Evidence consistent with the so-called “God Particle” Higgs boson was but one of the “Big Bang Machine” Large Hadron Collider’s major discoveries this year: On Monday, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the agency in charge of the collider, which is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, announced at a conference in Tokyo that it had observed one of the rarest ever predicted particle decays — a strange beauty quark decaying into a muon and antimuon — which is only expected to occur three times in every billion decays, according to the Standard Model, the prevailing particle physics theory that explains the laws of the universe.
“This measurement is a sort of checkup of the Standard Model and today it appears healthier than it was yesterday,” said Pierluigi Campana, a spokesperson for the LHCb (for “beauty” quark) experiment in a statement. LHCb made the discovery by combining data from particle collisions conducted in 2011 and 2012.
