Three-decade quest backs physics' 'Standard Model' 4 hours ago Scientists on Wednesday said that after a nearly three-decade bid they had detected a telltale change in a sub-atomic particle, further backing a key theory about the Universe. Researchers at the world's biggest particle collider said they had observed an extremely rare event—the decay of the neutral B meson into a pair of muons, the heavy cousins of electrons. The results provide further support for the so-called Standard Model, the conceptual framework for the particles and forces that constitute the cosmos, they said in the journal Nature. Neutral B mesons are unstable composites of two kinds of particles called quarks, bound by the "strong" force. Their decay into muons is predicted under the Standard Model. But getting evidence to confirm the prediction has been a puzzler since the mid-1980s. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-05-three-decade-quest-physics-standard.html#jCp
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14474.html Observation of the rare Bs0 →µ+µ− decay from the combined analysis of CMS and LHCb data The standard model of particle physics describes the fundamental particles and their interactions via the strong, electromagnetic and weak forces. It provides precise predictions for measurable quantities that can be tested experimentally. The probabilities, or branching fractions, of the strange B meson ( Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ) and the B0 meson decaying into two oppositely charged muons (μ+ and μ−) are especially interesting because of their sensitivity to theories that extend the standard model. The standard model predicts that the Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! and Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! decays are very rare, with about four of the former occurring for every billion Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! mesons produced, and one of the latter occurring for every ten billion B0 mesons1. A difference in the observed branching fractions with respect to the predictions of the standard model would provide a direction in which the standard model should be extended. Before the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN2 started operating, no evidence for either decay mode had been found. Upper limits on the branching fractions were an order of magnitude above the standard model predictions. The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) and LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) collaborations have performed a joint analysis of the data from proton–proton collisions that they collected in 2011 at a centre-of-mass energy of seven teraelectronvolts and in 2012 at eight teraelectronvolts. Here we report the first observation of the Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!µ+µ− decay, with a statistical significance exceeding six standard deviations, and the best measurement so far of its branching fraction. Furthermore, we obtained evidence for the Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!µ+µ− decay with a statistical significance of three standard deviations. Both measurements are statistically compatible with standard model predictions and allow stringent constraints to be placed on theories beyond the standard model. The LHC experiments will resume taking data in 2015, recording proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 teraelectronvolts, which will approximately double the production rates of Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! and B0mesons and lead to further improvements in the precision of these crucial tests of the standard model.
There's no question its a great , time tested model, but the best science minded people will always be looking at the anomalies and keep an open mind on the possibilities. "Standard Model Anomaly" http://phys.org/news/2015-05-particle-physics-discovery-theory.html#jCp "But the new experiments have been able to observe these decays, and to measure their probabilities. They show that while the strange B-meson decays into muons at the same rate that the standard model predicts, the neutral B-meson does so about four times more often than predicted (although the accuracy here was somewhat lower)"
Great stuff. Probability works very well in the Standard Model. But if you still want a candidate Satan particle, this one meets the general description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle Which I never heard of until Sylwester Kornowsky mentioned it on sciforums. It's a particle of monstrous energy. It falls from heaven burning everything in its path. About 50 times the energy attained by the counterrotating proton pancakes collided in the last run of the LHC, which are dumped into multi ton graphite blocks after the beams decohere in about 10 hours of continuous operation. That energy is sufficient to melt several tons of copper (the wires and tubing melted when the first LHC coolant accident occurred) in less than a second.
