Beauty quarks, sometimes called bottom quarks, arefundamental particles, which in turn make up bigger particles.
Up and down quarks, for example, make up the protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus.
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The way beauty quarks decay can be strongly influenced by the existence of other fundamental particles or forces.
(The b in LHCb stands for beauty.)
It found that beauty quarks were decaying into electrons and their heavier cousins called muons at different rates.
The result caused huge excitement among particle physicists.
New results
While the result was tantalizing, it wasnt conclusive.
All measurements come with a certain degree of uncertainty or error.
One way to achieve this is simply to initiate the experiment for longer and record more decays.
This is what my colleagues and I have done.
The March study looked at beauty quarks that were paired up with up quarks.
And that is exactly what weve seen.
Of course, we should be cautious.
