About the zeptoverse and the beauty particle!
It appears that machine learning & AI also played a major role in this discovery!
Unfortunately, I (using Google search) could not find an image showing the detection of the beauty particle published by CERN.
"They say good things come to those who wait, and the LHCb Collaboration’s latest result marks a major milestone in a decades-long search. As announced in a seminar held at CERN today [11/3/2026], the Collaboration has found evidence of a one-in-ten-billion decay of a beauty particle, becoming the first to do so using data from a single experiment.
The decay is that of a particle containing a beauty quark and a down antiquark, known as Bd, into a pair of muons (μ+μ–). Consistent with theoretical predictions, the new result places limits on possible new particles beyond the Standard Model.
Quantum physics describes how particle decays are influenced by other particles. Measuring this beauty-quark decay precisely could therefore reveal signs of new particles that are too heavy to be directly produced in LHC collisions.
In general, the more unlikely a decay, the more sensitive it is to the influence of new particles.
Bd → μ+μ– is part of a subset of decays that are so rare they have long been regarded as ‘golden channels’ in the search for new physics.
In these decays a beauty quark and an oppositely charged antiquark annihilate, releasing energy that becomes a muon – a particle similar to an electron, but heavier – and its antiparticle.
In 2015, a joint analysis by the LHCb and CMS Collaborations resulted in the first observation of Bs → μ+μ– and a claim for the first evidence of Bd → μ+μ–. However, in subsequent updates using data collected up until 2018, the evidence for Bd → μ+μ– was not confirmed. The Bs → μ+μ– decay occurs only around three times in every billion beauty-particle decays, but Bd → μ+μ– is even rarer, with a predicted rate about thirty times lower.
In 2024, a major upgrade of the LHCb experiment allowed data to be collected at five times the rate achieved between 2010 and 2018. This upgrade also enhanced the ability of the detector to distinguish between different types of particle. These improvements, in combination with the application of machine-learning techniques, allowed the LHCb team to suppress the vast background of processes that would have otherwise swamped the signals from these rare beauty-particle decays. ..."
In the first stage of the analysis LHCb physicists reconstructed Bs0 mesons using three decay modes, Bs0→Ds–π+, Bs0→J/ψφ and Bs0→ Ds–π+π+π–. The selected Bs0 mesons are then combined with π0 mesons reconstructed from the π0→γγ decay, requiring the two photons to be identified as two separate clusters in the electromagnetic calorimeter. A peaking structure is consistently observed across all three individual Bs0 decay modes at the mass 5698.9±1.5±0.6±0.1 MeV/c2 and with the width smaller than 9.8 (11.8) MeV at 90% (95%) confidence level. The Bs0π0 invariant-mass spectrum, summed over all three decay channels, is shown in the image above. (Source)
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