Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes

Recent measurements of particles called B mesons deviate from predictions. Alone, each oddity looks like a fluke, but their collective drift is more suggestive. Computer reconstruction of a collision event in the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment.

The collision produces a B meson, which subsequently decays into other particles that strike LHCb’s detectors. Amid the chaotic chains of events that ensue when protons smash together at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, one particle has popped up that appears to go to pieces in a peculiar way. All eyes are on the B meson, a yoked pair of quark particles.

Having caught whiffs of unexpected B meson behavior before, researchers with the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment (LHCb) have spent years documenting rare collision events featuring the particles, in hopes of conclusively proving that some novel fundamental particle or effect is meddling with them.

Source: quantamagazine.org