in an experiment. Anything more than the predicted value means potential trouble for the standard model. On page 68 of this issue, researchers working on the CMS and LHCb collaborations2 at the Large Hadron Collider describe a joint analysis of data from proton collisions that set the decay rate of the strange B meson at about three in one billion — in agreement with the standard-model prediction. However, they find that the decay rate of another type of neutral B meson, the 'non-strange' B meson, is at odds with the expectation from the standard model.

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Figure 1: The rare decay of neutral B mesons to muons.

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References

  1. http://home.web.cern.ch/about/physics/standard-model

  2. CMS Collaboration & LHCb Collaboration. Nature 522, 68–72 (2015).

  3. http://home.web.cern.ch/about/physics/supersymmetry

  4. Chatrchyan, S. et al. (CMS Collaboration) Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 101804 (2013).

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  5. Aaij, R. et al. (LHCb Collaboration) Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 101805 (2013).

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  1. Daria Zieminska is in the Physics Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA.,

    Daria Zieminska

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  1. Daria Zieminska
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Correspondence to Daria Zieminska.

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Zieminska, D. Proton smasher spots rare particle decays. Nature 522, 42–43 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14520

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