{"id":246708,"date":"2026-11-06T02:26:30","date_gmt":"2026-11-06T08:26:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/after-40-years-of-searching-physicists-find-evidence-for-an-ultrarare-particle-decay"},"modified":"2026-11-06T02:26:30","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T08:26:30","slug":"after-40-years-of-searching-physicists-find-evidence-for-an-ultrarare-particle-decay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/after-40-years-of-searching-physicists-find-evidence-for-an-ultrarare-particle-decay","title":{"rendered":"After 40 years of searching, physicists find evidence for an ultrarare particle decay"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Physicists at CERN report that they\u2019ve detected evidence of a rare meson particle decay (B\u2070\u2192 \u00b5\u207a\u00b5\u207b) that occurs when the meson\u2019s beauty quark annihilates with a down-type quark. The pair decays into a muon and antimuon, which are particles similar to electrons. Because evidence for this decay helps test theoretical predictions from the Standard Model, physicists have been waiting for it since 1984, when it was first theorized.<\/p>\n<p>The team details the measurements along with those of another slightly less rare decay in a recent <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2611.00230\" target=\"_blank\">paper<\/a> posted to the <i>arXiv<\/i> preprint server.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Physicists at CERN report that they\u2019ve detected evidence of a rare meson particle decay (B\u2070\u2192 \u00b5\u207a\u00b5\u207b) that occurs when the meson\u2019s beauty quark annihilates with a down-type quark. The pair decays into a muon and antimuon, which are particles similar to electrons. Because evidence for this decay helps test theoretical predictions from the Standard Model, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246708\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}