![]() ![]() This is impossible to explain in the Standard Model, which treats electrons and muons identically, apart from the fact that electrons are around 200 times lighter than muons. In March, a team of physicists at LHCb released results showing evidence that beauty quarks were decaying into particles called muons less often than to their lighter cousins, electrons. The way beauty quarks decay can be influenced by the existence of undiscovered forces or particles. However, billions of beauty quarks are produced every year by CERN’s giant particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, which are recorded by a purpose-built detector called LHCb. These are exotic cousins of the up and down quarks that make up the nucleus of every atom.īeauty quarks don’t exist in large numbers in the world around as they are incredibly short-lived – surviving on average for just a trillionth of a second before transforming or decaying into other particles. One of the best ways to search for new particles and forces is to study particles known as beauty quarks. It also contains no particle that could explain the mysterious dark matter that astronomy tells us is five times more abundant than the stuff that makes up the visible world around us.Īs a result, physicists have long been hunting for signs of physics beyond the Standard Model that might help us to address some of these mysteries. It does not include the force of gravity, nor can it account for how matter was produced during the Big Bang. It has passed every experimental test to date, and yet physicists know it must be incomplete. The Standard Model describes all the known particles that make up the universe and the forces that they interact through. “The fact that we’ve seen the same effect as our colleagues did in March certainly boosts the chances that we might genuinely be on the brink of discovering something new.” - Harry Cliff ![]()
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