Researchers in the College of Arts and Sciences have determined that the lifetime of the so-called charmed omega—part of a family of subatomic particles called baryons—is nearly four times longer than previously thought.

In an article in Physical Review Letters (American Physical Society, 2018), Steven Blusk, professor of physics, explains that the new measurement is based on proton-proton collision data from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. 

Blusk and his colleagues found that after analyzing collision data from nearly a thousand charmed-omega decays, the particle’s lifetime is 268 femtoseconds. A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second, or 0.000000000000001 seconds. For more, visit AS News