Studying rare processes is part and parcel of particle physics, providing stringent tests of the Standard Model. At the recent International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), the CMS and LHCb collaborations presented their latest research into one such process: the transformation of a beauty quark into a strange quark, a muon and the oppositely charged antimuon (b→sμ⁺μ⁻).
Rare particle decays hint at deviations from Standard Model predictions
