Theory of matter wrong?

Particle physicists have seen a rare happening that may force a rethink of current theories of sub-atomic matter.
After watching more than seven trillion disintegrations of the kaon particle they have seen three peculiar events when they expected to see just one.

At present physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US do not know if this is a fluke or points the way to a deeper theory of matter.

The research has been submitted to the Journal Physical Review Letters.

Fluke or breakthrough

The experiment looked at the disintegration of a sub-atomic particle called the K-meson or kaon.

It can decay in a number of ways. One involves it turning into a charged pion particle, a neutrino, and an anti-neutrino.

Physicists regard this decay pattern as especially interesting because it may reveal new effects not accounted for in the so-called Standard Model.

So far they have constructed a theory around 16 particles that make up all matter called the Standard Model of fundamental particles and interactions.

The Standard Model predicts that this particular event should occur only once in every 13 billion decays.




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Some better links with some actual information about why it questions the validity of the standard model:

Brookhaven National Laboratory's article.
PhysicsWeb's article.

The problem is that the decay happens too much. The standard model predicts it once every 13 billion decays, but it has been observed to happen once every 7 billion decays.

The decay process is also interesting because it is very complicated:
"When a K+, the lightest particle to contain a strange quark, decays to a pi+, which is comprised of ordinary quarks only, the strange quark is converted into a �down� quark. This is forbidden in any direct process by the Standard Model. K+ -> pi+,nu,nubar, however, still has a small chance of occurring by means of an indirect two-step process involving two very massive gauge boson force carriers and other quarks � in particular, the massive �top� quark, an exotic particle discovered in 1995 at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory." - BNL