Physicists See Golden Needle in a Micro-Cosmic.

Byline: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Haystack

UPTON, N.Y., March 23 (AScribe Newswire) -- An international team of physicists examining an extremely rare form of subatomic particle decay -- a veritable golden needle in a micro-cosmic haystack of 7.8 trillion candidates -- has discovered evidence for the highly sought process, which could be an indication of new forces beyond those incorporated in the Standard Model of particle physics. That long-standing theory of all particle physics precisely predicts the rate of such decays to be half that observed by the experimenters although it is still too soon to say if a deviation has occurred. The innovative experiment, which uses the most comprehensive particle detector ever built, is located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. The result is being presented at a colloquium at Brookhaven Lab today and has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.

The experiment detects the disintegration of an unstable subatomic particle called a K meson, which can decay, …