Scientists on Wednesday said that after a nearly three-decade bid they had detected a telltale change in a sub-atomic particle, further backing a key theory about the Universe.
Researchers at the world's biggest particle collider said they had observed an extremely rare event—the decay of the neutral B meson into a pair of muons, the heavy cousins of electrons.
The results provide further support for the so-called Standard Model, the conceptual framework for the particles and forces that constitute the cosmos, they said in the journal Nature.
Neutral B mesons are unstable composites of two kinds of particles called quarks, bound by the "strong" force.
Their decay into muons is predicted under the Standard Model. But getting evidence to confirm the prediction has been a puzzler since the mid-1980s.
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