After 42 Years of Searching, Physicists Find Evidence of a One-in-10-Billion Particle Decay

We may be one gigantically small step closer to solving the most essential Universal questions, including what happened immediately after the Big Bang, where is dark matter hiding, and why does normal matter even exist? The increasing sensitivity of particle colliders like CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is allowing researchers to probe unprecedentedly deeper into the very structure of our reality. Called the "zeptoverse," it may harbor undiscovered particles or forces existing at zeptometer scales, thousands of trillions of times thinner than a human hair, and cosmos-shaping quantum actions across time spans that are unimaginably small. After more than 40 years of effort, scientists have effectively fastened a knocker on the door of the zeptoverse, offering experimental evidence of an exceedingly elusive, unstable type of particle decay. In a seminar held on November 3rd, and in a preprint paper on arXiv that has not yet been peer-reviewed, the LHCb Collaboration announced evidence of this phenomenon.