P. Urquijo

Inside the accelerator, particles collide, and for a fleeting moment a B meson is born — a heavy particle that lives for less than a billionth of a second. Usually, it decays into a shower of debris, but sometimes it transforms into just two particles: a muon and a neutrino. This rare path is like a lottery where the winning ticket appears once in every two million draws.

At Japan's KEK laboratory, electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, collide inside the Belle II detector. In such collisions, new particles are born for a fleeting moment. Among them is J/ψ, a bound state of a charm quark and its antiquark.

Deep underground, in a former gold mine in Australia, stands a laboratory where silence is broken only by rare flashes of light. These flashes are the traces of cosmic particles that punch through hundreds of meters of rock. Eight plastic panels, resembling large glowing sheets, catch these particles.