CERN scientists observe rare neutral B meson decay at Large Hadron Collider

Scientists find evidence of rare particle transformation

Researchers at CERN detected signals indicating that a neutral B meson transformed into a muon and an antimuon. This specific event is extremely unlikely according to current physics models. The standard model predicts this transformation happens only once in every ten billion decays.

Observation marks smallest scale ever explored

This discovery represents the first glimpse into a scale of reality many times smaller than an atom. Scientists have been searching for this phenomenon for more than four decades without success. The collision produced numerous particles including neutral B mesons before this specific decay occurred.