S. Lin

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 the Large Hadron Collider, protons are smashed together, and among the debris, a heavyweight particle, the lambda baryon, sometimes appears. It lives for a tiny fraction of a second before decaying into other particles.

A chef prepares a delicate dish where every grain must be in its place. A single stray crumb of an unwanted ingredient can overpower the subtle flavor of the main product. In much the same way, physicists studying the fusion of oxygen nuclei struggle with impurities in their targets. The reaction in which two oxygen-16 nuclei fuse determines the late stages of massive stars.