A once-promising hint of new physics from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, has melted away, quashing one of physicists’ best hopes for a major discovery.
The apparent anomaly was an unexpected difference between the behaviour of electrons and that of their more-massive cousins, muons, when they arise from the decay of certain particles.
But the latest results from the LHCb experiment at CERN—Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, which hosts the LHC—suggest that electrons and muons are produced at the same rate after all.
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