These exotic particles could break physics

‘Penguin’ decays from CERN’s latest Large Hadron Collider experiment hint at weird new physics

Physicists know that their elegant theoretical description of forces and particles — the standard model of particle physics — must be incomplete, because there are a host of phenomena it cannot explain, such as the existence of dark matter.

But observations continue to confirm the model’s accuracy with ever greater precision. Even measurements that seemed to break the mould, such as a discrepancy in the mass of a particle called the W boson , have evaporated under further investigation.

Now, an analysis from an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, suggests that evidence for one result that deviates from the standard model has grown. It concerns the decay of particles called B mesons into other particles. The result, which has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters , is one of the last remaining anomalies for particle physicists, who look for new physics in the debris from proton–proton collisions that turn energy into matter.

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Nature explores the latest findings from CERN’s LHC beauty (LHCb) experiment, and the exotic and heavy particles that could explain them.

Rather than looking for new, heavy particles directly, LHCb looks for their subtle effects, including when they pop up fleetingly as ‘virtual particles’ that influence particle decay. To look for these effects, researchers analysed the frequency and angle at which particles emerge from decays, to check whether they match those predicted by the standard model. The new analysis looks at when a B meson — a particle composed of a bottom quark and another lighter quark — decays into another meson that contains a strange quark, known as a kaon, as well as two muons (heavier cousins to the electron). They found that the angles at which the final products emerge from the decay disagree with those predicted by the standard model. Evidence for this anomaly has been growing since 2015.

Physicists think that this B -meson decay — known as a penguin decay — should be particularly sensitive to as-yet undiscovered physics. (British theorist John Ellis coined the term in 1977, owing to the resemblance of a diagram of the decay to a penguin , after losing a bet which forced him to include the word in his next paper). The decay involves a quantum loop, in which a bottom quark changes into a strange quark, through a temporary transition into ‘virtual’ particles that pop in and out of existence. Quantum physics allows even heavy, non-standard-model particles, to fleetingly enter this loop and leave the final products with properties that are not possible from only known particles.