by Matt Williams (UniverseToday.com): Ever since the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012, the Large Hadron Collider has been dedicated to searching for the existence of physics that go beyond the Standard Model. To this end, the Large Hardon Collider beauty experiment (LHCb) was established in 1995, specifically for the purpose of exploring what happened after the Big Bang that allowed matter to survive and create the Universe as we know it.
Since that time, the LHCb has been doing some rather amazing things. Since that time, the LHCb has been doing some rather amazing things. This includes discovering five new particles, uncovering evidence of a new manifestation of matter-antimatter asymmetry, and (most recently) discovering unusual results when monitoring beta decay. These findings, which CERN announced in a recent press release, could be an indication of new physics that are not part of the Standard Model.
In this latest study, the LHCb collaboration team noted how the decay of B0
mesons resulted in the production of an excited kaon and a pair of
electrons or muons. Muons, for the record, are subatomic particles that
are 200 times more massive than electrons, but whose interactions are
believed to be the same as those of electrons (as far as the Standard
Model is concerned).
This is what is known as “lepton universality”, which not only
predicts that electrons and muons behave the same, but should be
produced with the same probability – with some constraints arising from
their differences in mass. However, in testing the decay of B0
mesons, the team found that the decay process produced muons with less
frequency. These results were collected during Run 1 of the LHC, which
ran from 2009 to 2013.
The results of these decay tests were presented on Tuesday, April 18th, at a CERN seminar,
where members of the LHCb collaboration team shared their latest
findings. As they indicated during the course of the seminar,
these findings are significant in that they appear to confirm results
obtained by the LHCb team during previous decay studies.
This is certainly exciting news, as it hints at the possibility that
new physics are being observed. With the confirmation of the Standard
Model (made possible with the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012),
investigating theories that go beyond this (i.e. Supersymmetry)
has been a major goal of the LHC. And with its upgrades completed in
2015, it has been one of the chief aims of Run 2 (which will last until
2018)...
Full article: https://www.universetoday.com/135091/cern-declares-war-standard-model/#
