WHEN PARTICLES BEHAVE BADLY!

An interesting news release from the IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON

New Result From Large Hadron Collider Challenges Leading Theory in Physics – Cannot Be Explained by Our Current Laws of Nature

Imperial physicists are part of a team that has announced ‘intriguing’ results that potentially cannot be explained by our current laws of nature.

The LHCb Collaboration at CERN has found particles not behaving in the way they should according to the guiding theory of particle physics – the Standard Model.

The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that particles called beauty quarks, which are measured in the LHCb experiment, should decay into either muons or electrons in equal measure. However, the new result suggests that this may not be happening, which could point to the existence of new particles or interactions not explained by the Standard Model.

“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.” — Dr. Mitesh Patel

Physicists from Imperial College London and the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge led the analysis of the data to produce this result, with funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council. The result was announced today at the Moriond Electroweak Physics conference and published as a preprint

So what does this mean?

NEW PHYSICS!

Pallab Ghosh at the BBC reports,

The Standard Model (SM) is the best theory we have to explain the fine-scale workings of the world around us.

But we've known for some time that the SM is a stepping stone to a more complete understanding of the cosmos.

Hints of unexpected behaviour by a sub-atomic particle called the beauty quark could expose cracks in the foundations of this decades-old theory.

The findings emerged from data collected by researchers working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It's a giant machine built in a 27km-long circular tunnel underneath the French-Swiss border. It smashes together beams of proton particles to probe the limits of physics as we know it.

The mystery behaviour by the beauty quark may be the result of an as-yet undiscovered sub-atomic particle that is exerting a force.

But the physicists stress that more analysis and data is needed to confirm the results.