• Accepted Paper

Observation of a Bc*+ meson with the ATLAS detector

G. Aad et al.

Phys. Rev. Lett. - Accepted 30 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/vrxp-zkbs

Abstract

The first observation of a new meson state decaying into Bc+ and a photon is presented using a dataset of pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy s=13 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 140 fb1. The Bc+ mesons are reconstructed from a three-muon final state from Bc+J/ψ(μ+μ)μ+νμX decays, along with photons reconstructed via conversions to electron–positron pairs in the detector material. The new state is observed with a significance that exceeds 8 standard deviations. The mass difference between the new meson state and the ground-state Bc+ meson is measured to be 64.5±1.4(stat.)1.4+1.0(syst.) MeV. This corresponds to a mass for the observed state of 6339.0±1.4(stat.)1.4+1.0(syst.)±0.3(mBc+) MeV, where the last uncertainty is due to the precision of the best knowledge of the Bc+ meson mass. The low mass difference value matches the theory expectations for the lowest vector state of the bc quarkonium system, the Bc*+ meson.

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