“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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World’s deepest laboratory opens in southwest China in search of dark matter
World’s deepest laboratory opens in southwest China in search of dark matter
For instance, a photon, or a particle of light, is a massless boson that mediates electromagnetic forces and helps us see and understand the universe.
The W boson, discovered in the 1980s, is much more massive – about 85 times heavier than a proton. It mediates the weak nuclear force and is responsible for some of the most common nuclear decays.
In the new study, they detected a combination of three bosons which had never been seen together: two W bosons carrying opposite electric charge, plus one gamma photon.
While such a phenomenon had been theoretically predicted, it had never been observed before, Li said. As W bosons are very unstable, the triplets only existed for a very short time before the W bosons decayed into other particles, he added.
“Our study showed that all possible processes predicted by theory would happen and leave a trace – however rare and brief they might be,” he said.
Li was confident in the team’s findings because the observed significance was 5.6 standard deviations. It meant the chance for their observation to have resulted from a random fluctuation in the data set would be as low as one in a million.
His team will now continue the search for multiple boson productions from proton collisions.
Chinese scientists are playing an increasingly active role at the LHC, making up about 2 per cent of the thousands of scientists and engineers from all over the world who use the facility, Li said.
Construction could begin as soon as 2027.
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