At the heart of the world's largest particle physics laboratory CERN, an extremely rare phenomenon was captured for the first time with extraordinary precision, this event involving the disintegration of a particle called kaon could lead us to an even deeper understanding of the fundamental forces that govern the cosmos.
Kaons, subatomic particles made up of two quarks, are known to be unstable, but what caught the attention of scientists was an extremely rare type of decay that occurs less than one in every 10 billion kaons. This decay called the “golden channel” had been predicted by the standard model of particle physics, but observing it directly has always been an almost impossible challenge until now.
Using the super proton cyclotron, a particle accelerator at CERN, the researchers managed to fire a beam of protons at high speed against a stationary target, generating secondary particles, including kaons, with the help of extremely high-precision detectors they captured the exact moment in which that some of these kaons went through this very strange disintegration process.
To be more exact they measured that approximately 13 out of every 100 billion kaons decayed in this way, what makes this observation more intriguing is that scientists expected a lower decay frequency, the observed rate was approximately 50% higher than predicted by the standard model, this means that we are facing a potential breakdown of the rules that govern particle physics, suggesting the possibility of a new physics.
In other words, if these results are confirmed by more experiments we could be on the verge of discovering something revolutionary about the structure of the universe, although the detection of this phenomenon had already been achieved before this was the first time it was measured with a level of certainty. so high, reaching the five Sigma standard that is the level required to be considered a legitimate discovery in the world of particle physics.
This means that there is an incredibly low probability that this observation is just a statistical error, even so, scientists remain cautious, although this result is a big step, it still needs to be reviewed and confirmed with new data, and if these results continue to be confirmed, what today is just an anomaly could become the key to unraveling the deepest mysteries of the universe.
What else could be hidden in subatomic particles that we have yet to observe, scientists at CERN are determined to discover and you are closely following what could be the beginning of a new era for science.
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