New LHC results hint at new physics… but are we crying wolf?
Wanting there to be something beyond the standard model may be influencing what we actually investigate.
“In recent years several new particles have been discovered which are currently assumed to be “elementary,” that is, essentially structureless. The probability that all such particles should be really elementary becomes less and less as their number increases. It is by no means certain that nucleons, mesons, electrons, neutrinos are all elementary particles.” -Enrico Fermi
Over at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, particles are accelerated to the greatest energies they’ve ever reached in history. In the CMS and ATLAS detectors, new fundamental particles are continuously being searched for, although only the Higgs boson has come through. But in a much lesser-known detector — LHCb — particles containing bottom quarks are produced in tremendous numbers. One class of these particles, quark-antiquark pairs where one is a bottom quark, have recently been observed to decay in a way that runs counter to the Standard Model’s predictions. Even though the evidence isn’t very good, it’s the biggest hint for new physics we’ve had from accelerators in years.
