Science Art: CERN-EX-1107175 01 by the LHCB Team at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.


Click to embiggen

The formal name for this image: LHCb: Event display presented at the EPS-HEP 2011 conference showing a B0s meson decaying into a ?+ and ?- pair.

It’s what happens when a strange beauty particle called B0s, made from a beauty antiquark (b) stuck together with a strange quark (s), falls apart into two muons, one positive and one negative. The purple lines – those are the tracks left by the muons.

And this kind of thing – this process – is a very small part of how the Big Bang resulted in everything we see around us today.

Image from here, with more information about this poetic quantum interaction from the LHCb Team.