Geneva:A UK-led team of physicists has discovered evidence of an extremely rare particle decay that could provide insights into undiscovered physics at exceptionally small scales, as announced by the University of Cambridge.

According to Anadolu Agency – English, researchers using the upgraded Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at CERN near Geneva detected signs of a beauty particle, which contains a beauty quark, decaying into two particles called muons. This marks the first time a single experiment has produced evidence of the rare decay after more than four decades of searching. If confirmed, it would be the rarest particle decay ever observed.

Beauty quarks, exotic counterparts of the up and down quarks making up ordinary atomic matter, typically exist for about 1.5 trillionths of a second before decaying. This allows scientists to study physical processes at extremely small distance scales. The decay identified by researchers, known as "Bd to mu mu," occurs when a beauty particle transforms into two particles called muons. "This process only happens for one in every ten billion beauty particles, so it's incredibly difficult to find," said Dr. Harry Cliff of the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, who led the analysis.

The Large Hadron Collider can probe distances of approximately 100 zeptometers, with a zeptometer being a trillionth of a billionth of a meter. "The results could open the door to a strange new world known as the zeptoverse, where particles that could help explain mysteries like dark matter and how matter came into existence during the Big Bang may be hiding," Cambridge stated.

While the Large Hadron Collider has not yet produced definitive evidence of many new particles predicted by theories extending the Standard Model of particle physics, this discovery has led researchers to consider the possibility of new physics existing at even smaller distance scales. The LHCb experiment is specifically designed to study particles containing beauty quarks, which are produced in large numbers during high-energy particle collisions inside the collider.

The research involved about 20 physicists from the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. The findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, were scheduled to be presented at CERN on Tuesday.