At a symposium organized by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) at the end of last September, the results of one of their alleged experiments, NA62, were presented, during which a very rare particle transformation was recorded – read CERN On his website.
The experiment was carried out by colleagues from the University of Birmingham at Geneva's Super Proton Synchrotron, SPS for short. A proton accelerator with a diameter of 7 kilometers has been used under the Swiss-French border since 1976. British specialists have researched the decay of the kaon particle here.
Kaons are particles made up of a mixture of quarks and antiquarks, held together by a strong interaction. Kaons can be produced relatively easily by directing a focused beam of protons at a beryllium target. In this case, a secondary beam is produced, containing about 6 percent kaons.
The kaon decays in a hundredth of a second, and most of the time the result is the superheavy brother of the electron, ion and neutrino. However, in 13 cases out of 100 billion decays, something else happens: the result of the decay is a pion and a pair of neutrino and antineutrino. Researchers have now noticed this rare decay.
This phenomenon is called the golden decay channel because it is so rare
Predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.
To monitor the golden channel, not only were highly sensitive instruments needed, but billions of measurements had to be made and repeated in order to validate them by eliminating the margin of statistical error. The first results were reported in 2019.
The practical discovery of the decay channel paves the way for new physics, as researchers continue to make measurements to find out what deviations there are from Standard Model predictions. For example, the mathematics originally indicated 8.4 such cases out of 100 billion, but the aforementioned 13 gold decays observed in practice show a 50 percent higher frequency.
Aside from this, the Standard Model is considered one of the most successful scientific theories based on verified observations based on its predictions.
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