University of Florida news: Confirming a decades-old prediction, the physicists with the CLEO collaboration say they observed a rare and extremely short-lived subatomic particle with the unusual name of “charmed-strange meson” decay into a proton and anti-neutron.

Detection of the event, which the collaboration made public Sunday, was attributed to John Yelton, a physicist at the University of Florida, one of many institutions that are part of the CLEO collaboration.

“It’s the sort of thing that, for many years, people have known should happen,” Yelton said. “What we have done is show that it does, and how often.”

Yelton said the latest result shows there remains much to be learned from collisions at lower energy in lower energy colliders. “It highlights the fact that there is still physics to be done at lower energy accelerators,” he said.

The CLEO collaboration has also submitted a paper on the discovery to the journal Physics Review Letters.