This measurement is the most significant in a series of LHCb results from the past decade that all seem to line up - and could all point towards a common explanation.” “The more data we have, the stronger this result has become. Paula Alvarez Cartelle, a physicist at Cavendish Laboratory, based at the University of Cambridge, and a member of the LHCb Collaboration. “These new results offer tantalizing hints of the presence of a new fundamental particle or force that interacts differently with these different types of particles,” said Dr. The new results determine the ratio between the decay probabilities with greater precision than previous measurements and use all the data collected by the LHCb detector so far for the first time. The deviation presented today is consistent with a pattern of anomalies measured in similar processes by LHCb and other experiments worldwide over the past decade. We will be excited to see if they strengthen the intriguing hints in the current results.” “More studies on related processes are under way using the existing LHCb data. “If a violation of lepton flavor universality were to be confirmed, it would require a new physical process, such as the existence of new fundamental particles or interactions,” said Professor Chris Parkes, a physicist at the University of Manchester and CERN and a spokesperson of the LHCb Collaboration. The new results indicate hints of a deviation from one: the statistical significance of the result is 3.1 standard deviations, which implies a probability of around 0.1% that the data is compatible with the Standard Model predictions. In the Standard Model of particle physics, the ratio should be very close to one. The Standard Model predicts that decays involving different flavors of leptons should occur with the same probability, a feature known as lepton flavor universality that is usually measured by the ratio between the decay probabilities.
The electron and the muon, together with a third particle called the tau, are types of leptons and the difference between them is referred to as flavors. The first decay involves the electron and the second the muon, another elementary particle similar to the electron but approximately 200 times heavier. The measurement made by the LHCb team compares two types of decays of beauty quarks. “It’s too early to say if this genuinely is a deviation from the Standard Model but the potential implications are such that these results are the most exciting thing I’ve done in 20 years in the field. Mitesh Patel, a physicist at Imperial College London and a member of the LHCb Collaboration. Our hearts did beat a bit faster,” said Dr. “We were actually shaking when we first looked at the results, we were that excited. Particle physicists have therefore been searching for ‘new physics’ - the new particles and interactions that can explain the Standard Model’s shortcomings. The model is unable to explain cosmological observations of the dominance of matter over antimatter, the apparent dark-matter content of the Universe, or explain the patterns seen in the interaction strengths of the particles. However, it is clear that the Standard Model is incomplete. The Standard Model of particle physics provides precise predictions for the properties and interactions of fundamental particles, which have been confirmed by numerous experiments since the inception of the model in the 1960s. The decay of a B 0 meson into a K 0 and an electron-positron pair in the LHCb detector, which is used for a sensitive test of lepton universality in the Standard Model.
0 kommentar(er)
