Ask Ethan: Could An Unexplained Decay At The LHC Demolish The Standard Model?
“I want know more about the last announcement from the LHCb [collaboration] about CP Violating asymmetry in a charged B meson decay. What [does] this mean and/or this is a hint for new physics beyond the Standard Model??”
I hear your whining all the time. “The LHC is such a waste. They haven’t found anything other than the Higgs.” Well, maybe you’re not paying attention to the right things, then? The Standard Model is so successful because it makes exquisite predictions for how the composite particles we produce in accelerators ought to live and decay. Well, we have a series of particles, the mesons that contain bottom quarks, that clearly aren’t obeying the rules of the Standard Model. The most robust puzzle we have about this is known as the Kπ puzzle, since there’s a large and significant difference between the CP-asymmetry of neutral and charged B-mesons that decay to kaons and pions.
Could this be the hint of new physics beyond the Standard Model we’ve waited for for so long? Don’t count the LHC out yet, and keep looking for new anomalies!
