Scientists at CERN spent the last decade waiting for a one-in-ten-billion chance event, and now they’ll spend the next few years figuring out whether it challenges the laws that (we think) govern the smallest building blocks of matter.
Most people who aren’t particle physicists have probably never heard of a kaon, but this tiny subatomic particle could present a big challenge to the Standard Model: the theory that describes the fundamental forces of nature and names all the smallest building blocks of matter, or elementary particles. University of Birmingham physicist Evgueni Goudzovski and his colleagues spent about a decade watching what happened when kaons decayed, and they found that about 1.3 times out of 10 billion, a decaying kaon splits into another subatomic particle called a pion, along with a pair of extremely small, elusive particles called a neutrino and an anti-neutrino. (The rest of the time, kaons decay into different products.)
