

LHC glimpses hint of new physics - aethertap
https://plus.maths.org/content/lhc-glimpses-hint-new-physics

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tobias2014
Please note that this is still an analysis of "LHC Run 1" data. Fore more
details you can visit Jesters blog:

[http://resonaances.blogspot.de/2015/03/lhcb-b-meson-
anomaly-...](http://resonaances.blogspot.de/2015/03/lhcb-b-meson-anomaly-
persists.html)

"So how excited should we be? One thing we learned today is that the anomaly
is unlikely to be a statistical fluctuation. However, the observable is not of
the clean kind, as the measured angular distributions are susceptible to
poorly known QCD effects. The significance depends a lot on what is assumed
about these uncertainties, and experts wage ferocious battles about the
numbers."

Conclusively: "Therefore, the deviation from the standard model is not yet
convincing at this point."

~~~
lamontcg
And these kinds of discoveries come and go a lot.

Of course eventually one of them really needs to pan out in order to explain
dark matter and dark energy. But the default attitude to any of these results
should be a good dose of healthy skepticism.

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lutorm
Wow. I was a CERN summer student in 1995 and me and another student worked on
the tagging of B-meson decays in ATLAS. Hers was exactly the B->K mu+mu-
decay. So 20 years later, it's observed... ;-)

(Incidentally, the particle physics publication system is beyond screwed up.
We, who did the actual work, weren't even allowed to be authors on the paper
where the results were described, because we weren't "members of the ATLAS
collaboration". We merely got an acknowledgement.)

~~~
monk_e_boy
What did tagging B-meson decay involve? I almost understand some of those
words, so be gentle :)

~~~
lutorm
I barely remember... ;-)

The idea is that you need to quickly identify ("tag") interesting reactions
out of the millions happening, so there are a set of increasingly stringent
but slower filters that select events. Muons are good because they are easy to
identify, then you look back at where they came from and see what other things
were created. Typically mesons (and other hadrons) create a "shower" of
particles and by adding upp all their energies you can estimate what particle
they came from.

But all that stuff is mostly repressed from my memory. I decided that particle
physics wasn't for me after that summer... ;-)

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MindTwister
Whenever I read something like this I'm reminded of this Douglas Adams quote:

    
    
      “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone
      discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is
      here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by
      something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
    
      There is another theory which states that this has
      already happened.”

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peter303
It look like run1 recorded about 10^13 interesting collision events on the
b-detector, each on several thousand sensors. If you wish to scan for a new
type of particle you potsulate various decay sequence sensor geometries and
intensities, scan all the events and cross your fingers. ANd hope you avoid
false positives. Will keep grad students busy for decades mining all this
data.

