The Large Hadron Collider accelerates billions of protons to very nearly the speed of light and then smashes them together head-on. These high-energy collisions happen at four specific points around the LHC’s ring – each straddled by one detector. One of these detectors is the LHCb. The ‘b’ in its name stands for ‘b-physics’, a branch of particle physics that studies larger particles that contain a smaller particle called the bottom quark.
In new results discussed at a seminar at CERN last week, physicists noted a discrepancy between the behaviour of one of the larger ‘b’ particles as observed by the LHCb and the theoretical prediction. They don’t exactly know why the difference exists but they have some ideas. The bigger question is if it could be a sign of the ‘new physics’ that physicists have been looking for.
They’ve also conceded that the results extracted from the LHCb data aren’t statistically significant enough. In other words, because the events being studied happen quite rarely, the data sample has to be big enough to comfortably eliminate the possibility of statistical fluctuations. This can be eliminated to a greater extent by collecting even more data. So why pay attention to it now?
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