#lhcb

Queue of lonely chairs to meet a model of the LHCb experiment

Will The Large Hadron Collider ‘Break’ The Standard Model?

“Many physicists are excited about the possibilities while others are more pessimistic. However, the most important aspect of this is that everyone is appropriately cautious, practicing responsible science instead of prematurely declaring a new discovery. There are many hints of new physics out there, but we cannot be sure which ones will hold up and which ones will turn out to be mere statistical flukes. The only way forward is to take as much data as we can and to examine the full, synthesized suite of all of it. The only way we’ll ever reveal the secrets of nature is to put the question to the Universe itself, and listen to whatever it is that it says. With every new collision we create in our detectors, the closer we get to that inevitable but critical moment that physicists all over the world are awaiting.”

On the topic of a new electron-positron collider in response to people saying they should spend money on something 'more important'! (I am open to differing opinions from my own - this is my own view and the evidence I formed it from!) This comes after a press release today from CERN on https://home.cern/news/news/physics/particle-physicists-update-strategy-future-field-europe 

This has caused quite a bit of controversy within the scientific community - that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, a climate crisis, why should we care about particle physics and a new expensive project that could just prove the standard model is more or less complete, and maybe ‘just fill in the odd gap’?

Firstly: in response to people saying the money should be sent on climate change or pandemic management, the tech that is developed to make such a particle collider, such as the LHC, causes huge tech advancements which can even be used in medical fields eg https://t.co/kwun6K7H6t?amp=1

Secondly: a high-profile project such as this, and the results it could bring, will be great for future research funding for all science, not to mention the job opportunities for scientists and engineers (eg, ATLAS has ~3000 authors from 181 institutions! https://atlas.cern/discover/collaboration)

Thirdly: although 'the Large Hadron collider' is one collider, it isn't just one experiment! There are 7 experiments at the LHC: ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, LHCb, TOTEM, LHCf and MoEDAL! There have been over 2725 papers published from the LHC experiment: see this article on what 10 years of the LHC have achieved: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/10-years-of-lhc-physics-in-numbers

Finally, all I have to finish with is a quote from Stephen Hawking: “It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.”

July 5th, 2018: Check out LHCb’s latest measurement for the lifetime of the Ωc0! It’s suuuuuper discrepant with older measurements. [official site] [arXiv] [presentation]

What does this mean? I’m not sure! But it’s certainly curious, perhaps even... exciting??

The LHCb experiment investigates the slight differences between properties of matter and antimatter by studying a type of particle containing the “beauty quark” (or “b quark”). The LHCb Experiment at CERN will shed light on why we live in a universe that appears to be composed almost entirely of matter, but no antimatter.

"LARGE HADRON COLLIDER DISCOVERS FIVE NEW SUBATOMIC PARTICLES"

 To date, many impressive findings have been presented in the field of particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider has demonstrated yet again that discoveries are not slowing down any time soon.  Using the LHCb detector of the collider, scientists have discovered five new particles, all of them discovered at the same time. These particles are made of baryons, meaning they are made up a three fundamental particles called quarks.  Quarks come in six different 'flavours': up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. The new particles that were discovered are excited states of a particle called Omega-zero, which contains two 'strange' and one 'charm' quark.  "This discovery was made possible thanks to the specialized capabilities of the LHCb detector in the precise recognition of different types of particles and also thanks to the large dataset accumulated during the first and second runs of the Large Hadron Collider," a CERN statement said.  "These two ingredients allowed the five excited states to be identified with an overwhelming level of statistical significance – meaning that the discovery cannot be just a statistical fluke of data."

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.