Rare boson particle ‘triplets’ seen for first time in Chinese-led scientific study

Scientists have seen a grouping of two W bosons carrying opposite electric charge, plus one gamma photon in data collected at Large Hadron Collider

Though such ‘triplet’ particles had been theorised, they had never been seen before, Chinese-led research team says

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A Chinese-led team of scientists has made a never-before-seen discovery in data collected at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 7:00pm, 6 Apr 2024

An extremely rare event in the world of particles has taken place during a Chinese-led study at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland.

And the event has scored yet another victory for the Standard Model – our current best theory to describe how the basic building blocks of the universe interact.

Sifting through experimental data collected between 2016 and 2018, researchers from Peking University and their colleagues from around the world spotted the simultaneous appearance of three force-carrying particles, known as bosons, which had never been seen together before.

Such triplets were produced about 250 times, after protons were accelerated to close to the speed of light and smashed into each other billions of times inside the LHC’s 27km (16.7-mile)-long ring, the team reported in the journal Physical Review Letters last month.

“The probability for such an event to occur is 1/50 of the probability of detecting a Higgs boson,” paper co-author Li Qiang told the Post on Wednesday.

“We are excited to play a leading role in such challenging work,” said Li, who has been part of the boson research group at Peking University since 2010.

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