For more than a decade, scientists have known that the subatomic particles called charm mesons can travel as a mixture of their particle and antiparticle states. Now, a new discovery made by Oxford physicists analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC, part of CERN) is showing for the first time that they can also oscillate between these two states.
Achieving the discovery was no small feat. "What makes this discovery of oscillation in the charm meson particle so impressive is that, unlike the beauty mesons, the oscillation is very slow and therefore extremely difficult to measure within the time that it takes the meson to decay," Professor Guy Wilkinson of the University of Oxford said in a statement.
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