In a 2 November 2017 article in The Guardian, Ben Allanach and Tevong You
report on the CERN Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment
which has detected anomalies that may be a murmur at the heart of
The
Standard Model.
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Originally Posted by Allanach & You, The Guardian
Particles known as “bottom mesons” are not decaying in the way the Standard Model of particle physics says they should, and it’s causing some excitement.
Measurements made by the LHCb experiment at CERN are showing some anomalies which, if confirmed by more data, would signal the breaking point of our most fundamental description of particle physics to date - the Standard Model.
Using proton collisions from the LHC, LHCb has been carefully measuring the production of bottom mesons and how often they decay to kaon and muon particles. It looks like the answer is: not nearly often enough! In fact, this decay occurs at only about three-quarters of the frequency predicted by the Standard Model.
To be sure, statistical fluctuations or systematic uncertainties in the measurement could account for this deficit. However, the chances are small, on the face of it. If the Standard Model is correct, and you made 16000 copies of our LHC and ran them all in the same way, only about 1 of them would measure the data to be in such bad agreement with the Standard Model by chance alone.
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A call for higher energy colliders
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Allanach & You, The Guardian
The obvious way would be to produce the leptoquarks or Z primes in a colliders such as the LHC. However, it is quite likely that they will be too heavy for the LHC to produce directly in sufficient quantities to detect; through Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2 the LHC just wouldn’t have enough energy available to convert into their large mass.
So we had a look at the plans for future higher-energy colliders at CERN. One plan is to roughly double the LHC energy by ripping out the current magnets in the current 27 km tunnel and putting in more powerful magnets. Another alternative is to enlarge the circular tunnel to 100 km, taking it all the way underneath Lake Geneva nearby, thus increasing the maximum energy attainable for the same magnet power (this is because a larger circular tunnel has less curvature and so requires less energy to bend the colliding particles around a circular trajectory). The result is a super-collider that can achieve around seven times the LHC energy.
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Article here :-
https://www.theguardian.com/science/...a-new-collider
Summary of
The Standard Model here :-
https://home.cern/about/physics/standard-model
and another here :-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model
