Scientists can never guess with certainty what exotic particles will be produced by the collision process inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This is precisely why this experiment always attracts a great deal of peer attention.
CERN’s Large Hadron Bottom Quark Collider (LHCb) and its research team
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) recently announced that at the Large Hadron Bottom Quark Collider (LHCb), one of their four major particle detectors, they have discovered some decay laws for quarks that cannot be explained by the most mainstream Standard Model.
In the framework of the Standard Model, quarks, one of the fundamental particles that make up matter, are known to have six flavor states, including up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange. The decay process of the bottom quark in the collision experiment should produce an equal amount of electrons or muons (also written as muons). However, the new experiment found anomalies that do not fit this prediction.
”When we first saw the data, we were almost trembling with excitement and our hearts were racing.” Mitesh Patel of Imperial College London, a physicist involved in the study, said, “Although it’s a little early to say that this finding defies the Standard Model, it’s the most exciting discovery I’ve made in 20 years of research in this field. “
The Standard Model is now one of the pillar theories used by the physics community to explain the world, describing the fundamental particles that make up all the matter in the world, and the forces that act between them. But now, scientists are realizing that this theory is encountering major obstacles in explaining the composition of dark matter, and why the world has asymmetries in positive and antimatter.
To answer these confusions, scientists use the Large Hadron Collider to continuously conduct experiments to find matter outside the Standard Model.
The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle collision experimental facility, capable of accelerating subatomic particles to near the speed of light and then colliding them. Such collisions can produce a variety of novel particles that physicists are constantly recording, analyzing, and studying.
The standard model considers electrons and muons to be like close relatives within a Family, with similar properties except for minor differences in mass, so it is presumed that quarks produced by the LHC experiment would have the same chance of decaying into muons and electrons.
However, recent experiments have found that a meson containing an anti-basic quark, the B meson, has a higher probability of decaying into an electron than a muon, which is not consistent with the predictions of the Standard Particle Model.
Finally, the study presents a calculation of whether these data results are coincidental odds. They say that the golden rule of particle physics experiments requires that the chance of the result being a “coincidence” must be less than 1 in 3.5 million for the result to be declared conclusive. The chances of the data being a “coincidence” are 1 in 1,000, so the researchers said it was too early to declare any conclusive conclusions.
The study was published March 22 on arXiv, a preprint site.
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